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Is it just me or is Office 2008 the worst program ever?

I

Inconsequential

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 12, 2007
1,978
1
Thank god its only a trial im using :rolleyes:

Why the hell is it so shockingly bad?

Excel constantly crashes (esp when printing)
It messes about with the page layout (putting a graph on a portrait page instead of landscape - restarting it cures it but then does it again if you tell it to bring two pages per sheet)
Its slow as (even with recent things turned off).

Why did MS release such a bag of ****?

And STILL no AV for personal messenger. :rolleyes:

Sorry MS, not getting my money. I'll just keep reinstalling the trial when I need the graph stuff, otherwise Numbers (even tho more basic) ftw.

/rant
 
iWork 09 works great for my needs. I really like Pages and Numbers over Word and Excel.

I don't need a lot of the advanced features.
 
Works great for me.. I use Entourage 24/7, Excel and Word less frequently but so far in 3 months with ZERO issues.
 
VSMacOne said:
Works great for me.. I use Entourage 24/7, Excel and Word less frequently but so far in 3 months with ZERO issues.
Click to expand...

Yeah, i'm with you guys that have decent things to say about it.

I'm running an ooooold version of MS Office; in fact, its the free stuff that i got from college!
MS Office (for students) '04 and I haven't had any problems with it! (thank god! :rolleyes:)
 
I've never had excel crash while printing and I run it on three Macs. I do like iWork a lot but office works better when dealing with work related things, mainly because there are no import/export or reformatting issues. So all and all, I probably use Office 2008 about 2/3 of the time.

Office 2007 though is significantly better on Windows. The ribbon UI and right click access to the formatting menu are two things that are better.
 
robanga said:
I've never had excel crash while printing and I run it on three Macs. I do like iWork a lot but office works better when dealing with work related things, mainly because there are no import/export or reformatting issues. So all and all, I probably use Office 2008 about 2/3 of the time.

Office 2007 though is significantly better on Windows. The ribbon UI and right click access to the formatting menu are two things that are better.
Click to expand...

oh boy. i cant tell you how aggravating that was at first. didnt know how to do anything
 
its just you.

office works great for me. Although i am going to try iwork 09 just out of curiousity
 
It seems to be just you. The only problem I had was with Messenger, and a simple reinstall solved that problem. Otherwise, the rest of the Office suite has worked very well for me. It isn't as nice as the Windows version, but I can make due.
 
dukebound85 said:
oh boy. i cant tell you how aggravating that was at first. didnt know how to do anything
Click to expand...

Indeed! It was strange at first. Once I got I used to it though, it has really worked for me. I find myself missing the ribbon when I flip over to the Mac side of things.
 
Well im going to try a reinstall.

But as everything else is working perfectly as always I think its down to Office really.

I also have Office 2004, but when comparing it to the windows versions it always seems slower and laggier.

They all feel unfinished to me when using them side by side.

Edit: New bug, it decided after a crash that all the graphs were 1/10th their original size in there own windows. Que me spending 10 mins reorganizing them all

Grrr
 
Hmm have you tried updating it? I had problems like what you were describing, but htey went away after I ran the updates.

I love Office 2008. Best program ever! i've never really had any problems with it.
 
I agree,

If there's a program which really causes slowdowns and crashes frequently is Microsoft Office. I had less problems with other programs like Maya and Adobe Products, which are supposedly the ones which crash most frequently.


But what can you expect from Microsoft?:rolleyes:
 
I have it right now and I think it's awful. I can't stand how slow it is. And how multiple Word windows jump between Spaces when they feel like it. I can get by with iWork most of the time, but sometimes I need 100% document compatibility w/ docx files w/ coworkers. Oh well... maybe in a few years we'll get a version that doesn't suck...
 
spaceballl said:
I have it right now and I think it's awful. I can't stand how slow it is. And how multiple Word windows jump between Spaces when they feel like it. I can get by with iWork most of the time, but sometimes I need 100% document compatibility w/ docx files w/ coworkers. Oh well... maybe in a few years we'll get a version that doesn't suck...
Click to expand...

The spaces issue is a know one, and last I heard, it's apples end of it that needs to be worked on.
 
i use office 08, no problems so far. although i only use it for a couple of hours every other day.

but the messenger not having AV, its f***ing stupid (sorry for my language, but it is) the corporate side has AV, why can't they give it to the personal >_<

also, this is not mac-related but the windows live messenger, is always spammed with adverts, at least they haven't done that to the mac version.

thats why i use adium for IM'ing :p
 
Actually, I don't find any issues with Office '08. I had Office X (that's the one BEFORE Office '04), and that didn't like the Intel MacBook and iMac, but after upgrading it works great. Doesn't hog too much RAM, and haven't had a single problem with it yet! 
 
Prekesh said:
i use office 08, no problems so far. although i only use it for a couple of hours every other day.

but the messenger not having AV, its f***ing stupid (sorry for my language, but it is) the corporate side has AV, why can't they give it to the personal >_<

also, this is not mac-related but the windows live messenger, is always spammed with adverts, at least they haven't done that to the mac version.

thats why i use adium for IM'ing :p
Click to expand...

Per Nadine, see this forum, MS is working on the next version for Mac that will have A/V with it.
 
I agree with most here. I think Office 2008 is very good, save for the annoying spaces issue (regardless of whose fault that is). I am trying to use iWork 09 more now (specifically Numbers) to see if I can make that work going into the future, if for no other reason than it is cheaper and I will always buy iWork anyway just to get Keynote.
 
Numbers 09 is limited in being able to handle about 65,5xx rows, deleting anything beyond that point.

This limitation existed in Microsoft Excel all the way until 03/04 and was finally lifted in 07/08 versions. Why would anybody need more than 65K rows? Because some people work with high throughput sequencing data and those big files are the norm.

Numbers 09 is barely catching up to 4 year old Excel and is useless for scientific applications involving sequence analysis.

So in this case, Numbers 09 would give Office 2008 a run for its money for being THE worst program.

Also, besides being a bit slow (improved with updates, in fact), Office 2008 has been OK for me personally. The PC version of the Office is much better, though, and while I like Mac OS and all, Office might make me consider switching back to Windows. Especially if the next incarnation of Windows is better than Vista.
 
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