Comments on: Mac Office 2008 SP1

By: DrBoar

DrBoar — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:54:36 +0000

Powerpoint extremly unstable with spaces enabled.

By: anna

anna — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:57:20 +0000

I’ve swapped from Microsoft to Mac OS approximately 2 years ago and the only problems I’m still facing are when I have to use the Mac version for Office. This is ridiculous. I have run this update and I can’t no longer access any of the Microsoft products that I own. I’m currently working on a very tight deadline and i have spent already 2 hours trying to solve this!!! Plus the fact that I suspect the only solution to my problem is to reinstall the whole pack or even better damp it for Mac iWork!!!! I can’t see how such a well established company can produce such RUBBISH products!!!!

By: Spaces inserted in wrapped text | keyongtech

Spaces inserted in wrapped text | keyongtech — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:57:16 +0000

[...] if i ever change any text or resize the text box itself. I’ve heard of others with this problem http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/05/…#comment-35085 …but no fixes. Anyone seen this or have a [...]

By: Default formatting of pasted text | keyongtech

Default formatting of pasted text | keyongtech — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:54:31 +0000

[...] make a difference, so it’s a good idea to give them the data that the workaround is not sufficient. http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/05/…fice-2008-sp1/ « Word 2004 won’t open email attachments after security [...]

By: Cody Rank

Cody Rank — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 07:41:51 +0000

My copy stopped working after installing SP1, and I finally found the fix:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=86896
see post by ‘SirROM’

By: TVNshack

TVNshack — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:41:02 +0000

Hello to all,

I use both 2004 and 2008. Actually, it’s very nice that both versions can co-exist on the same system. Congrats for offering us this possibility.

Actually, I do need going back to 2004 often because the SPACES/EXPOSE Bug is a killer. I use 8 Spaces on my MBP. Can’t live without it. I’m a Unix freak and always used (HP-VUE, CDE, CodeTeck’s VirtualDesktop, etc). I’m a power user: 14 hours/day in front of my MBP as an average.

Well, that Spaces bug is a show-stopper to me. I can’t get any Office 2008 apps to stay under control when I need to switch to other spaces where other applications documents are open. After a while. I just close 2008 and reopen the same document with 2004, loosing the advantages of 2008.

I’ve found a trick to “reset” Excel or Word and not getting lost raising the visibility of a document having the focus. The main one is to iconize the document. It works Ok, but it’s a major pain having to do that every time I give the focus to another window on the desktop. I’ve got no trick, still, to avoid Excel to abruptly switch me to the Space where Excel/Word/PPt was loaded first, and when I have a document opened on another space.

People at the MacBU, please consider this Spaces bug as really a show-stopper, for us, power users.

Thanks
Thierry

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:30:06 +0000

Office will not open for me after this update.

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:28:23 +0000

Nice update. Seriously, WTF.

By: Kris

Kris — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:36:15 +0000

I’m having similar issues within PowerPoint; I think I’ve narrowed it down to a problem with justified text. When you justify it, it actually seems to right justify (although not completely), and leave the text ragged on the left side.

Same issues happening with opening Word documents as well.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:45:59 +0000

Is there any official timeframe set for when you are going to fix the bug introduced by SP1 where you can no longer double click on a Word 2004 document and have it open?

I find it hard to believe that someone actually made a conscious decision to add this change to SP1. Do you only test with new word docs?

Tom

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:07:41 +0000

It seems that what’s needed are more updates, with fewer things affected in each update.

That way when you make changes and people who have been reporting problems with spaces report the problems have gotten worse, not better, you have a smaller haystack for what things to fix.

Fortunately, known bugs aside, I have managed to get SP1 to more or less work. The final solution for me was to uninstall Office 2008 and 2004, blow away anything that remained and looked like Microsoft installed it, and then install 2008 from CD, then update it without ever actually running anything.

