RE: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (UNCLASSIFIED)
RE: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (UNCLASSIFIED)
- Subject: RE: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (UNCLASSIFIED)
- From: "Wolfe, Barbara (Civ,ARL/SLAD)" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:16:41 -0500
- Thread-topic: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (UNCLASSIFIED)
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
Now that the 4 positives and 17 negatives have increased to some
unknown, may I just add a few thoughts regarding the other side, the PC.
For the past year of having used the latest MS Office for the PC, many
of these same issues are also prevalent. This just reinforces my thought
that it would be GREAT to have Bill Gates sit in on one or many of our
branch meetings, but keep him here until he makes the corrections!!!!!
After all why does the program think I ALWAYS want bullets there, of ALL
places!!!!! Why do I ALWAYS need to track changes! And why does it have
to be so difficult to number pages? Even the basic irritants can become
overwhelming!
Oh, we use both systems - Mac and PC, but Mac is by far the better!!!!
Have a good day ....
Barbara
Barbara Ann Wolfe
Operations Research Analyst
US Army Research Laboratory
Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005-5068
410 278-4700 (DSN 298)
-----Original Message-----
From: fed-talk-bounces+bwolfe=email@hidden
[mailto:fed-talk-bounces+bwolfe=email@hidden] On Behalf
Of Nichols, Jared
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 8:40 AM
To: Boyd Fletcher; Fed Talk
Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for
Mac
#rant{
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top: 0px;
left:520px;
margin: auto;
width: 200px;
color:#ffff00;
padding:10px;
background-color:#222;
border-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
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<div id="rant">
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....
</div>
-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:
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 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.
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. We had 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.
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 coalition 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.
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure and Operations Information Services
Department MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
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