Slow, unstable, less compatible with Office for Windows than other aps

Author's Rating:

Pros: Has more shapes than iWork '09
Looks nicer than NO or OO (so what)

Cons: Compatibility with MSOW weak
Stability poor
Dual window support weak
Interface clumsy
Weak PDF export

The Bottom Line: 
If I had a choice again I would not buy it. Supposed better compatibility with Office for Windows, turned out to be wrong.  The other suites are generally better

Author's Review
I bought MS Office 2008 for Mac (MSOM) on the assumption (wrong) that it would be good at opening MS Office for Windows (MSOW), all versions, and that I would be happy with it.

I had occasional compatibility issues with NeoOffice (NO) and OpenOffice (OO) and was dissappointed with the availability of shapes in iWork.

Besides getting more shapes than iWork, I have been very dissappointed with MS Office for Mac.  Here a list of some of the issues I have experienced:

1. Compatibility - MSOM is generally less compatible with MSOW than iWork '09 and in most cases than both NO and OO.  This is especially the case with PowerPoint where either paragraphs are completely messed up and no-longer editable (try working with a paragraph that converts to one letter per line) or graphics simply don't show up (frame is there but no image - go figure).

2. Stability - the system has often crashed when copying tables from excel into PowerPoint or Word.  To top it off, following the latest crash I learned that auto-recover did not work with excel for some reason (yes I know save your work etc.)  but why did auto-recover work when powerpoint crashed ?

3. Dual window support in powerpoint is weak.  I often work with large power point files and like to refer to previous slides.  In MSOW I would open a second window and could easily work side by side.  In MSOM you can do it but you can only edit on, get this, the new window you open.  The original takes edits but slowly and clumsily.

4. Interface - well compared to iWork 09, the closest comparison, is clumsy and slow

5. PDF creation poor - I converted a 4.9 MB Powerpoint file to PDF and found it ballooned to 17.6MB!!!! I did the same exercise on iWork and it grew but to a more respectable 6.2 MB - I could at least e-mail it.