I figure this time next year, Office 2008 will be reasonably stable. Of course, by then I may not care. I already use Keynote and have found Numbers adequate for what little spreadsheet needs I have. Pages is not yet able to serve my needs, though, particularly since my needs include the ability to work in .doc format (not .docx and not import/export..)

By: John W.

John W. — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 05:51:00 +0000

Keep getting this even with a unified communications certificate:

Unable to Establish a secure connection to exchangeold.xxx.xxx because the
server name or IP address does not match the name or IP address on the
server’s certificate.

By: Done with MS

Done with MS — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:23:40 +0000

Well, your update, SP1 has rendered my system unable to open any previously existing word documents. I tried uninstalled and reinstalling but that did not work. I have had a ticket open with microsoft support. The answer they gave me was that I should email all my existing word documents to myself, then use the new copies. Patently ridiculous. I would suggest to all users of MS office to instead try open office or Iworks.

By: Moose Haas

Moose Haas — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:19:01 +0000

I have the same issue with Powerpoint as Anonymous reported with the text wrapping putting in a space on subsequent lines.

How did they manage to break something as specific as that? Complete lack of testing?

By: Angus

Angus — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:54:37 +0000

Cant open downloaded .doc files anymore since installing SP1.

mariner write can open them so its SP1’s problem.

angus

By: Bernhard

Bernhard — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:20:02 +0000

I was happy to hear from SP1. I am strongly depending on a perfectly working Office for my work and hence I did the update (German language) to benefit from the improvements. However, I am facing now problems with PowerPoint, I never experienced before.
When I open PowerPoint documents from before (Mac Office documents or Windows documents) the second and following lines of sentences are moved slightly to the right, and there are also some other strange effects with the position of the text.
When opening the same documents with Mac Office 2008 (without SP1 on another computer) everything is fine again.
What should I do about that? Will that be fixed soon?

Best regards,
Bernhard

By: Caleb

Caleb — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:01:26 +0000

To sum it up either there are 1 of 2 problems:

A) After the SP1 update, Office assistant consistently nags you to ‘participate’ in quality control while you are trying to open Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Entourage. Regardless of your answer, it ends with the Check for Updates window and your program fails to load.

- OR -

B) After numerous uninstalls and re-installs of Office 2008 and removing officePID and the settings file (as said on one troubleshooting website) now I no longer get setup assistant. Instead, applications bounce in the dock once, then fail to launch. Or they bounce a couple of times then prompts to restart.

I am unable to reinstall office 2008 without being forced to apply the SP1 patch. utter crap.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:26:18 +0000

Good update?

I’ve seen nothing but more problems from that crap update
- word: if a tablecells on the last line wraps text, text becomes invisible n that cell on all but the last line
- powerpoint: thext wrapping in you body gets the space in front of the next line, wrecking the layout completely

This is the most crap update of office for Mac I’ve seen over the year, now looking how to roll it back.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:35:59 +0000

An update that stops an application from allowing you to open files by double-clicking it is pretty much unforgivable. I’m just so glad I haven’t had to use Office for a long time

By: Brrryc3

Brrryc3 — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:54:27 +0000

Hey, It’s me, Bryce, again. I changed my posting name because my dad told me to. Oh well, that’s life. Anyway , here’s my daily surprise from reading this blog. I’m reading along and get sucked into the post and a big explosion of amazement occurs inside my head. ow! I didn’t know that Office 2008 had so many problems. First it’s the issue with speed and then it’s the typing problem and then it’s the slow typing problem and then it’s the problems with SP1 installation and application startup. Get a sense of what things are going on, guys. It’s crazy! Sheesh…

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:29:01 +0000

What are we supposed to do about this application launching problem? I can’t open documents anymore by double-clicking? Please tell me a fix is in the works for this issue.

By: Catarina Teixeira

Catarina Teixeira — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:48:37 +0000

“SP1 has completely disabled my Office 2008 installation. I cannot launch any of the applications, and I get stuck in a ’setup assistant loop’”

The exactly same thing happened to me. I had to uninstall and install office again.

