Microsoft Office Update, and Visual Basic for Applications to Return

[iPoodOverZune]

Coincidentally, I uninstalled Office 2008 last night. I had both 2004 and 2008 on my Macbook, and I didn't mind 2008 too much as it didn't cause my fans to go into jet engine mode. It is full of bugs however (spaces anyone?), and MOST importantly (for me) it doesn't work with Endnote (bibliography software). It also stopped my copy of Word 2004 working with Endnote too. It had to go. I use iWork most of the time now, and use Word 2004 to insert references.

I think when it is finished it'll be a good suite (as others have said excel>numbers), but until it is fixed, no thanks...

If you insert references at later stage, then try Papers from mekentosj people. Papers is an excellent or shall I say gold standard app. It like itunes for pdf. Now they have implemented (although not direct as endnote) inserting references. It still uses endnote to create library but it does pretty much you do right now with the added benefit of whole pdf library in one place. Endnote sucks when it comes to reading through articles.

 

[realgenius]

Also notable is that Microsoft has announced that they will be bringing back Visual Basic for Applications in the next version of Mac Office:

...the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms. The Mac BU is always working to meet customers' needs and already is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac.

Does it say VBA will be returning?

Doesn't it just say that some people use VBA and that Microsoft works hard to please customers? It seems to be missing something like "...the next version of Office for Mac, which will include VBA-language support."

 

[brian6504]

Well you are welcome to sit around and do name calling all you want (example, Fanboy comments) (you don't look like prince doing that BTW) but the truth of the matter is Microsoft gives the Mac community very good reasons to hate them.

Firstly they come out with Office 2008 and for most people who don't read these forums they just go into the Apple store and buy MS Office thinking it's as good or better than the last. They have no idea MS screwed them on the VBA thing. Once they get home and open it and find out later they are stuck with it.

MS Office 2008 is very slow to load (especially against the Windows version) despite the claims by MS it's designed for the Intel Macs.
Now MS makes an announcement that they are bringing VBA back to Mac Office and unfortunately not until the next version???
Hmm, that means you will have to buy another copy of Office and it won't be available until 2012.
This is a ploy to get force the Intel Mac community to buy the Windows version, that was Microsoft's plan all along.
Tell me why the Mac community doesn't have a reason to hate Microsoft.

There nothing blind about the Mac communities reaction and BTW as far as Vista is concerned, you need to visit more Windows forums, they will tell you how much Vista sucks, you don't need Mac users for that.

Microsoft was been very open about the missing the VBA support almost since they decided they had to cut the feature. It's not something they took lightly. If you (as in one) knows anything about software development it wouldn't be hard to see why. Not only did Microsoft have to move their entire build system to Xcode from Code Warrior (which is no small feat), they had to update all their code to compile with gcc. After that they had to pour over the code base to account for subtle difference on the x86 and ppc.

That's a lot of work. Then consider the fact that the VBA code was largely written in PPC assembly. There is no conversion to x86 assembly, so they have to essentially rewrite the entire VBA compiler for the x86, ignoring the fact they're moving from CFM to Mach-O. The complexity of this is enormous and no firm could pull this off in the way everyone expected.

And Office 2008 is actually built for Intel Macs. It does actually contain x86 binaries. Stop all the conspiracy theories and learn a little bit about software and sympathize with the huge burden placed on Microsoft's Mac developers.

 

[dgdosen]

I dont get it, both MR and Macworld are reporting that the SP1 update is now available via MS's site or SU but i've been checking both mediums for the last 5 hrs and still cant find the update.

Where is it?

I'd bet they're rolling it out slowly and only making it visible to certain users or serial numbers. Either that or they "RTM'd" it and haven't released it yet. I'm sure it will be here soon enough. I don't think it will change Office very much.

I sure wish they'd bring One Note to the mac side....

