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goodcow

macrumors 6502a
Aug 4, 2007
749
1,001
I don't know what the deal is on your particular machine that it runs on or someone's that you know it runs on, but MS Word:Mac bounces open in 7 seconds on my MB Pro.

I look forward to this release.

That's 6 seconds too long.

Office on Windows launches instantly.

The performance on Mac Office is garbage.
 

Yvan256

macrumors 603
Jul 5, 2004
5,081
998
Canada
I used Pages '08 to make that fake datasheet, and the first thing someone asked was "wow, what did you use to make that PDF?"

I told him I used Apple's Pages '08 and that it only took about 5 minutes including the diagram at the bottom of the page, then printed directly to PDF. He was impressed, for some reason.

People who never tried anything but Microsoft software just can't see how 1980-esque other programs can be.

Another example is PCB design software. I've used about half a dozen programs on Windows and then tried Osmond Quartz on Mac OS X. It's night and day. I feel like I'm designing boards with Microsoft Paint when I'm on Windows.
 

cmaier

Suspended
Jul 25, 2007
25,405
33,471
California
1) I am very much looking forward to the return of VBA.
2) I hope that Word isn't as crashy and unstable as in the current version
3) don't care about outlook.
 

tom5304

macrumors regular
May 7, 2005
211
110
Hell folks!

you guys complain more than a girl on the period!!!

Office is the best out there? don't know, but indeed, iWork sucks for ppl who work with office and vice versa, I think its all a matter of taste / need....

People who use crude sexual slurs on an open forum shouldn't really be commenting on matters of taste. :(
 

Westside guy

macrumors 603
Oct 15, 2003
6,341
4,160
The soggy side of the Pacific NW
I'd purchased 2007, but the slow load times drove me so nuts that I decided to try going Office-free... and I haven't missed it at all (for 2 years? 3?).

I briefly loaded reinstalled it once because (I thought) Keynote was not always doing the best job translating one or two Powerpoint files - but when I loaded those "problem" presentations into the Mac version of Powerpoint, the slides displayed the same apparent problems. So, I uninstalled it and I've been happily chugging along with iWork.

None of the documents I see at work use macros, so that's not an issue for me. On Windows I tend to disable that feature anyway for security reasons.
 

bigjnyc

macrumors 604
Apr 10, 2008
7,856
6,769
I agree. Actually I like ribbons, on the PC. They have just been poorly implemented on the Mac. The same is true of the mess of apps.

Why would you resort to his Office 07/11 crap? Apple has plenty of options that do the same stuff. I haven't run across anything that iWork, iLife or Apple core apps couldn't do.

You must not be much of an Excel/Numbers user... This is where office absolutely blows iWork away. If you are an intensive Excel user there is no way you can replace it with numbers.
 

farmboy

macrumors 65816
Nov 26, 2003
1,296
478
Minnesota
Microsoft software has been running on Macs since the very first Mac was shipped in 1984. There's nothing weird about that. Maybe you're just too young to know that Microsoft's application suite was the software that made the Mac a usable alternative to DOS boxes. If it wasn't for Microsoft's Mac support, the Mac would have never been a success.

Actually, in 1984 if it wasn't for Mac and it's GUI, Bill Gates wouldn't have had a chance for his Excel spreadsheet; Lotus and VisiCalc would still be kings. Chicken><Egg.
 

Bruticus

macrumors newbie
Apr 23, 2010
4
0
Sydney, Australia
Office 2011

Outlook is NOT Entourage, by any stretch. Just wait till you get your hands on it.

Which is a segueway into my next point: if you are using this as an official beta tester, remember you do have an NDA that was agreed to.
 

JavierP

macrumors regular
Mar 17, 2008
133
0
Hint to Microsoft

1) Fire all your mac UI developers
2) Buy this guys http://www.projectwizards.net/en/merlin/
3) Make them program all the UI stuff for Word,Excel,etc.
4) While waiting for them to finish, fix the damn bugs in Office 2008
5) Rename Merlin to MS Project
6) Release a decent Mac Office 2014
 

DogHouseDub

macrumors 6502a
Sep 19, 2007
612
1,384
SF
That's 6 seconds too long.

