MacMasters

The simplest solution is usually the best solution. If Spaces doesn’t support multiple grouped windows, don’t use multiple grouped windows!

Yeah, it is actually. I would argue that the reasons are mostly self-inflicted, but it’s still a non-trivial task. If it makes you feel better, VBA support is supposed to come back in the next version (Office 2011? IDK).

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/
http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/05/13/saying-hello-again-to-visual-basic/

What was said about performance has nothing to do with 30000 pixels or what so ever. Sometimes I feel like being near a singularity because word is so slow. Add a picture and then wait a few seconds before it is drawn. There a plenty of other situation, where the speed just sucks. And my documents are not even big. Just admit it, the codebase is a mess. The implementation is just bad! Making such an ugly hacked toolbar … Why not using a plane dumb window?

Bad rendering – texts are jumping back from the next side just to be not really there, where one can see them. You have to scroll up and down to make word redraw the entire area correctly. Clicking on the scrollbar doesn’t bring you to the corresponding area in the document, though the scrollbar grabber(how is this thing called?) gets moved to that place. For you microsoft people who don’t know that: there are two options in the system preferences! Clicking to the scrollbar can really mean to scroll to that place (like on windows) or really jumpt there!

And why the hell is there no VBA? Is it that hard? This is one of THE BIG REASONS to use MS office.

As I first used the I was totally shocked. How can such a big and powerful company like MS bring such crap to the market? Did anybody test this? Then the first updates came out (promising perfomance improvements, etc …) and I couldn’t install them, because the installer didn’t find my MS installation … Such things MUST NOT HAPPEN! Shame on you, really!

If openoffice wouldn’t bad so bad I’d use it. But unfortunately it’s slow, has bad rendering, bad usability. So why do I still use office 2008? Because I need to have compatibility to windows office 2003/2007. That’s the only reason …

Your team had plenty of time to re-implement plenty of Office over to Cocoa, and at least pure Carbon. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of job it was to wrap PowerPlant inside Carbon so it would compile on Intel. Sadly, such a feat is extremely impressive (and extremely time-wasting). Software Engineering 101 tells us that if we need to spend 8 months porting someone else’s (Metrowerks) product so we don’t have to rewrite ours, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!

So instead of doing the responsible thing and creating a decent product, Office sucks, and people are finally starting to give it up in favor of OpenOffice and iWork.

Way to go MS!

Why is it that Adobe products do no suffer the same issues??

I must totaly agree with Eliezer and nearly all the other posts here.

1. The Spaces bug makes Office 2008 unusable.

2. Noone cares who’s fault this bug is, MS Apple or whoever.

3. Spaces is perhaps the most important new feature in Leopard. So there is no question that Office 2008 must work with it perfectly.

4. If rewriting the whole Toolbox code in Cocoa is the only way to fix it,- then damn!!! just do it! You should have started to write everything in Cocoa 6 years ago. We pay a lot of money for this office suit so use it to fix this bug! We don’t care if you have not enough software engineers. Just hire more. You are the big Microsoft. So why should the Windows Office crew be much bigger then the apple crew? The point is no one cares how big the effort is to fix this bug. Just fix it and do it fast. Even freeware like Neooffice can handle spaces… It’s a shame for MS.

Sorry for being so rude. But attitude of Microsoft is just embarrassing.

The problem is that I don’t care, and neither do any of the other users of Office 2008. The fact that you have difficult software engineering problems is nothing new; all software companies have difficult software engineering problems, that’s the nature of programming. Even more so, this isn’t something you should be even discussing on a public blog. It sounds to me like you’re saying, “this is difficult, so we aren’t doing it.” Apple introduced Cocoa and Carbon almost a decade ago at this point, and even back then they had a roadmap which ended with a completely cocoa-based interface.

Microsoft has had plenty of time to work on a complete rewrite, as Adobe did a few years back. It seems that they chose not to go this route, and now they’re stuck with the bad choice of either continuing with sluggish and buggy software or committing to a multi-year rewrite process after everyone else has already adapted to the new software design. Either way, customers are unhappy and Microsoft loses out as people switch away from their software.

Mac Office is falling farther and farther behind Win Office. Frankly, the one-year offset doesn’t seem to be enough to keep up. Wasn’t so bad back in the days of Mac Office 98. But ever since the x86 transition, Mac BU seems to be putting out fires and punting ever more features to the next version. Meanwhile, Win Office is not standing still. And considering that Adobe took a one-version development hit for Cocoa …

As a consequence, I’ve reverted to 2004 (except Powerpoint, where the new features slightly outweigh the introduced bugs). 2008 is still installed on my Mac and I give it a try with each dot-release (like today), but so far none of my big issues with 2008 have been solved.

Frankly I don’t believe any more we will see these things get fixed in Office 2008. More likely there will be a complete rewrite (Cocoa ?) as Office 2010, 2012, …

Sad for those, who spent their money already on 2008!

