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Office 2008 bugs/features/annoyances

G

Glenny2lappies

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 29, 2006
582
421
Brighton, UK
Having a first play with Office 2008.

Thought that as we know people from the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft read these forums, we'd let them know what we -- their customers -- think.

First impressions: slow to start, seems a bit quicker when it's running. Some updated features, but not that many. Odd icons that seem less 'classy' than Office 2004.

Entourage
  • Updated interface. Seems like a lot of changes were for change's sake, e.g. the tree icons are a lot brighter and more complex. In fact all of the icons are 'busy' compared with Office 2004. Looks like Microsoft sacked Mr Subtle and went for Mr Garish's colourful icons which he got as a job lot from a $5 all you can eat icon site. It's the antithesis of the Mac's subtle icons -- but then that's why we eschew Windows for the much quieter world of the Mac.
  • When editing a message, <cmd><backspace> still deletes the whole message without saving it in the drafts. It should just delete the word to the left of the cursor. PITA.
  • Having some problems with rules not firing (these were imported from Entourage 2004)
  • Default 'reply' and 'new' message edit fonts are huge and needed to be reduced by 4 points (12-->8)
  • Once it's loaded, Entourage seems a little faster in that messages in the preview pane load a bit quicker.
  • Useful to have the diary visible in the inbox.

Powerpoint
  • Nice to have the slide preview column as per Office 97 (2004 only had a text preview)
  • Some issues with scrolling; the slide doesn't always change page but scrolls up the window.
  • Opening a file.PPS (presentation) in Entourage seems to open full PowerPoint which leaves some toolbar/box detritus on the screen when the presentation's finished; and opening PowerPoint is a lot slower than just opening the viewer.
  • Opening a bunch of presentations resulted in them all individually dinging a "error" telling me that they contain VBA and do I want to clear the VBA or not. Like I give a damn; Office 2008 can't do VBA, and if I save the file without VBA macros, subsequent people opening the presentation using Windows & Office 2003 may want to see/use the macros. Hopefully there's a setting to stop asking stupid questions.

Not yet played with Excel & Word. Oh joy. Such pleasures to look forwards to.

Has anyone else noticed anything good/bad/indifferent about Office 2008 whilst they've used it?
 
I installed it, took about half an hour until Word crashed and I lost 10 minutes of an essay. I switched back to NeoOffice and I won't go back to Word unless I really need to.
 
Evader said:
I installed it, took about half an hour until Word crashed and I lost 10 minutes of an essay. I switched back to NeoOffice and I won't go back to Word unless I really need to.
Click to expand...

That's really, really bad luck! By default, Word is set to auto-recover every 10 minutes, so you must have just missed the auto-recover by seconds!
 
Evader said:
I installed it, took about half an hour until Word crashed and I lost 10 minutes of an essay. I switched back to NeoOffice and I won't go back to Word unless I really need to.
Click to expand...

Microsoft Help said:
You can set how frequently AutoRecover saves your files. For example, if you set it to save every 5 minutes, you'll recover more information than if it's set to save every 10 or 15 minutes.
Important
Do not use AutoRecover as a substitute for regularly saving your files by clicking Save . Saving your files often is the best way to preserve your work.


  • On the Word menu, click Preferences.
  • Under Output and Sharing, click Save.
  • In the Save AutoRecover info every box, enter how often you want Word to save documents.
Click to expand...


There you go ;)

Autorecover is my savior when OS X decides it doesn't want to be stable anymore and freezes up.
 
Some annoyances from Word:

1 If you have a Word doc open and it's not active, clicking the scroll bar does not make it active - you have to click further into the document.

2 If you have Word open but no document, if you just click the dock icon it will open a new document. This means that you can't just make the app active and then go to the Open Recent menu to choose your doc without opening up a new document as well. This is an annoying trick they seem to have copied from Pages.

3 They have not sorted out the annoying Work Menu. Is is too much to ask for a 'Remove Item from Work Menu' command as well as the blunderbuss command that will remove any menu item?
 
More Entourage...

  • When offline -- happens a lot with a laptop -- it chimes with the "ching" sound like the old version to indicate that it can't contact the server. Except it goes on for about six ching ching ching ching ching chings (the old one only did a couple). Great in a meeting; have to remember to mute the Mac as soon as you open the lid.
  • When offline it racks up some errors in the networking as per the old version. It used to be possible to <cmd>A, <del> to delete them all. Now it flashes some modal dialog each time it deletes a record (which will be 144 in a day).
I know these are hardly show-stoppers, but it didn't do it before.

On the plus side, the new ToDo 'flag' on a message is much clearer than before. Strange the colour of the flag can't be changed.

Still not found anything of any substance that's new in Entourage.
 
Some of the things that I noticed:

- Very slow start up times for all applications compared to Microsoft Office 2004 and Microsoft Office X.

- Microsoft Word by default double spaces when you press enter, no longer single spaces like Office X and Office 2004.

- Typing in Microsoft Word has a very slight delay, and the blinking "|" bar completely disappears when typing, making anything that your typing feel laggy.

- No letter zoom slider like in Microsoft Office 2007 for PC's. Mac user still have to specify zoom levels like 100% - 150% and so on.

- No VB support in Office 2008 ( I know this has been beaten to the ground, but if Microsoft no longer supports it, why was it implemented in Office 2007 for Windows )

- Office 2007 for Windows has three themes available namely silver, blue and black. Why can't Mac users have Office themes built in.

