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: "Nichols, Jared" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:40:11 -0500
- Acceptlanguage: en-US
- 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
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If I may add another things... Office 2008 is not spaces aware!!! Try having Word open, with the toolbox palette open and then switch spaces. Toolbox palette stops working. Or, have multiple Word docs open, then switch spaces, frequently, one of the open docs will switch spaces with you. Nice, huh?
Microsoft blames Apple because they said that Apple held Spaces close to the vest for so long during Leopard development. So therefore, “spaces aware” won’t be built in until the next major release and their “workaround” is to either not use Spaces or to go back to Tiger. Sorry, not happening. It’s funny, because other applications that I use that are older than Leopard itself, so therefore were not designed with Spaces in mind WORK JUST FINE WITH SPACES. It’s a load of horse crap.
This is one of my major, major gripes about the product. Had they paid attention to Apple’s UI guidelines and recommended coding best practices, this wouldn’t be an issue – just like it’s not for the thousands of other applications out there. But no, Microsoft had to do it their own way because of course they know best when it comes to software.
Christ on a pony....
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-j
ps (see what I did there with the CSS instead of </rant>???)
On 2/23/09 23:01 , "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.
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure and Operations
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436
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