Re: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac
Re: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac
- From: Boyd Fletcher <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:05:47 -0500
- Thread-topic: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac
Title: Re: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac
The MS Word 2008 reliability has gotten to be unbearable. I now have to edit complex docs in XP on Virtual Box using Office 2003 (office 2007 also tanks and has major compatibility issues with .doc) or I edit in Office 2004 but on 200 page docs with hundreds of track changes and lots of graphics it is just two slow on my MBP.
I think the new .???x file formats are great and applaud MS for moving to XML (though I wish it had been ODF) but they definitely need to fully test of the conversion process. I think part of the problem is that MS really doesn’t fully understand the older formats, some of that code is 20 years old and many of the folks that wrote it are now millionaires and off doing better things :)
What I could never understand with Office 2008 is why it doesn’t have the ribbon UI like Office 2007. MS did a lot of UI studies for Office 2007 so they have quite a bit of real data on the viability and success of that UI model. And so far, I think its been quite successful. They fact that the Mac group both ignored (or at least appeared to) the Office 2007 UI studies and the work done on Office 2003 with dockable/undockable toolbars is just plain weird.
boyd
On 2/23/09 11:17 PM, "Dan Morrison" <email@hidden> wrote:
Bad thing #2 is equally as bad with Word 2007 for Windows. Running in
VMWare on my Mac, Word will regularly crash with .doc files. When it
crashes, it tries to auto-recover, which causes another crash, an so
on. At work, it does not crash, but .doc documents with tracked
changes or comments cause Word to slow down to an almost unusable
pace, even bringing the typematic rate to a crawl. My NOC has not
been able to fix this problem (or even attempt a solution other than
running the included repair application, with no success.)
Being the MS has the all the code for .doc files, the pathetic state
of the "compatibility mode" is a disgrace. Shame too, because I
really, really like 2007 when editing .docx files.
Dan
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Boyd Fletcher <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> After using MS Office 2008 Enterprise edition daily for 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. I'm curious to
> see if other people are having similar problems.
>
> The good things:
>
>
> Entourage 2008 with CAC authentication for OWA is awesome! works great and
> supports CAC authentication to multiple OWA sites concurrently
> Entourage is very solid. very seldom crashes and the database repair
> problems that frequented entourage 2004 seem to be gone
> Word and Powerpoint are considerably faster than their 2004 versions
> especially with graphics.
> MyDay is very helpful. nice addition
>
> The bad things:
>
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Excel's lack of ability to dock the formula bar drives heavy Excel users
> bonkers. We had a number of folks switch to Apple's apps and Neo/Open Office
> because of this issue
> 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
> 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)
> indentation behavior with bullets is not consistent with office 2003/2004.
> Extra space is added.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> Having a “hide” ability for MyDay was a very commonly requested feature. it
> could work how the Dock works when hidden.
> 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”
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> lack of ODF import/export support is problematic when communicating with
> academia and coalition partners using OpenOffice.
> "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.
>
>
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