 

[iPoodOverZune]

"Reliability is improved for pictures that used to display a QuickTime-related error message.
This update fixes an issue that causes some pictures to display the following error messages:
• QuickTime™ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
• QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture.
This issue might occur when you open or copy pictures from Office documents that were created in an earlier version of Office for Mac or of a Windows-based version of Office. "

This was one major headache for me in terms of windows compatibility as all my research collaborators use windows. It sucked whenever I would send them a powerpoint and then the figures would be blank with those errors. Hopefully, that scenario is improved now.

 

[Eraserhead]

^^ Thats been a bug since at least 1995, I'm impressed they've fixed it.

 

[mogrefy]

Not fixed. Hopefully with 10.5.3, since apparently there are other apps affected as well.

Please say it is so, I'm so sick and tired of having Office Applications getting stuck in the background or bouncing out of their "assigned space"!!!!

 

[xUKHCx]

• QuickTime™ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
• QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture..

^^ Thats been a bug since at least 1995, I'm impressed they've fixed it.

It was a simple enough problem to work around though rather than draggin/dropping or copy/pasting you choose Insert instead. Once I learned that I never had the problem ever again.

 

[onestream]

Vba

Hah, VBA was predicted to return in the next Office for Mac version by the guys over at microsoftrumors.com in early April...

 

[NAG]

Neat, Excel isn't completely worthless for scientific graphing anymore.

 

[jacg]

Microsoft was been very open about the missing the VBA support almost since they decided they had to cut the feature. It's not something they took lightly. If you (as in one) knows anything about software development it wouldn't be hard to see why. Not only did Microsoft have to move their entire build system to Xcode from Code Warrior (which is no small feat), they had to update all their code to compile with gcc. After that they had to pour over the code base to account for subtle difference on the x86 and ppc.

That's a lot of work. Then consider the fact that the VBA code was largely written in PPC assembly. There is no conversion to x86 assembly, so they have to essentially rewrite the entire VBA compiler for the x86, ignoring the fact they're moving from CFM to Mach-O. The complexity of this is enormous and no firm could pull this off in the way everyone expected.

And Office 2008 is actually built for Intel Macs. It does actually contain x86 binaries. Stop all the conspiracy theories and learn a little bit about software and sympathize with the huge burden placed on Microsoft's Mac developers.

Why does it feel like the same ancient software with an attempted gloss on top? It does so many common things in such a clunky way compared to regular OS X software, and with 2008 the interface just gets worse. Can we get rid of the irritating buttons below the menubar yet? (why would you copy OS X's most ineffective interface element - the dashboard widget bar?)

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

really?

I would think 2008 would be one of their worse selling ever.

I mean, Pages, Keynote, iChat, and Mail easily beat their Office counterparts and come at a fraction of the price.

And Numbers isn't too bad. As far as ease of use and how good it looks... Numbers wins. Unfortunately, it is missing numerous features. (Line of best fit ... multipart graphs... just to name the ones I've repetitively found disappointing to find absent... so I'm still being force to use Excel 2004 from time to time. Hopefully Numbers 2 will be much better.)

 

[fabian9]

Equation editor bug gone?

I really hope this updates fixes the microsoft equation editor bug which leaves equations horribly pixelated when saving a word document in the new docx file format... it's really annoying!

Also I hope I won't get an error message telling me that I've run out of disk space when I always had 70+GB available on my hard drive. It then wouldn't let me save my work anymore! lol because that was also very, very annoying!

Seriously I've had sooo many issues with office '08 since it's come out. I used to like it but then I had to do my final year project on it and it turned out to be a nightmare. really do hope it's more than a good beta now..........

Fabian

 

[Eraserhead]

It was a simple enough problem to work around though rather than draggin/dropping or copy/pasting you choose Insert instead. Once I learned that I never had the problem ever again.

True, but you shouldn't have to use that work-around .

 

[twoodcc]

sounds nice. i'll go download this now

 

[mstur]

You dont need Leopard !

Keep the updates coming - Office 2008 ought to be more optimized for Leopard than it is.
Would like to see snappier performance overall.

