Whether or not you should upgrade to Office 2008 depends on a couple of things. If you use third party apps such as MathType for equations or EndNote for reference and bibliography management, then I would say don’t upgrade. The lack of VBA support in Office 2008 has severely limited the functionality of many third party applications.

If you are looking for a speed improvement, then you will likely find a small improvement in office 2008 since it does not require Rosetta. However, the speed gains have been pretty slight from my experience. I have both 2004 and 2008 installed on my computers and I quite often opt for 2004.

I have found VBA to be unstable on Office 2001 and 2004, and have bought several titanium laptops just to allow me to continue to run 2001 – the VBA iteration I like better. Some VBA functions just do not work as they are supposed to and I have had to write applescript patches for both versions.

I find it hard to forgive MS for dropping VBA in the prior version. I do admit that they tried to drop it for the Windows version as well, but with a shift to .Net and WERE NOT ALLOWED TOO. The uproar was great on the Windows side and unfortunately too mild for them to take it seriously on the Mac side until their market share dropped and people started avoiding macros to maintain cross platform compatibility.

I WILL NOT BUY ANOTHER MS PRODUCT UNTIL A WORKING VBA FOR MAC PRODUCT IS AVAILABLE. I have emailed the Mac BU in the past and offered to be a beta tester.

Applescript is not designed to handle strings, text, and formatting like VBA can. Filemaker Pro would be a better choice, but I just don’t have the energy to switch all of my documents to a new platform, though it would be the best long term approach. I am ornery and do not hanker towards bending over and using the windows version, which I would not be able to patch with Applescript.

For all of you who have wondered what Office does that iWork doesn’t, I can’t tell you that since I honestly haven’t used the iWork products since they stopped coming free with new Macs (so, at least 5 years ago, if not more). Back then, I found they were lacking functionality I was used to from Office, but maybe that has changed. I’m a huge Excel user; I probably use it for at least 2 hours a day at work, if not more. I know I would not want to upgrade from Mac Office 2004 to 2008, as it no longer has VBA support, which I often utilize. There are a number of other things that also translate to less feasible cross-platform sharing of documents between Mac Office 2008 and the PC versions.

I personally am curious if iWork has the functionality I use on a daily basis. I would assume there’s no VBA support, but does Numbers (and the other iWork apps, for that matter) have any capability to automate tasks with some other language, say, AppleScript or better yet, C something, Java, etc.? (not that that does me any good if it’s a document that needs to be cross-platform) How about pivot tables, trend lines for graphs, statistical analysis add-ins, anything like Solver. And, does Pages have automatic tables of contents like Word does, and the other auto-text features available in Word? These are the big things that I’d be looking for in iWork before considering making the switch from Office.