Office on Windows launches instantly.

The performance on Mac Office is garbage.

But isn't that because Office in Windows never really closes? It's always there, running in the background chewing up resources.

To mimic that speed on the Mac side, leave the apps running but hidden.
 

Anuba

macrumors 68040
Feb 9, 2005
3,790
393
I like the ribbons, I like pretty much the whole design except the hideous toolbar on the top left, looks like someone puked out random icons and ran away.

And can someone for the love of god come up with a universal symbol for "Save" that isn't a floppy disk? There are teens now who've never even seen one, it's like having a picture of a crank on the car ignition key.
 

SiPat

macrumors regular
Jun 20, 2009
195
0
Outlook crashed halfway through importing a WinPC Outlook .pst file, and every time I re-try to import, Outlook notifies me that it could not start the import because I stopped it!!
 

LagunaSol

macrumors 601
Apr 3, 2003
4,798
0
If you are remotely serious about spreadsheets in Excel you are aware that Numbers (or OpenOffice/Lotus/etc.) cannot hold a stick to Excel (except the steaming pile that is 2008).

You must not be much of an Excel/Numbers user... This is where office absolutely blows iWork away. If you are an intensive Excel user there is no way you can replace it with numbers.

Fortunately spreadsheets are not an integral part of my job or life. I consider myself lucky indeed in that regard.

The performance on Mac Office is garbage.

Broken by design? One has to wonder. Years of "sucks worse (and less functional) on a Mac than on Windows" can't be mere coincidence...
 

Anuba

macrumors 68040
Feb 9, 2005
3,790
393
That's 6 seconds too long.

Office on Windows launches instantly.

The performance on Mac Office is garbage.
That's got nothing to do with Office on Windows being snappy, it's the result of SuperFetch on Windows 7. Your Win7 machine monitors which applications you start up often and builds up a cache that's loaded into RAM on startup. Since stuff like IE and Office apps are loaded very often, those are usually the first to be picked up by SuperFetch.

Do a fresh install of Win7 and a fresh install of Office and time the first launch, not very fast at all.

Since OS X has no technology resembling SuperFetch, apps load much slower, on the other hand OS X doesn't hog your hard drive for 3 minutes after bootup, like Vista and Win7 do when they're preloading the applications that you're likely, though not necessarily, going to launch.
 

LagunaSol

macrumors 601
Apr 3, 2003
4,798
0
And can someone for the love of god come up with a universal symbol for "Save" that isn't a floppy disk? There are teens now who've never even seen one, it's like having a picture of a crank on the car ignition key.

LOL! :D

Outlook crashed halfway through importing a WinPC Outlook .pst file, and every time I re-try to import, Outlook notifies me that it could not start the import because I stopped it!!

Sounds like they've implemented the "Unhelpful error message" nature of Windows in the Mac version of their products.
 

baryon

macrumors 68040
Oct 3, 2009
3,879
2,937
For me, iWork is perfect for what I want, and I like the way it stays simple. Office allows for much more complex editing to be done but I don't really need that. The only thing I hate with Pages is that when you insert and image and make it "inline" and not "floating" so that it moves with your text, it becomes completely buggy, unpredictable and total nonsense. If anyone has tried placing images in a Pages, they know what I mean. Maybe I'll give Office a try just for that reason.
 

MacMosher

macrumors 6502
Jan 5, 2006
277
0
Canada
WOW, just wow, MS brings all the UI garbage from the PC to the Mac.

I hate the ribbons, just hate them. Their toolbars on steroids, morphing into all sorts of different shapes and sizes. They make for nice screenshots but are a pain to use. They really thing that was better than menus?

And they still haven't learned that that combining Mail, calendar and Task apps together is just a mess (let them talk to each other, but reside as separate apps).

Looking back, Office 2004 was probably the best version of Office, on any platform, period.

Amen.

I still run office 2004.

Personally the only thing of any value that microsoft produces for me is excel.

Outlook is just way to messy for me to even think about trying to use all its functions.

