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
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
Loving my experience with the beta and thanks for the opportunity.
