Word also has an issue with quitting, apparently when it tries to write the Normal file that saves defaults. MacFixit has described it in more detail. Installed on my iMac, it pops off a bug report to Microsoft every time I quit and sometimes gets lost in a spinning rainbow wheel and has to be force quit.

Installed on my MacBook under the three installations license, it works fine. I've tried every fix for the iMac's problems I could find to no avail. I suspect it's related to the fact that on my iMac, the demo version of Word 2004 loaded several times, creating the files Word creates when it first runs. On my MacBook that demo version of Word was never run, so those files didn't exist. Microsoft seems to know that an older application can cause problems, but their deinstallation portion of the new installation apparently doesn't clean out everything it should.

Starting Word seems to go OK, and in the few days I've used it, I've had no problem editing and saving files using the new and much more attractive interface. Just be advised that Word loads much more slowly than Excel and Powerpoint. Very slowly.

The main problem with packaging and releasing applications as a suite is that, given the nature of deadlines, in any suite there's going to be one "runt" in the litter, one application that was most buggy and least ready when the release date arrived. Unfortunately, for Office 2008, that application seems to be the most used one, Word.



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