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Microsoft Office Update, and Visual Basic for Applications to Return

At the weekend I ended up with a knackered partition on my 2.33 macbook pro. So I rebuilt the whole thing with a fresh install of Leopard. I previously did an upgrade from Tiger on it.

I have always been a bit annoyed by the speed of Office 2008, and the bugs! I did notice a small improvement once I'd done a clean install of the OS. I use Office 2008 everyday day in day out. The difference was enough for me to blat my 24" imac and do a reinstall on that too, as again I just did an upgrade from Tiger (not an erase and install). Same sort of improvement in speed.

However, with this update (SP1) the whole experience is different in my opinion, load times have easily halved from cold, and warm loads are basically instant now. Warm starts are all that matter too, as I never reboot my computers...because you rarely have to. Reboots are for those other people that use some other OS.

I personally feel Office is great, windows or mac version. Yes it has its oddities and plain damn idiotic ways of doing things...but if you use it enough you learn to ignore and get round them. I've tried Neo Office (been a tester) tried the new Open Office etc...to be honest if I was to use a non-ms product I would just shell out for Apples version...as these (while free and very good) just dont cut it in the world of work - I've tried and have wasted time before - and time is money. At least with Word your guaranteed if you have a problem someone will be able to help and 5min there and another 10min there all add up.

Just get that VBA support in there so I can run my accountancy spreadsheet I spent weeks perfecting for my business (when I use to use Windoze)! As for Office 2004 - good riddance!
 
dr_lha said:
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.
Click to expand...

Most I've seen want pdfs, not word.
 
Works fine for me

After installing.... working just fine for me.
I would use iWork 08, however most people use Office at my school and my work. Bummer.:p
 
The insertion point still lags when I type. Anyone else experiencing the same thing with WORD?
 
jasonklee said:
The insertion point still lags when I type. Anyone else experiencing the same thing with WORD?
Click to expand...

Same here, and spell check seems to lag more with 12.1.0 than the previous version. AND I too, had the damn endless not starting up, asking about user experience participation, then starting up the updater app. What crap, mine is also a legal version and I had to delete those two files a person posted as a solution and reenter my product id. How stupid. And they wonder why people are reluctant to buy their crap. That is a very obvious error that should have never made it out of the door.
 
I have had nothing but a great experience with Office 2008. I'm sorry to see so many others haven't.
 
Heil68 said:
I have had nothing but a great experience with Office 2008. I'm sorry to see so many others haven't.
Click to expand...

Me too! I do not know why people have had a bad time, although most people have problems with the windows version too....

I think its a great word processor.
 
caspartheghost said:
  • Shut down any open Office apps.
  • Run a Spotlight search for fontcachetool
  • Open the search. Make a note of the path to where it is in case you decide to move it back.
  • Move FontCacheTool into a folder somewhere else (maybe in Utilities?) called 'Moved from Office'.
  • Restart an Office 2008 app.
  • Check out the speed increase.

You might lose WYSIWYG font menus, if I remember right, but now Word boots about 3x faster.
Click to expand...

Instead of doing that, you can just turn off WYSIWYG menus in Preferences.
 
after updating to SP1, I have a major problem after closing any window in word. The entire program will crash and close and I will be prompted with this:
word.png


anyone else experiencing the same problem or have a solution?
 
-hh said:
To a large degree, I see this as 'Vaporware' annoucement from the Microsoft camp.

They know that there's a lot of Mac adoption on the consumer side ... and sales of Office 2008 indicates a lot of White Collar types that can influence the adoption of Macs into the Enterprise.

To prevent more wholesale defections away from Office into the different options (NeoOffice, iWork, etc), all MS had to do was to deliver a message that stopped these potential "lost sales" from being motivated to actively go out to look for alternatives.

Thus, their promise is to "Bring Back" VBA gives their discontent consumers a warm fuzzy that they don't need to bother look for alternatives, but merely sit back (fat dumb happy) and wait for MS to deliver...eventually.

...

Update that you pay for, you mean.

The clincher here is that this isn't being promised as a FREE upgrade to existing (eg, "screwed") Office 2008 customers, but as something that will come about ... um ... "eventually" in a MS Office product whose name (2010? 2012?) and shipping date haven't been even announced.

Gosh, its not like we've ever seen this sort of pattern ever before!

...

And they've had utterly no warning whatsoever for years, just like Adobe, right?

I might buy it...some...but that still doesn't reconcile with their business decision to not provide this as a free upgrade to existing 2008 buyers.

Overall, what I suspect is a tad more likely is that MS saw that a lot of people bought 2004 and got 2008 for $20. Personally, I routinely "skip upgrade" in this fashion on Microsoft products.

...

I'm a bit puzzled here: if a complete rewrite was necessary, then why would they repeat the mistake by writing in assembler again? Why not do the rewrite in a higher-level language so that the original code (at least) is hardware-insensitive portable?

And it still doesn't wash with the idea of "making good" to existing Office 2008 customers. It doesn't matter if the project takes another year or another 3 years: MS could - - if they wanted to - - alternatively announced that VBA will be a free upgrade to Office 2008. Given that the MBU is reportedly tehir most profitable division, its hard to rationalize soaking your good custoemrs while giving away cute freebies in the White Elephant-of-a-Zune division. Or even charging nothing for XP rollbacks on Vista purchases.