I know some of these points are kind of limited, but why not port Office 2007 for Windows and give Mac users the same program. Kind of like Windows users and Mac users on a level playing field. One Office suite for both Windows and Mac users.
 
Word '08 Probs

Just a weird thing I've noticed while working in Word now. I'm working on a small document where I need to select a word or phrase and edit and stylize accordingly. But when I do one action, it affects the whole document. I can usually remedy this by pressing Undo and it just formats what I originally selected. Has anyone else come across this problem? I also get the same sort of problem when I select features from the toolbox but not when I access the same tools by going to Format -> Paragraph or Font.
 
Office 2008 fixes O 2004 'bug'

Not quite sure this is the right place for this but as thread is about O 2008 bugs thought it might be at home here. With Leopard, O 2004 had a printing bug - not clear whether O 2004, 10.5 or printer drivers at fault but with Word you got blank pages, Excel 1 cell per page (if you were lucky) and PPT blank pages. With some jiggling about of page settings, which printer you used and a bit of swearing you could get a correct print. Entourage seemed to be OK. Does this printing issue still exist in O 2008?

It is interesting the mixed views on O 2008. For the moment have to keep using 2004 as I also use EndNote which has plug-ins to Word and the developers have yet to produce updated plug-ins for 2008. Would be nice to look forward to fixed printing.
 
There are 2 missing features that caught my attention from Office 2008 as a whole:

1- Office 2008 does not use the new equation editor from Office 2007 on Windows, and still uses the same editor Office used back in the Mac OS 9 days.

2- No Right-to-Left text direction support. This has been available on the Windows version since Office XP, in 2001.
 
I just found out a serious bug/annoyance in Excel 2008 charts: the option to set custom error bars seems to be gone!!! If I open an excel 2004 document with custom error bars, Excel 2008 displays them OK but there''s no way to change them, since the UI element to do so is gone.

This is a picture of the error bar dialog, and the red box is where the custom error bar selector is meant to be and was in Excel 2004.

This is a serious drawback since I do need this feature. Now I have to reinstall Office 2004 just so I can use Excel 2004. :S

errorbars.jpg
 
Hyperlinks in PDF files?

Maybe I've missed something obvious, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

When I print to PDF, hyperlinks are not preserved. They are when printing to PDF from Apple applications (in Leopard, at least).

Office 2008 is my first upgrade since I first started using Office X back in 2003. I had hoped that since then, Microsoft would have implemented printing to PDF while preserving links.
 
"There is a problem with your Office database"

I get this annoying dialog box every time I open an Office 2008 application. The rest of the dialog box tells me how to use the Microsoft Database Utility to fix my Office database. Only one problem with all of this: I do not have an Office database, so of course the utility cannot find one to fix. This is nagging the crap out of me. Someone please tell me how to make it go away?

Thanks,
Alan
 
I've noticed that whenever I create a new document in Word 2008 the spacing after a sentence is always added. Is there any way to default it to zero just like you can default a font in the format window?
 

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Alex3231 said:
I've noticed that whenever I create a new document in Word 2008 the spacing after a sentence is always added. Is there any way to default it to zero just like you can default a font in the format window?
Click to expand...

Yes!
This is very annoying, anyone know how to set it to "0" by default.
 
sethro said:
Yes!
This is very annoying, anyone know how to set it to "0" by default.
Click to expand...

In the styles section of the formatting palette, click on the arrow on the right of "Normal," and then choose modify style. On the lower left corner, choose paragraph, and in spacing, set "after" to be 0. close the paragraph dialog box, and click on add to template, now "ok" it. This should do the trick.
 
Microsoft User Data?

sethro said:
Thanks so much for this tip.
Click to expand...
I haven't got it yet, but can anyone tell me whether they have stopped storing the settings in the Documents folder?

This is something I find so completely insensible and annoying that it would stop me from using the thing altogether. :eek: To have a hard-coded folder, in the wrong place, so that that moving it will destroy your Office implementation completely, is just an insane thing to have to deal with on a Mac in the 21st Century.
 
sethro said:
- Typing in Microsoft Word has a very slight delay, and the blinking "|" bar completely disappears when typing, making anything that your typing feel laggy.
Click to expand...

Have other people noticed this delay in typing? I'm absolutely stunned that, with all of the computer horsepower we have these days, the most basic function of the word processor -- to display text that is being typed, is not able to be done in real time. This has driven me crazy about different versions of word for years, as well as openoffice, but I thought that now that we had a UB of office and screaming fast intel chips, that we'd be beyond it. Truly incredible. Nothing makes an experience feel more sluggish than the text lagging behind the typist.
 
Does anyone know how to change the date format in Office 08?

Why didn't they use the settings from the International Prefpane?

Is it also possible to have the excel formula bar sit right below toolbar (like in Numbers)?
 
Word 2008 is crashing and crashing for me.
Well it doesn't support Endnote just like Pages.
I would rather use Pages. I feel I can also focus better in Pages. I will just copy and past temporary references and export to Word 2004 and let EndNote do the magic there.
 
i cant believe they got rid of VB

i need endnote - 2004 is way too slow - my thesis will be too big for it to handle!! will have to use office in VMWare!! bad times!
 
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