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Yaawwwn

Dear MS,
You're too late to the party. Office 2008 was so crappy that I gave up on many of the apps over a year ago now. I have no time to migrate back to your mail program or drop Keynote for PowerPoint. Word '08 still crashes at the drop of a hat on three different Macs, and the absence of macro function in Excel was just plain idiotic. Try fixing your crappy software a little sooner and maybe you won't lose so many people.

buh-bye
 
That video is laughable. The “managers” there are all constraint by MS tight budget and they are not only

1) Implementing a feature from Mail which has been there since the beginning of man
So what if it has been around in mail forever, it is new to Outlook for Mac

2) Scrapping the PPC support
This, is a great thing in my opinion. PPC is dead and on its way out. Apple has removed it from its future products so i see no reason for Microsoft to not do the same thing.

For what? For implementing MACROS again?
Macros are highly useful in the business environment and one of the things everyone complained about when it was removed from Office 2008.

I’m sorry but Mac users should NOT agree with programmers implementing useless features and calling it a new office version.
Useless is a subjective term and you can think what you like.


Good God, they are still touting the ribbon??????????? Does no one at MSFT know good user interface design? Look at the iphone. Any 3-year-old can pick it up and do far more sophisticated things in 10 minutes than can an adult who shelled out bucks to be trained on using the Office ribbon.
Some people like the ribbon and some do not. I have been testing the betas and have found the ribbon to be very nice. I first used it on the Windows machines at work and got use to it there. It is very nice to see that i can have the same layout in the ribbon at home when i need to open those work documents and edit them.
 
I hope they finally fix the dual monitor/full screen bug that's plagued Office 2008 since its release (Link).
 
What would you expect the 64-bit version to buy you?
I'm OCD and when I boot up, there are only a couple of 32-bit stragglers running. But then, I start to run office apps and the purity of my 64-bit machine dwindles.

Besides that ;) I expect it to be ~8% faster, more secure, more robust, and less buggy because a lot of errors will be caught during the 64-bit conversion.
 
Have you tried working with long documents? The kind of issues I often encountered with Word are described in the comments here: http://ask.metafilter.com/96292/Mac-word-processor-for-academic-writing-in-the-humanities

I'm asking these questions because at the moment I don't trust MS to deliver a quality product. Word is fine for short essays, letters, notes, that sort of thing but if you work with large documents it can be a liability as I and many of my colleagues have discovered. However, it is VERY useful to be able to work with Word since it is the de facto standard across platforms.

Can't say I've had too many problems with document size - small or large.
I not sure I see why dissertations etc should present problems.
 
Just waiting for Nadyne (from Mac BU) to chime in with her thoughts.

Well, I see my colleague Schwieb beat me to it, but I'll chime in since I've been summoned.

It's been funny to see the reactions to our video. Ryan, Amy, and Eric are all pretty pleased that everyone seems to think that they're barely old enough to hold down a full-time job. After all, name me someone in their mid-30s who doesn't take it as a compliment when they get carded for their cocktails. Maybe we should do a cross-promotion with Oil of Olay. ;)

I wouldn't say that we're treated like second-class citizens at Microsoft. I'm sure everyone's had an amusing experience in being the lone Mac user in a room full of Microsoft employees, but overall everything's pretty awesome.

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
Well, I see my colleague Schwieb beat me to it, but I'll chime in since I've been summoned.

It's been funny to see the reactions to our video. Ryan, Amy, and Eric are all pretty pleased that everyone seems to think that they're barely old enough to hold down a full-time job. After all, name me someone in their mid-30s who doesn't take it as a compliment when they get carded for their cocktails. Maybe we should do a cross-promotion with Oil of Olay. ;)

Oh God, please no! :)
 
Mostly for non-public internal reasons. We're handling the beta ourselves -- our team is much smaller compared to products such as Windows, and we're working with a similarly smaller beta pool.

Schwieb
MacBU Dev Lead
http://www.schwieb.com/

Can the team test the following, please? :)
•*Word: Paste Special... -> PDF saves at proper quality in .docx format. Only works in .doc in Word:2008.
• Word: Invisible characters display - e.g. paragraph markers do not corrupt graphically, tearing and such, when you scroll up and down a few times.
• Word: Similarly, reliable updating of the display when changing hanging indents and such things.
• Word: Also would love it if Snow Leopard's built-in 'scroll in background' was enabled. Although I know you guys intentionally disabled it in '08, it is a really handy thing.

• Excel: Default cell widths, heights, and how many fit on a page (A4) agree with what is the case in Windows.

•*PowerPoint: Possible to save window size and position like with Excel's 'Workbook' startup file.

• All: Live window resizing; at least Excel:2008 does not have this - if I recall. I'm currently trying to exist on iWork again, to justify having bought '09, but man is it hard in a Windows heavy work environment, compatibility is just nasty.
•*All: Access to built-in OS X Special Characters palette from Edit menu. I do assume you're keeping fully functional menus along with the Ribbon.
• All: That customise toolbars does not result in shrinking window size on leaving that interface - I guess with the Ribbon that won't apply so much :).
• All: Could we please get English: New Zealand dictionaries? I know there are issues with lack of demand :(.

