Okay then, well here's some of my impressions!

1) Sync Services, instead of the default being collate, the default is now erase and use Office - a minor annoying change.

2) Elements Gallery is just the ribbon effect - so so.

3) Much faster loading times on Intel

My Day is pretty good as well - not sure how much RAM it sucks, but its like Anxiety but the ability to add tasks in is a bonus that Anxiety doesn't have yet (Anxiety requires you to open the app)


4) Pray you don't have to sit through the horribly obviously scripted product launch

5) Expression Media is very similar to Adobe's Bridge application

Installation was quick.

1. The installer offered to remove a previous version of Office which was moved to trash
2. The installer checked for duplicate fonts.
3. The installer offered to move your previous Office identity. Previous identity was left in its default location.
4. New 2008 identity was the same size.
5. The installer created new office shortcuts within the dock. Old shortcuts were not removed.

Entourage starts much much quicker. All mail was imported, all accounts and the settings were preserved. On first connection, Office asked if you want to retrieve the mail from particular account.

Tested briefly Word, Excel and Power Point - all is working.

Got a copy finally - finishing the article now, expect to see it Monday when I'm back from holidays.

Overall a huge improvement, but still room for more.

This article is going to be big...

I'm wondering.. my student edition of Office 2004 came with multiple licenses, four of them, I think. Is this the same with standard versions of Mac:Office, or is it an edu only thing?

I'm guessing that's monday night then ...

I've read one review that gives me hope at least that MS haven't completely mangled the interface - as they did with the new Win-PC version of Office. What the "chindogu" were they thinking?

Andrew I hope you will be doing some tests on Word to Word cross platform sharing?

In the previous versions it was a bitch. While minor edits don't cause problems the time consuming issues around formatting (template) glitches and problems with End-note were depressing.

i've been running entourage using imap on the first try - didn't work so well, pptp vpn to the exchange server - worked well but inconvenient to connect to the vpn every time, plus disconnections after idle timeouts. settled on exchange via owa which is essentially doing the same thing as rpc over http. i like it, works very well for me. the tasks synchronisation is a pain but i never usually use tasks anyway, so i've taken to creating calendar events for tasks. that seems to work well. other than that i have my gmail in entourage via imap and both work together well.

One thing that's really annoying me is that even though I have the language set to "English (AUS)", it still tries to force me to spell things without u's.

And when I right click on a word to try to add it to the dictionary, "Add" is greyed out. WTF!

A list of known (by Microsoft) problems with Office 2008 by program

Word

Excel

PowerPoint

Entourage

Back now from a beautiful long weekend of camping on an island and snorkelling at sunset with fish at a siopwreck...ahhh

Expect the article tomorrow - I'm buggered. So far I have written about my experience with both on the Mac. I will be opening some of my old word files from PC days (Office 2004) in Mac office 04, and 08 as well as Pages and Office 2007 via VMware Fusion.

The only thing I have not really focused on with the article is Entourage as it is something that I have never used or seen a need to use. The main point of the article is focusing on the comparison of the two suites and their main components; word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. I feel that if I started comparing Entourage vs. Mail and iCal etc. I would have to go into all kinds of crap like MSN vs iChat and this article is long enough already!

Overall, I am very impressed with Office '08 but will continue to use iWork for most of my stuff. Hopefully the article will be able to help you choose which solution is best for you

I'm looking forward to it being released this week!!!
Also hoping they issue and update soon to fix some of the issues I've read about here and other sites - but to be honest none of them so far sound like they will stop me installing it as soon as I can get a legal / local copy!

Be prepared to bump up your RAM if you are heavy Entourage user.

According to the Activity Monitor:
Entourage: 1.74 GB Real, 2.57 GB Virtual memory
Word:183 Mb Real, 1.24 GB Virtual
Powerpoint: 75 Mb Real, 988 Mb Virtual
Excel: 69 Mb Real, 1 GB Virtual

hmm that's odd, i'm looking at mine and its:

Entourage: 92.47MB Real, 934.44MB Virtual

I'm connected to an exchange server and imap server through two different accounts...your memory use seems a bit on the "maybe there's something not right" side...?

edit: as a comparison i just loaded up apple mail, and it's showing:

Mail: 27.64MB, 852.12Mb Virtual

So both are using a lot of virtual memory, but as for physical - I seem to be having some efficient use going on at my end..

Did a re launch and memory usage dropped to 65 Mb, but again ... my current Entourage session has lasted few days.
It shows that it pays now and then to quit / relaunch or even restart the Mac to get apps behaving as they should.

anyone have experience with the inbuilt reference manager (or a link to a review about it)??

I'm just getting to the end of a thesis and installed Office 2008 about two weeks before it is due. Big mistake.

[1] I looked at the reference manager briefly, and it's okay. It's a bit like a smaller and more streamlined version of EndNote. I myself tried EndNote, didn't like it, and gave up. The inbuilt version by Microsoft is better integrated than EndNote ever was and less annoying from that perspective, but nevertheless I think would be a bit too limited for most serious applications - you only have a choice of four referencing styles, for instance, and I can't remember there being any options to create your own style. Also, while there is a choice of about 20 different source types, I still found myself not being able to enter in all my sources (I think I had trouble with referencing transcripts of interviews and either web pages or radio broadcasts).
[2] Word 2008 actually looks very nice and features like inserting tables and bibliographies (if you've used their referencing system) look like a real improvement on the last version...
[3] BUT the thing is crashing for me every second time I go to 'Save As...' (which is a lot, considering I'm backing up after almost every change, not willing to risk years worth of work). This is a major issue for now, obviously, and something that wasn't happening in Word 2004. Perhaps even stranger, the 'recovered' document when I reload Word is older than my last saved version anyway, so is useless. The crash seems to occur regardless of whether I have other applications open or not.

I should say that I've been using word with a 100000 word document with 500 footnotes and even more than one language. But the crash rate for me for now is rather unacceptable - as a result, I don't feel nearly as secure with this new Word as I did with the last.