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Office 2008 + Spaces = Absolute mess??

M

morrisman1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 6, 2008
272
0
Bottom end of the bottom half - Invercargill New Z
im having issues with spaces, expose and office 2008.

when i change spaces, word tends to follow me (creepy i know) and it a pain. the expose issue is when i open expose and click on a word window it wont always go there and just go back to where i was. the usual fix is clicking on the word windows when not in expose and then it seems to come right. its aweful if there is more than one word window open.

is this a recognised bug? and is there a fix? i have 10.5.2
 
overall...

as a software package, office 2008 seems pretty damn good though. it beats office 2007 for windows hands down in the way that it hasnt been 'dumbed down' and had familiar features mucked around with. the transition from office 2004 to 2008 was very easy but 03-07 on pc is an absolute nightmare to put it nicely.

it has the nice features of 2007 like proper graphs, better graphics etc which i like. i'd say they have done a better job of their mac version than they have done on the pc version

now they just need to fix up those freakin bugs!!!
 
i predominantly use Word 08, and have this exact same bug. the windows don't follow the spaces rules I have set for them, and will often jump around to wherever I am on the desktop, which is very annoying.

I heard that powerpoint and excel are a bit better in this regard, but since I don't use them much I can't say.
 
Same problem here. I was just searching the forums to see if there was a fix. Obviously not. This is such a pain. I finally bit the bullet and went for 08 but now I can't keep my different word tasks separate = CLUTTER!:mad: This seems like such a no-brainer. How could have MS overlooked this?!
 
Well, I know a number of people who will be glad to know that Italian was of greater importance... but in the meantime :mad: I wish that apple could just fix a few more things with pages(better error checking is my big beef) to make it a sound alternative.
 
yojitani said:
Well, I know a number of people who will be glad to know that Italian was of greater importance... but in the meantime :mad: I wish that apple could just fix a few more things with pages(better error checking is my big beef) to make it a sound alternative.
Click to expand...

You know I have the very same issue with pages...

Anywho, yea I don't understand how the expose bug got by Microsoft. I think that they must have implemented some hack to get it to be messed up...
 
I think this MIGHT be a Spaces bug, not office... I know the newest build of OS X is supposed to fix a lot of spaces bugs... Hopefully it takes care of it.
 
On the whole i've been fairly impressed with 2008, seems less sluggish than its predecessor (except copying blocks of cells in Excel for some reason ??) and i really like the way some of the features like the gallery are presented.

Definately doesn't work well with expose/spaces at all well and its pretty irritating. Mind you there have a few apps out there who have had spaces/expose problems since Leopard and i reckon our favourite folks in Cupertino must have done quite a bit of fiddling to expose to get it working well with spaces. Parallels had similar issues i seem to remember but they've sorted it since. I expect M$ will really get this sorted in one of the next updates cos it just makes the app feel somewhat ameteurish.

There are stupid bugs as well that i don't understand how they weren't spotted/resolved on release really... Like the navigation pane on Word is great and all but u can't use the scroll on your mouse in it and if the word document is in the background and u click within the navigation pane to bring the window to the front not much will happen...

Bit silly really cos the PowerPoint navigation works fine. Good product on the whole though - and that's pretty rare of me to say good things of M$ products.
 
I find it truly incredible how individual software developers can have apps which work seamlessly with spaces, and yet billion $ Microsoft just cannot figure it out.

I wish they would sort it out, its bloody annoying.

The only other spaces bug I've seen is in Adium, change space and hover over your contacts (or where they were before you changed), and the hover information (picture, screen name and picture) still shows up.
 
tom. said:
I find it truly incredible how individual software developers can have apps which work seamlessly with spaces, and yet billion $ Microsoft just cannot figure it out.
Click to expand...

As a normal programmer, there is very little that you can do that would affect spaces. The only thing you can do is mark something like a toolbar window to be visible in all spaces (toolbar windows would obviously disappear if the application becomes inactive, but you would want them to follow you if you edit documents in multiple spaces).

The problem might be that Microsoft programmers are more clever than the rest and figured out how to make Spaces do things they want, but they didn't get it quite right. Or, they got a request from their management to make Office behave in certain ways, and where I would have told them "can't do this, Spaces doesn't let you do this" they went ahead and did it in a way that almost, but not quite completely, works.
 
Office 2008 & Spaces are a joke.

I constantly have my spaces spazzing out- taking windows and putting them on different spaces, sometimes just the formatting pallete- leaving my document on the original space.

Absolute joke. They've had a year to sort this out and still havent.
 
gnasher729 said:
As a normal programmer, there is very little that you can do that would affect spaces. The only thing you can do is mark something like a toolbar window to be visible in all spaces (toolbar windows would obviously disappear if the application becomes inactive, but you would want them to follow you if you edit documents in multiple spaces).

The problem might be that Microsoft programmers are more clever than the rest and figured out how to make Spaces do things they want, but they didn't get it quite right. Or, they got a request from their management to make Office behave in certain ways, and where I would have told them "can't do this, Spaces doesn't let you do this" they went ahead and did it in a way that almost, but not quite completely, works.
Click to expand...

Actually, there's plenty of things that you can do that affect Spaces. Our windowing code is all Carbon-based, and predates Spaces. You'll see this issue occasionally in other Carbon apps, such as the Adobe apps. But lots upon lots of people use Office, and our windowing code is more extensive than lots of other applications, so the problems are much more obvious.

We're definitely aware of the problem, as is Apple. We've shown our code to Apple to try to work out a solution that we can get into Office 2008 (and they can get into Leopard), and that hasn't resulted in a complete fix. We've made some improvements, and Apple has also made some improvements to the Leopard code, so it's better than it was when we launched but it's not 100%.

If you'd like further details about this, one of our senior developers wrote a pretty in-depth post about it: risks and rewards. The stuff specific to Spaces starts about halfway down that blog post.

I use Spaces on my Leopard box myself, and I completely feel the pain. :(

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
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