Happy I switched but ... MS Office ...

[Haouka]

Hello

I have been using PC laptops for 10 years at work and I still do. I use mostly Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook.

I just received a 12" PB, I really love it for iTunes, iPhoto, ... but I cant get used to Office v.X; here are my problems, maybe there are solutions:

- I'm used to having each application using the whole screen which is nice given its a laptop and it also helps getting concentrated on 1 thing at a time ... with my Mac, I have all these windows and pallets, and even if I try to maximize the size, there are still some areas not covered ... looks a bit messy

- when I use Excel or Word with my Mac, the size is systematically too small and I have to zoom to 125% size to be able to read something ... with my PC it seems to be always right at 100% and easier to read. Does it have something to do with resolution?

Thanks

 

[mkrishnan]

- when I use Excel or Word with my Mac, the size is systematically too small and I have to zoom to 125% size to be able to read something ... with my PC it seems to be always right at 100% and easier to read. Does it have something to do with resolution?

I think I have this problem about as often on PC and Mac (I got my first iBook in late December so I am still using a lot of Excel files I made on Office 97). But one thing I noticed is that *for me*, turning off quartz extreme font smoothing in the Excel preferences makes the text slightly easier to read. Go to the Excel menu -> Preferences -> View tab and it is on the lower right.

 

[Vanilla]

- when I use Excel or Word with my Mac, the size is systematically too small and I have to zoom to 125% size to be able to read something ... with my PC it seems to be always right at 100% and easier to read. Does it have something to do with resolution?

Yeah I get this as well, though I note that if you resize say an Excel document and save it, from then on whenever you re-open it, it will open to the saved Zoom level.

Vanilla

 

[MisterMe]

Hello

I have been using PC laptops for 10 years at work and I still do. I use mostly Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook.

I just received a 12" PB, I really love it for iTunes, iPhoto, ... but I cant get used to Office v.X; here are my problems, maybe there are solutions:

- I'm used to having each application using the whole screen which is nice given its a laptop and it also helps getting concentrated on 1 thing at a time ... with my Mac, I have all these windows and pallets, and even if I try to maximize the size, there are still some areas not covered ... looks a bit messy

- when I use Excel or Word with my Mac, the size is systematically too small and I have to zoom to 125% size to be able to read something ... with my PC it seems to be always right at 100% and easier to read. Does it have something to do with resolution?

Thanks

From my reading of your "problems," it seems that they stem from a single source: The Mac is not Windows. Except for games, the Desktop, and presentations, the Mac displays all content within windows. That is as it should be. Full-screen mode on Windows irks me to no end. Your other "problem" is also due to your preference for Windows. Windows text has traditionally been larger because many computers running Windows have much lower quality monitors with larger pixels. Macs traditionally have much higher quality monitors with much higher pixel densities. However, you have the solution to your problem. Set the zoom to 125%. There is no law that mandates 100% zoom. You have two other choices: 1. Set a more legible resolution in the Displays control panel. 2. Use the Universal Access control panel.

 

[stump]

My feelings exactly. I have a 15" PB, plenty of room which Office 2004 does not use either. It squeezes your document into a small window to the left. If you enlarge it it still keeps the document workspace a small rectangle. It also keeps all toolbars as floating palettes instead of the more useable design as in Windows. Interesting as I too have just switched. I have loved all the Apple and Native apps for the Mac but Office is the only one so far that I really dislike.

I guess MS and I are quite different in terms of styles and in how we work. If I could find someway to convince Corel to port over WordPerfect, now that is an outstanding piece of software.

 

[mkrishnan]

I guess MS and I are quite different in terms of styles and in how we work. If I could find someway to convince Corel to port over WordPerfect, now that is an outstanding piece of software.

I thought MS made an effort to copy Mac software design principles and that was how Office.X / 2004 ended up the way they were. I don't presently use any traditional mac-garde software, like Photoshop, but my impression was that palletes at least used to be quite traditional in Mac s/w.