If you want an example of a “toolbox”-like window that behaves well, check out the “Table…” item in the Text Edit menus. It opens up a little window that’s used for formating tables, and you can have tables open in multiple text edit docs at the same time, SWITCHING BETWEEN SPACES, and doing whatever you want… and it’s fine with it.

It might not look as flashy as the MS Office toolbox, but damn, it works.

But I’m willing to keep it closed if it will stop Spaces from spazzing out.

The problem is, it doesn’t.

Here’s an example of what happened to me before. I was working on a Word Doc in Space 2. Then I switched to Space 1 to refer to the Word doc there. I began reading it. About five full seconds later, I magically get switched back to Space 2. I wasn’t even touching the keyboard or the mouse. I don’t understand how the hell it happened.

But it happens to me a lot with Word.

And my toolbox is closed the entire time

Or, I wish Word could automatically minimize the toolbox before Spaces switches, that would also reduce the problem I suspect.

We are paying customers after all, and the bug has been around at least a year (more)? Right? This must be your biggest single bug. You should at least try to reduce the impact.

Thanks.

P.S. BTW my own workaround is to set up Command+T to toggle the toolbox open and closed. If you keep it closed all the time, it seems like the problem happens much less often. (I have not empirically measured but seems like it.) Go to Tools->Customize Keyboard. In the View category there is the command ToggleOfficeToolbox, which you can tie to whatever keyboard shortcut you like.

The why is easily answered – it’s because Entourage was designed from the ground up as a completely different application. It has added Exchange functionality that has improved with each release, but it is NOT outlook! See this page for details:

Another thing I fail to understand is why Entourage is SUCH a far-cry from Outlook and why the data files are not inter-compatible. Thus far, no one from the MacBU seems to have addressed this.

Outside of just basic performance-enhancement, are ACTUAL speed increases something Microsoft is going to be able to do with 2008?

I’m a big apple fan, but I’m more than aware that their coding is far from perfect!

They’re also very secretive about what they’re working on, which perhaps works for iPods, but really frustrates the end user when all we want to know is that our frustration is being channelled into something productive when we give feedback.

Please do all that you can to make this more visible. Knowing that there is some intelligable reason as to why these two interfaces are not working really helps a frustrated user.

I had to look right down to the third page of comments on something from the second page of google to hear that there was something not quite right with the implementation of spaces. Spread the word and reduce stress levels; Spaces is not perfect yet and the amount of time required to fix the problem is not financially viable right now. *sigh of relief*

AMEN – and here in March of 2009, it still is almost unusable. How this continues, just blows my mind.

That anonymous source does sound mighty familiar!

Every time I go home and work on my Windows machine, running Office 07, it just drives home exactly how awful the Office 08 interface really is. The Ribbon and pop-up context menu are ridiculously simple yet manage to give me quick, ready access to 90% of the commands I need, often without moving my mouse more than an inch. The Ribbon interface feels more Mac-like to me than anything I’ve seen in Mac Office, ever, and I started using Mac Word in 1992.

Also, while you’re at it, can you make Excel stop changing the size of open windows every time I switch between them? It drives me batty. Respect the window size I choose, don’t change it. Ever.

PowerPoint, I give you props there. It honestly is the only Office 08 program that seems to work as expected, with essentially no issues. Great job. Now can you make the rest work as well? We’re waiting, and we’re losing patience.

Yes, Entourage obviously needs some improvement to better service current needs of people. We can’t afford its terrible handling of HTML, its inability to lookup Exchange contacts without involving LDAP, incompatibility with Time Machine, etc. All these things are well known. But for the rest of it: is there anything in Entourage that really needs to be fully redone?

I’d rather have E’rage’s handling of directory lookups via a single, consistent, standard mechanism than Outlook’s completely split personality handling of Exchange and LDAP. LDAP use in Outlook blows chunks, and there’s a lot of LDAP out there, *especially* in the Mac userbase, something E’rage does have to deal with.

LDAP is an approved, supported way to interact with Exchange’s GAL, so the fact that E’rage uses it is not bad by any definition. The *implementation* could use some fixing, but LDAP is not “bad”.

I know a bug of this type is an interaction between the operating system and the application, but it sounds really, really lame to say “It’s Apple’s fault” when a) almost no other applications have this behavior, and b) you’ve had a year to fix it.

At any rate, thanks for explaining the issues, and for your comment on my blog.

Yes, Entourage obviously needs some improvement to better service current needs of people. We can’t afford its terrible handling of HTML, its inability to lookup Exchange contacts without involving LDAP, incompatibility with Time Machine, etc. All these things are well known. But for the rest of it: is there anything in Entourage that really needs to be fully redone?

All in all I believe MS Office for Mac is an excellent piece of software, very well crafted, obviously worth the money. I tried other options several times (such as OpenOffice). Always switched back to MS Office at the end.