This is an update to the email I sent back in February. Microsoft didn't have the courtesy to respond to the last email and the idea that I have to pay MS to report bugs to MS is an absolute absurdity. So....
After using MS Office 2008 Enterprise edition daily for over the last year, I thought it might be interesting to report on what works well and what doesn't. Hopefully MS can address the deficiencies mentioned - but its looking less and less likely that they care about making a quality and reliable product people can trust.
The good things:
1. Entourage 2008 with CAC authentication for OWA is awesome! works great and supports CAC authentication to multiple OWA sites concurrently 2. Entourage is very solid. very seldom crashes and the database repair problems that frequented entourage 2004 seem to be mostly gone 3. Word and Powerpoint are considerably faster than their 2004 versions especially with graphics. 4. MyDay is very helpful. nice addition
The bad things:
1. Entourage 2008 does not support searching of the GAL via OWA. Users must download the free 3rd party app "OWA GAL Search". This shouldn't be necessary. 2. MS Word is very unstable on large (100+ page word documents) using the .doc file format. it can be easily crashed if a user uses page up/page down or scroll bar to rapidly scroll through the document. It appears to be worse if track changes are on and show comments/insert&deletes are being displayed. words crashes at least a couple times a day. I have sent hundreds of crash dumps to MS because of this. 3. All toolbars should be dockable/undockable. This is a common UI capability. Mac Office's inconsistent use of dockable toolbars in frustrating to users - especially those coming from MS Windows. I've never seen any mainstream application which such a bizarre approach to mixing dockable and undockable toolbars. 4. Excel's lack of ability to dock the formula bar drives heavy Excel users bonkers. I've seen a number of folks switch to Apple's apps and Neo/Open Office because of this issue 5. on Tiger, there is still a severe bug in PowerPoint that causes some drawings not to print correctly to PDF. This bug is silently ignored in Preview but not in Adobe Reader (on all platforms). Office 2004 PPT does not have this problem 6. there is a bizarre problem, with wrapping lines within PPT slides specially related to use of "/" at the end of line. Problems does not occur with 2004 and seems to happen with new slides. If the slide was created in Office 2003/2004 it works fine (most of the time) 7. indentation behavior with bullets is not consistent with office 2003/2004. Extra space is added lines after the first 8. Entourage makes some security assumptions about certain file extensions and blocks them from being accessed. there does not appear to be a way to turn this off or change the list. 9. the default paragraph spacing (pt) for after is set to 10 by default. its very very frustrating to users to have to reset this to a more reasonable value. Word 2004 used 0 10. you can’t set the theme for non .docx files, so if you save to .doc and you didn’t select the theme (i.e. default fonts) you must change the doc to .docx before you can access the theme again and change the default fonts. there should be a way to change directly the default fonts while using .doc files. 11. Having a “hide” ability for MyDay was a very commonly requested feature. it could work how the Dock works when hidden. 12. MyDay, if it is set to show in Menu Bar, does not show up in ALT-TAB nor does it show up in “Force Quit” which is bad. Apps should always show in “Force Quit” 13. Word and Powerpoint – the default style should use Times Roman not Calibri (ppt) or Cambria (word) as the default font for documents. This is causing big training and support issues as Calibri/Cambria are not standard fonts. 14. Icons that consist of picture and word below, only the picture is clickable. this is incorrect behavior as the words should also be clickable. For example in Entrourage message create window the Priority, Signature, and Security buttons the word beneath the icon is not clickable. the problem does not occur in all place in all apps. 15. the elements gallery is nice but not used as much as the developer may have thought and users should be able to remove it (undock it) from being displayed. 16. lack of ODF import/export support is problematic when communicating with academia and foreign partners using OpenOffice. 17. "Recent Addresses" behavior when using compose message will not let you delete specific recent addresses like you can on Outlook 2003. You can either clear the entire list or live with bad entries in the list. 18. You can't r/w Windows Outlook PST files on Mac. 19. You can't encrypt your email store in Entourage. Yes I could use FileVault but FV is buggy and still not in my opinion ready for production use. 20. MS Powerpoint has very serious compatibility problems with older .ppt. It frequently renders and edits bullets wrong and I have to revert back to Office 2004 21. MS Word has serious cut and paste problems from other word documents. For example, it will frequently grab non-selected theme data (like background images) when copying on small amounts of selected text. Office 2003/2004 don't have this behavior. 22. Adding encryption certificates for a sender says it works but it never adds the certificate to the list 23. there is no way to clear individual names from the "Recent Addresses" features. Outlook can do this but with Entourage its and all or nothing clear.
My Conclusions:
1. MS Word 2008 should not be used to edit .doc of more than 10-20 pages with heavily use of track changes. Its simply not stable and crashes very frequently. 2. MS PowerPoint 2008 can not be used to edit .ppt file reliability. There are serious bugs in bullet rendering and edit code - which the most heavily used feature in PPT. 3. Entourage is relatively safe and stable to be used. With its CAC auth support it is better than Entourage 2004, but lack of encrypted data stores can be problem. Add its unreliable behavior with add people's certs for encrypting mail to then makes it use in DOD problematic. 4. Excel's poor GUI decision make its use very frustrating to heavy excel users.
So...if you don't need Entourage 2008's CAC auth capabilities or OOXML file formats then you are probably far better off using Office 2004.
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