Also really looking forward to 'docked' formula bar in Excel; I'm pretty much all about the interface at this point; the only real 'bug' I covered there was with the paste as PDF.

So, October I hear. Looking forward to it! Cheers.
 
All: Could we please get English: New Zealand dictionaries? I know there are issues with lack of demand :(.

For that matter, can the Setup Assistant please get an NZ option, as well as an "Other"? At the moment it's impossible to launch any Office app without "lying" in the Country field.
 
Dear MS,
You're too late to the party. Office 2008 was so crappy that I gave up on many of the apps over a year ago now. I have no time to migrate back to your mail program or drop Keynote for PowerPoint. Word '08 still crashes at the drop of a hat on three different Macs, and the absence of macro function in Excel was just plain idiotic. Try fixing your crappy software a little sooner and maybe you won't lose so many people.

buh-bye

2011 is a vast improvement to 2008.
Migrating to Outlook from Mail takes no time at all.
2011 even in beta phase feels very stable and has not crashed for me yet.
Finally Macro's are back.

So they seemingly have addressed your little list of woes.


One of my issues with Word in regard to photos has been its inability to handle images elegantly. With Pages you can move images around the page and the text will resituate accordingly, they don't 'lock' or refuse to stay at certain locations on the page like they have done in every single version of Word i've used.

My other issue with Word is that it becomes very unstable with large documents, especially documents with images. After about 75 pages or so Word just isn't very good.

Can you say anything about these issues? There are certain things I like a lot about Word, but I tend to use it as a secondary word processor. I basically make use of the features I like then move back Pages or Mellel.

I think one of the main differences between Pages and Word (correct me if I'm wrong) is the fact that Pages requires core acceleration (gpu) hence if your mac video card plays up you can't drag drop images into Pages (a lot of us found this out when our flashed 4870's were broken in 10.6.4), the benefit of pages being core accelerated is that the process of moving photos and it's handling of the same is snappy and responsive generally.

Pages is not without it's own issues when handling large amount of photos, especially if you are dropping in images with Alpha transparencies or have applied filters / instant alpha masking. Doing so has in my eerience often resulted in the file crashing or becoming utterly unresponsive until you delete the corrupted / memory zapping image.

Word doesn't use the same gpu acceleration for it's image handling, which is why it can feel a little less responsive (2011 certainly goes a considerable step further than it's fore bares in addressing that) but it has never corrupted an image file for me that Pages has done.

Now as in regards to very long documents. I generally work by new chapters, new file even when working with large amount of images. I tend then once my overall book is complete save everything as a PDF and compile the whole lot of chapters together into one file at this stage in Acrobat.

I personally would not trust any application with the task of handling 1 file with all my work & images inside it, out of fear of file corruption.

The maximum chatter size would be around 30-40 pages with 50 images, and for this I have not had crashing. But I do check file size, and remember when getting as big as that they are going to become hefty file sizes and will require a decent CPU and plenty of memory to give them breathing room.

I work on an Octo Mac Pro with 12GB of ram, and still get page outs when working on a number of big files like this.

So hence I would always recommend instead of pushing each application / file to it's limit with text and more over images, for your own convieniance & protection break them down to smaller chunks.

It's been funny to see the reactions to our video. Ryan, Amy, and Eric are all pretty pleased that everyone seems to think that they're barely old enough to hold down a full-time job. After all, name me someone in their mid-30s who doesn't take it as a compliment when they get carded for their cocktails. Maybe we should do a cross-promotion with Oil of Olay. ;)
.

Lol, yeah I made a comment on facebook about how on earth you get any work done with so many 'beautiful people' in one place :D

If you could send me a Microsoft certified face pack or two it would be appreciated. I swear to god I found my first wrinkle the other day..... It turns out I was just bent over the wrong way :eek:

Loving my experience with the beta and thanks for the opportunity.
 
I like some of hte users here who refuse to ever give MS credit ever haha.

Anyway someone complained about the ribbon taking up space....I don't hve Office Mac but PC Office 2011 beta you can minimize the ribbon with one click.

Better than minimise would be the option to completely hide the rectangular buttons. Can you do this in Office2011? The pill button is there - why not use it? If you have a favourite ribbon section you could keep that open but hide the whole lot with the pill.

Even better would be the option to have all the ribbon gubbins in a palette next to my page, as I have one of those newfangled landscape displays. This way I could access the ribbon features without constantly sacrificing vertical screen space. Gotta keep hoping it will happen... (in the meantime Office2004 does exactly this, albeit very slowly and crashily).
 
Better than minimise would be the option to completely hide the rectangular buttons. Can you do this in Office2011?

You can completely hide the Ribbon.