*Synchronizes watch to see how long before this thread devolves into an argument into the merits of OpenOffice and its derivatives vs. MS Office.... *

 

[stump]

Yes, I see what you mean. It does, as Mac's have, use palettes, however I personally can find them confusing when you have so many. Especially when they are all over the screen. I prefer a static toolbar that is easily understood. I am new to the Mac so I may not have all the settings correct but I notice they overlap each other often. I find it takes a lot of time to arrange things and on my PB at least, they are really tiny on the big screen. I believe that is due to the finer resolution that is native. Unfortunately, reducing it is not attractive.

 

[parrothead]

You know you dont have to use palettes in word right? You can customize and set up the "static" tool bars to hearts content. Also, I have never seen how Word handles things on a widescreen PC monitor (actually I have never seen a widescreen monitor except the Apple ones) but I would think that you would be left with a lot of unused grey background space. A nice thing about Work for Mac is that you can have two documents open side by side and be able to use and work on both easily. As far as I know you cant do this in windows.

 

[mkrishnan]

You know you dont have to use palettes in word right? You can customize and set up the "static" tool bars to hearts content. Also, I have never seen how Word handles things on a widescreen PC monitor (actually I have never seen a widescreen monitor except the Apple ones) but I would think that you would be left with a lot of unused grey background space. A nice thing about Work for Mac is that you can have two documents open side by side and be able to use and work on both easily. As far as I know you cant do this in windows.

In Windows you actually aren't required to have your windows at max size, although everyone maximizes their windows so much (self included) that it seems like its the only way. So you can have side-by-side docs. I don't do it much with two word docs, but I do frequently do side-by-side Excel and Word.

 

[Sabbath]

I can't remember on word v. X but on 2004 the palettes just hide when you aren't using them, you can also manually hide the whole app command+h and you can also hide all other apps option+command+h. Not having a whole app in one window is something you'll just have to kind of get used to. I much prefer it but I always have done ie you can kind of do it with palettes in photoshop on windows.

The size problem is just due to the tight packing of the pixels on the 12" screen I think, unfortunately it is a price you pay for such a small package, but the zoom is fix for this.

 

[ZORROFOX]

Your other "problem" is also due to your preference for Windows. Windows text has traditionally been larger because many computers running Windows have much lower quality monitors with larger pixels. Macs traditionally have much higher quality monitors with much higher pixel densities. However, you have the solution to your problem. Set the zoom to 125%. There is no law that mandates 100% zoom. You have two other choices: 1. Set a more legible resolution in the Displays control panel. 2. Use the Universal Access control panel.

First point, windows PCs and Macs have the same screens, you are just wrong. My mac laptop runs at 1280x800, my PC desktop runs at 2560x1024.
Second, I've got documents that both computers use, on the mac's screen (1280 pixels across) 100% is barely visible and fits up to cell Q in excel. On the PC, the fonts are very readable at a standard font scail (same at Text editor in both windows and osx) and go to cell O. Note that this means that the mac and pc versions actually differ in that the mac's text at "100%" is both smaller in size AND smaller by pixel count.
Finally, the main problem, as you put it, is that Windows has a nice feature where the computer knows how big your screen is (control pannel -> display -> resolution -> advanced depending on your version and customization) The setting here is for DPI, as in how many pixels per inch. Mac, sadly, has never had the good sence to realize that screen sizes deffer so aplications like word have no way to scail their text to the right size as they would in any windows computer.
Finally, before you scream that the problem really does exist in windows, let me clarify, my MacBook laptop dual boots windows XP and Mac OS X, in winxp mode, the resolution and size of text is perfectly readable and I can measure witha ruler to see that it's the same size as on the desktop, and more importantly, The same size as when I print it out on paper. When using Mac OS X on the SAME laptop, the font sizes are screwey and tiny, and moreover, "100%" is a totally arbitrary and obnoxiously small zoom that does not correspond to size on a printed page as it would in windows, lynux, or any other operating system. This, I admit, is in large part microsoft's fault as they did a really ****y job porting office to mac and in large part Apple's fault for not incorperating resolution calibration into any of their operating systems.