By: Quenton Elliott

Quenton Elliott — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:48:17 +0000

What a terrible update to an already sketchy program. If the business world hadn’t standardized on this once great piece of software I’d be telling everyone to jump ship. First is the speed issue, no amount of RAM will speed up office 2008 or 2007 on a brand new core2duo machine. No one uses docx. Everyone but MS knows this is a still-born file format and I must spend time changing it back to doc, xls etc for all clients (mac and PC). The biggest problem I’m seeing on out-of-the-box macs is related specifically to SP1: The stupid setup assistant will not go away. No rhyme or reason, just keeps asking if I’d like to participate. say no, say yes, it doesn’t matter since it keeps popping up instead of the desired office app.

This release has officially jumped the shark with bloaty feature-creep. People were better off with text edit.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:49:25 +0000

I installed SP1 hoping it would fix the problem with Excel 2008 being unable to keep up with regular typing. N o s u c h l u c k. I t ‘ s s t i l l p a i n f u l l y s l o w.

Back to Excel 2004 for me.

By: teo

teo — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:51:12 +0000

SP1 has completely disabled Excel and PowerPoint (when I try to launch either, the splash screen comes up but before showing a blank document the application quits and I get the crash reporter). Word launches but quits itself if I try to close the blank document that appears.

Deleting the 2 files that some at AppleInsider have suggested removing ( /Users//Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 settings.plist and /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist ) resulted in me going back to the setup assistant at launch but did not fix the issue (I re-enter my user information, the application splash screen comes up, it quits, I go back to the crash reporter). I also tried restarting my computer, to no avail of course.

Version history: I never installed the beta and originally installed 12.0.0 before successfully upgrading to 12.0.1 on top of which I installed SP1 today.

By: msh

msh — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:19:52 +0000

after installed SP1 on imac (2.4 GHz, core Duo) i was unable to open some (but not) all excel files that i had no trouble working with before SP1. I could open the same files on a G4 powerbook on which i had also installed SP1, but not on another identical imac. so problem seems to be imac specific. when I removed SP1 from imac and re-installed office 2008 from original CD, problem with excel files disappeared. any idea about whether/when this kind of problem will be fixed so I can try to take advantage of SP1 (assuming there are any advantages)?

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 19 May 2008 03:44:09 +0000

I’m with many on this list – SP1 completely crashed my office install. I can’t open anything – excel, word, etc simply crashes and the crash reporter comes up. While a lot of people are saying they “expect” this poor delivery from Microsoft, I certainly can’t believe any company (mine included) would release something this unfit for market in good faith. Shame on you Microsoft – this is yet another reason (behind Vista) why my company and I am rapidly losing faith in your products and moving to Linux and Mac across the board.

By: Microsoft Patches Office. AGAIN « JD’s World

Microsoft Patches Office. AGAIN « JD’s World — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:32:52 +0000

[...] MacBU announced the availability of Office 2008 SP1 today in conjunction with the security patch. The 180MB [...]

By: Rene

Rene — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:12:54 +0000

Same problem as Kobes: manually started update can´t find the installation on my hdd….please give me a hint!

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Hey:

So I have Office 2008, which I installed about 2 months ago, and I come back into my office today and it has auto started its updater, and asks me if I want to continue. Sure, I can fix a sandwich while its doing that, I think. So it takes about 10 minutes to settle on the fact that I only have two volumes on my computer, and then asks if I want to continue, sure, OK. “Installation will take 502Mb” it says. Wow, for an update?

So I’m sitting here, watching the bar that says that “about 1 minute remains”, and watch “running Italian grammar checker installer script” Huh? “Running Japanese grammar installer script.” And so on. 10 minutes later, still “about 1 minute remaining”. Then, “running clipart installer script”, “running sounds installer script”.

Oh honestly.

But finally, “Install Succeeded”.

Well, that’s good. Sure glad I’ll be able to write in Italian, Japanese, Spanish etc. and not make any grammatical errors……

BMW