Word is the biggest piece of ***** ever... always has been and as far as Im concerned, I don't care how many ribbons or bows they attach to it, it will still be terrible. Formating in word has got to be the least intuitive thing ever. I use LaTeX because it does what I tell it to do, not the other way around... plus it actually makes documents that look presentable.

Anyway, enough with that rant. Excel 2004 >> Excel 2008
 

Anuba

macrumors 68040
Feb 9, 2005
3,790
393
Broken by design? One has to wonder. Years of "sucks worse (and less functional) on a Mac than on Windows" can't be mere coincidence...
It has more to do with lukewarm interest than malice. Apple's apps for Windows aren't exactly optimized either. I've often had sneaking suspicions that they're trying to make Windows look bad. Yeah yeah, you'll probably say that Windows looks bad on its own, but really... it's something I've noticed ever since I ran QuickTime on Win98 and Win2K in the 90's. QT could crash Windows in destructive ways that no other app from no other company (or amateur/hobbyist programmer) could. It's as if Apple had been researching ways to bring down Windows and built QT around it. But... I'm going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt too and suggest that it has to do the same kind of lukewarm interest that makes MS continue to do a less-than-stellar job with Mac versions of their products.
 

mabaker

macrumors 65816
Jan 19, 2008
1,209
566
Why all the bitching about the ribbon UI? You can choose the old style! If it were Apple they would have scraped the toolbox LONG ago but at least the guys of MS give us an option. Isn’t that pretty? I think it is. Give them some credit.

Fans of the toolbox format, however, should note that the option to use it still exists.

Fine by me.

Now let’s hope it opens in less than 50 bounces.
 

tigress666

macrumors 68040
Apr 14, 2010
3,288
17
Washington State
Heh, I dunno. I can't put out too educated an opinion as I only have Office 2004 but my computer came with Pages/Numbers (Whatever version was available in 2007) as I bought it slightly used off of some one and she had included that with the computer.

I tried using Pages for a while, it was decent. Had nice features. And I'll admit Word annoys me. And yet eventually got Word and still preferred it over Pages (and I can't even quantify why, Pages seemed to miss some stuff) despite it annoying me (like insisting on formatting my stuff one way even when I tell it not to). Word is buggy but it seems to have either features/format I prefer (it's been a while since I touched Pages so I can't remember what it was about Word I liked better enough to deal with its bugginess).

Though after installing 10.6 Word got even buggier (anytime I switch to it the window I"m working on does not come to the forefront, any other open windows from any other program stay in front and I have to actually hit the title bar of the window to get it to the front). And it's slow on my computer (though I suspect some of that is my computer's problem as i think it really could use a wipe out and a reinstall of OSX).

I remember way back in the day when apple's word processor was called ClarisWorks. I did actually prefer ClarisWorks to the Word of the time (though Clarisworks spreadsheet was awful compared to Excel).

And yeah, I"m sorry, numbers does not compare to Excel. Excel I will actually give Kudos to MS for and I'm not a huge MS fan (save for Excel and their Flight Simulator).

In general I find I like Apple's OS and their computers (mainly cause they run the OS and they do think very ergonomically when it comes to laptops) but I don't tend to use much of their software (I also prefer Firefox over Safari mainly cause of add ons I can get and features in general though Safari runs a lot smoother on my machine). I find in general the software tends to miss out on features I want (like it is like the light versions of the software I would use).
 

LagunaSol

macrumors 601
Apr 3, 2003
4,798
0
Keynote kicks the crap out of PowerPoint.

Pages lacks some Word functionality, but bests it in other areas. It's probably a better choice for most users.

Numbers lags behind Excel and needs some real improvement.

To me the biggest downside of iWork vs. Office is the lack of any kind of integrated media collection. Sure, 90% of the stuff in the Microsoft image/clipart collection sucks, but at least there's something there. With Apple you get nothing (except for the handful of images that come with the templates).

And how many typical users want to go to iStockphoto and pay for an image (or several) to use in their neighborhood flyer?

Big, big disadvantage.
 
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