My overall assessment = "thumbs down", for this announcement simply illustrates that MS has the intellectual capacity of the southern end of a north-bound horse.

-hh
Click to expand...
Huh - I can't say I disagree on any point here. I really wish I could. I wish that VBA returns in Office 2008 SP2. I really wish Office 2008 wasn't such bloatware, too, because in another year all of my users at work are going to start getting a steady supply of docx files emailed to them and M$ is intentionally dragging on the reader for Office 2004 users to bolster sales of Office 2008. I really hope that the licenses we just bought for Office 2008 are the last M$ licenses we have to purchase and that OpenOffice/NeoOffice become viable alternatives as they develop over the next few years.

But yeah, when you lay it out like that, it will be a paid upgrade and not ready until 2010 at the very least. I'm so sick of M$ - that they've dominated the computer world for so long riding the same one-trick ponies really galls me.

Well, there's my bowl of pessimism and glass of despair for today.
 
jmmo20 said:
my copy of Office 2008 is very legal, thank you very much.
Still... SP1 rendered my LEGAL office copy totally unusable for the reason mentioned above.

Had to recover 12.0.1 from time machine.

Way to go Microsoft. Every time you do anything you cover yourself with glory (.. or ****.. that's what the spanish saying is :D)
Click to expand...

If you revert back to the previous Office 08, then run the MS updater again, the SP1 update appears - running it from there (versus an external) link solved the problem for me.

jasonklee said:
The insertion point still lags when I type. Anyone else experiencing the same thing with WORD?
Click to expand...

Ditto.
 
caspartheghost said:
  • Shut down any open Office apps.
  • Run a Spotlight search for fontcachetool
  • Open the search. Make a note of the path to where it is in case you decide to move it back.
  • Move FontCacheTool into a folder somewhere else (maybe in Utilities?) called 'Moved from Office'.
  • Restart an Office 2008 app.
  • Check out the speed increase.

You might lose WYSIWYG font menus, if I remember right, but now Word boots about 3x faster.
Click to expand...

Anyone try this yet???? Is this true???? How much faster is it now????
 
Went on the page. Took longer than needed to figure out where is the download.

How does MS waste all that screen real estate?

Why is the update for the latest product in a low priority area BELOW the visible part of browser on a 1680x1050 screen? Typical MS design and organization.... Jeez...
 
baleensavage said:
Putting visual basic back in is a very good move. I never could figure out why they removed it. ...
Click to expand...
Maybe because it doubles the size and the complexity of an already enormous buggy product and only a tiny fraction of users actually need or want it? (just a wild guess) ;)

Seriously, I'm not trying to be mean, but as "important" VB support is to cross-platform office set-ups, the number of Mac users that implement or need to use VB *anything* is incredibly tiny overall.

On the plus side, this update seems to make Office actually work passably on my machine. Up until now I had to wait five or six seconds for anything to happen after I clicked the button.

So, after five years of development and a massive update pack, Office has finally struggled up to the "mediocre" level.

Wow. :eek:
 
Heil68 said:
I have had nothing but a great experience with Office 2008. I'm sorry to see so many others haven't.
Click to expand...

Of course they haven't. It's made by Microsoft.
It's funny how MS listening to customer feed back to reinstate previous features is bad, but Apple listening to customer feedback (list view on stacks and opaque menubar) is why they're awesome.
*sigh*
 
macornomac said:
Anyone try this yet???? Is this true???? How much faster is it now????
Click to expand...

It went from 14 to 2 bounces and the startup window was only up for 3 seconds instead of 15.

dvince2 said:
Of course they haven't. It's made by Microsoft.
It's funny how MS listening to customer feed back to reinstate previous features is bad, but Apple listening to customer feedback (list view on stacks and opaque menubar) is why they're awesome.
*sigh*
Click to expand...

I think you're misunderstanding. It was implied that VBA is coming in a pay for office update, unlike the changes to the menu bar and stacks in 10.5.2. If they're going to give us VBA in SP2 or SP3 or whatever then sure, thats nice. If they make us buy the update then that isn't so nice.
 
i am very pleased with office 08. iworks 08 and open office did not do what i needed, so i had to purchase office. i will say this is the only ms product i use though. :D
 
SP1 still fails with Spaces and window highlight looks weird with Expose. Are they not aware that us Mac users actually USE these features?
 
I have installed both Office 2008 SP1 and Messenger 7, both are running fine and feeling better than the previous versions. However for some reason my Microsoft Autoupdate didn't pick up either of them and I didn't know about either update until I checked macrumors today
 
This must be some kind of joke... SP1 hasn't addressed the expose issues at all and now since installing SP1 my MacBook runs at 100% fan/CPU. Activity Monitor can't even identify the problem, just tells me both processors are maxed out - have to close all m$ apps and put the little black laptop to sleep. Good job microsoft for flips sake.

They have at least addressed some of the scrolling and windowing issues, but when the install takes 500MBs i expect more for my hard drive space. On top of that the apps are still really sluggish...

It's just embarrassing really...
 
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