What you need is pure and raw RAM !!
I use Office 2008 on my iMac (4 GB RAM) and my Mac Pro (8 GB RAM) just with 10.4.11, and it screams !

Powerpoint was never that fast, reliable, intuitive, and: STABLE !!

I also have Office 2008 on my Macbook Air (2 GB, SSD), and it is the first Office version I almost never see the beachball...

 

[CptnJustc]

I really hope this updates fixes the microsoft equation editor bug which leaves equations horribly pixelated when saving a word document in the new docx file format... it's really annoying!

Aye, it does seem to fix this. Annoying when I noticed this was happening on reload toward the tail end of a 30-page document filled with equations.

Also I hope I won't get an error message telling me that I've run out of disk space when I always had 70+GB available on my hard drive. It then wouldn't let me save my work anymore! lol because that was also very, very annoying!

I've run into this one, too. When this error hit, it also converted my equations into pictures rather than equations, making them uneditable and trashing my document. Hasn't happened since that once, though, despite having occasionally less disk space. Bizarre.

So far, I haven't run into any of the Expose problems since the update. At least those weren't fatal errors, but they were hugely annoying.

 

[boobooq88]

I have one thing to say...

NeoOffice

Or OpenOffice 3 cuz it has the Aqua interface now

 

[spinko]

"the most compatible product.."

what is MSO-08 compatible with ? .. I had to buy this sh** because it supports dotx which is used on the PC platform.. that's why.. definitely not because it is the most compatible version... it's not even officially compatible with all my fonts... and besides it will certainly introduce another flux of incompatibilities over the months and years to come..

Plus the fact that Powerpoint is generating a huge load of mediocre presentations.. polluting the visual sphere with the most horrendous slide shows and lowering peoples visual quality threshold in the process.. you could add Word to this too. At least Apple makes an effort in this respect.

The only decent program in this suite is Excel..


thank's M$

 

[Matthew Yohe]

It looks like Entourage is silently rebuilding the spotlight database for my Entourage database... Microsoft's database daemon and mds are trading off in hogging the CPU and quick large disk writes.

 

[dr_lha]

really?

I would think 2008 would be one of their worse selling ever.

I mean, Pages, Keynote, iChat, and Mail easily beat their Office counterparts and come at a fraction of the price.

And Numbers isn't too bad. As far as ease of use and how good it looks... Numbers wins. Unfortunately, it is missing numerous features. (Line of best fit ... multipart graphs... just to name the ones I've repetitively found disappointing to find absent... so I'm still being force to use Excel 2004 from time to time. Hopefully Numbers 2 will be much better.)

I'll agree, Keynote beats Powerpoint, but Pages will never Beat Word all the time that publishers and journals expect you to submit Word documents based on their templates. Pages just isn't compatible with Word enough yet.

Numbers has a long way to go before it gets to Excel's level, but it is a fun app to use for non-work stuff, I'll admit.

 

[c073186]

Is this update available yet or not? Some people say they've installed it but I cannot find where to download it and software update says there are no new updates available. This is SP1 for Office '08, right?

 

[dr_lha]

So far, I haven't run into any of the Expose problems since the update. At least those weren't fatal errors, but they were hugely annoying.

Right now I have an SP1 Excel window stuck below everything else, and another which keeps changes with Space its on as I switch. Its safe to say that SP1 did not fix the Expose issue, but hopefully 10.5.3 will.

 

[jasoncps]

Update broke Office 2008

After updating to SP1, my Office 2008 never starts.

The Office assistant asking me to join the Customer Experience program just keeps coming up and never goes away. None of my Office apps ever launch!! Thanks Microsoft for yet another garbage product for the Mac.

Apple please make an Office alternative so I never have to run any garbage Microsoft software again.

By the way anyone know how to fix this problem without erasing and reinstalling?

 

[tomcattmatt]

I really hope they fixed some of the bugs in Word 08'. I was considering going back to 04' before the SP1. Has anyone tested it out to see if it works any better?