If anyone knows how to set the mac's to do that on a mac, or something similar that prevents me from changing zoom every time I open the document on a different computer, please tell me <

 

[MisterMe]

First point, windows PCs and Macs have the same screens, you are just wrong. ...

Not all computers were bought by nerds this afternoon. The quality of monitors in the installed base of Macs is far superior to the installed base of Windows monitors. The fact that some Windows computers have high quality monitors, notwithstanding.

 

[Frisco]

I never use the palettes either. I like MS Office better using the static look. Easy enough to change.

Welcome to Macintosh!

 

[PlaceofDis]

Holy Thread Ressurection!

perhaps your new questions would be better suited to a new thread, unless they do pertain to Office X and not Office 2004

 

[YS2003]

I prefer using Office on my Mac than on Windows. I like the way Mac handles mutliple open windows. I can multi-task a few Excel files, a few Word files, and a few others (such as Safari) and I can get to each open window by clicking on it (as I can see them all by arranging each window correctly). Under MS Windows, you need to click on the bottom part of the screen to bring the window to the front (you can click on the desktop to access the open window; but, under Windows, there is the borders around the window which really reduces the usable screen real estate). This is a little hard to explain in words. But, if you have a Mac and Windows machine, you can experiment by opening 2 windows for Excel and Word on both machines and compare how you can move back and forth among different files. I was able to compare this with my 12" iBook and 12" Dell X200 and I found it is easier to work on multiple Office files under Mac.

 

[Electro Funk]

if it makes you feel any better (and assuming you upgrade to the new office releases when they hit the shelves) i believe i read that the next release of MS Office is supposed to be exactly the same for the mac platform as it is on the windows platform. which has never happened in the past.

 

[Sun Baked]

if it makes you feel any better (and assuming you upgrade to the new office releases when they hit the shelves) i believe i read that the next release of MS Office is supposed to be exactly the same for the mac platform as it is on the windows platform. which has never happened in the past.

Probably still the same Universal Build code base, just bringing them back into feature parity which has been leapfrogging lately.

Don't expect any bug fixes to the problems that have been there since they ditched the old Mac Office code base years and years ago.

Doubtful that they will kill the Mac skin either, so likely more of the same -- but with the same features on both Windows/Mac this time round.

 

[Fukui]

First point, windows PCs and Macs have the same screens, you are just wrong.

Second, I've got documents that both computers use, on the mac's screen (1280 pixels across) 100% is barely visible and fits up to cell Q in excel.

Finally, the main problem, as you put it, is that Windows has a nice feature where the computer knows how big your screen is (control pannel -> display -> resolution -> advanced depending on your version and customization) The setting here is for DPI, as in how many pixels per inch. Mac, sadly, has never had the good sence to realize that screen sizes deffer so aplications like word have no way to scail their text to the right size as they would in any windows computer.


When using Mac OS X on the SAME laptop, the font sizes are screwey and tiny, and moreover, "100%" is a totally arbitrary and obnoxiously small zoom that does not correspond to size on a printed page as it would in windows, lynux, or any other operating system.

This, I admit, is in large part microsoft's fault as they did a really ****y job porting office to mac and in large part Apple's fault for not incorperating resolution calibration into any of their operating systems.

All these stupid problems are because office is an old old old old old app from the pre-os x days and as such, it is optimized for monitors of the day "800x600" (you can see this with a lot of carbon apps ported from OS 9). Same with the screwy window resizing. Its using the behavior of OS 9 not X.

Its sad, but MS office, on Windows is light years ahead of office for Mac. Features are missing, interface is totally backwards (look at iWork, waay more OS X styled), just looks childish.

Hopefully their next iteration will at least be as good as the 2007 windows version...................

P.S I prefer iWork by far (even with fewer features) than MS office on mac or windows.