Even better would be the option to have all the ribbon gubbins in a palette next to my page, as I have one of those newfangled landscape displays. This way I could access the ribbon features without constantly sacrificing vertical screen space.

We found that moving features off to the side resulted in people not being able to find what they're looking for. When you're working on a document, you're looking at your content. You're not looking over to the side.

I wrote a long blog post about the Ribbon, which talks about this topic and many others: Why is Office:Mac getting the Ribbon?

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
That's interesting; I always found the Formatting Palette to be one of the great strengths of Office:Mac, especially running on a laptop with screen size concerns. I also thought it worked better than the toolbars and, for that matter, the ribbon.

However, I recently set up the Mac mini at my mother's, which had been running bootcamped XP, to run OS X only with Office:Mac 2008, and it seems she quickly got rid of the palette when, for instance, it got in the way of a 'maximised' window in Excel. She then also lost the toolbars, thinking that pill widget was the close box (Windows :rolleyes:).

With all that in mind, it may well be that the ribbon comes out on top - I can certainly see it happening. The comment about focusing on the content makes sense; I've also never really bought into the 'panel' concept that iWork runs with, which is another 'off-to-the-side' model.
 
You can completely hide the Ribbon.

We found that moving features off to the side resulted in people not being able to find what they're looking for. When you're working on a document, you're looking at your content. You're not looking over to the side.

Thanks for addressing my questions - your loyalty to these boards is as impressive as your thick skin :)

I accept that the ribbon may be easier to master for new users but I am also pleased there is some hope for those who are used to working in other ways. I still use Office 2004 even though I purchased 2008 because I can use the full height of my screen for my content, put my essential tools in a tiny custom tool box top right and make use of the excellent formatting palette underneath that. This makes working with the apps familiar to the other apps I use regularly like iWork and many other third party apps with 'inspector-like' interfaces.

2008 had new glitches and quirkyness (new warning dialogues a-plenty every time you open and save), no VBA, missing toolbar items, glitchy window positioning, and you could hide the Elements Gallery, but not the irritating glowing rectangular buttons from which it jerkily springs! So if you've resolved these issues in Office 2011, made it faster and kept the interface options I mentioned from 2004/8, then I'll probably buy it for Excel use (and the ability to open Word/PPT files).

Sorry, I've tried to do stuff in Word and PPT, but I can work so much faster, productively and enthusiastically in Pages and Keynote, as they follow system-wide conventions and every area feels modern and well designed. I tolerate Excel because there is nothing with the same features yet. There is a danger I'm going off on a rant here; your videos suggest the experience will be good for Mac users but how much modern OS X convention will continue to be ignored or be ditched because MS research showed that people behave in a certain way? I see you've kept menus, but do they contain the menu items Mac users expect to find, like 'Special characters', my system-wide spelling, 'Paste and match style', etc? Say you found that people drive better on one side of a car than the other, would you swap the driver side and just argue that your design is backed up by research?

Good luck with the launch and I hope Office 2011 is great.
 
Thanks for addressing my questions - your loyalty to these boards is as impressive as your thick skin :)

I was a member of the boards here before I joined Microsoft. :)

I accept that the ribbon may be easier to master for new users but I am also pleased there is some hope for those who are used to working in other ways.

I'm not sure where new users came into this discussion, but I don't think it was from me. Given that ~80% of Mac users also use Word, and people are using computers earlier and earlier in life, focusing on new users wouldn't be a recipe for success. There's kindergarteners, but the education market seems pretty well covered already. ;)

For the research that my team conducts, we use participants all across the spectrum. We do talk to users who you might regard as novices, but then we also talk to people who have been using the apps since they were first launched.

your videos suggest the experience will be good for Mac users but how much modern OS X convention will continue to be ignored or be ditched because MS research showed that people behave in a certain way?

It's our goal to be a good Mac citizen and to provide the best productivity experience on the platform. For the most part, that meshes up easily; other times, we have to make trade-offs. Spelling/grammar is a great example of that. While the OS does provide an acceptable dictionary built into the system, ours is significantly deeper. Imagine if you ran a spellcheck on a document in Word:Mac 2011 and everything came out fine, but then you ran the same document through a spellcheck in Word 2010 for Windows and it came up with errors. To maximise productivity and avoid cross-platform issues like that, we use our own.

Good luck with the launch and I hope Office 2011 is great.

Thanks! :D The final release and the trial version are coming, so I hope you'll give it a go.

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
The problem with the Ribbon is that it began life without being adjustable. It doesn't matter how many hours of testing or market research are done, not everybody uses all the same commands. The pic is part of the custom Excel ribbon tab I made for me. Some of this is normal, some are special buttons. A lot of it is also on the standard Home tab, but a lot isn't, either. Did similar for Word and Outlook, although Outlook was really close to perfect.

I realize that not everyone would change the menus/toolbars back before the ribbon, either, but I certainly always did and advised/helped other people to do so. Having no customization leveled the playing field, and made everyone into hunt-n-peck sheep trying to get things done.
 

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