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Why I just gave £90 to Microsoft

a456

a456

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 5, 2005
882
0
I have had three problems with Office v.X ever since I first used it.

(1) Entourage displays graphics (pinstripes) in the wrong places, obscuring mail messages and when you click on them to clear them it crashes.

(2) The length of file names is restricted (31 characters or something like that?)

(3) Some unicode characters do not display making it impossible to use some foreign words and names.

My solutions:

(1) Don't use Entourage - ever.

(2) Live with it and annoy other people by abbreviating long file names - this actually does affect some of the work I do, although I won't bore you with the details.

(3) Finally cave in to buying Office 2004 (academic edition because I work for a university), because I often deal with foreign names and words, and need to send these files to people (an underscore just does not cut it)

Question: should I have been forced by the above factors (like many others I am sure) to upgrade, considering I had no other use whatsoever for any new features in the Office Suite? Would you not expect if you'd spent £300 on the full version to have unicode abilities? Even if they couldn't have programmed the initial version with it, surely once they'd figured out how to do it in 2004 they could have issued an update to users of the earlier software? (Similarly with the filename length - come on £90 or more to sort this out!). Also I have been so stung with my experiences of Entourage that I can't see myself ever using it - in fact when the installer asked me if I wanted to use identities from my previous Entourage clicking Yes caused it to crash - not a good omen.
 
I don't suppose you've looked into using the Apple "Mail" application? OR Thunderbird, or Eudora?

It sounds like you're problems are caused by the horrible excuse for an application that is Entourage. Outlook is ... passable, but Entourage is like Outlook's retarded cousin that eats paste. Don't waste your time or money with it.
 
Angrist said:
I don't suppose you've looked into using the Apple "Mail" application? OR Thunderbird, or Eudora?

It sounds like you're problems are caused by the horrible excuse for an application that is Entourage. Outlook is ... passable, but Entourage is like Outlook's retarded cousin that eats paste. Don't waste your time or money with it.
Click to expand...

I get the point you're trying to make, but all that aside, using words like 'retarded' as a negative adjective is really not cool.
 
It could be worse ...

I too, like one of the other replies, get on fine with Office 2004. In fact I find it a lot more stable than Win Office 2000 which we are still using at university. It could be a lot worse though. As an academic I use a product call EndNote which is absolutely brilliant when it works. However the publishers produce a release a year which comprises about 95% bug fixes and 5% new features. Each time you have to pay for the upgrade - an upgrade which is usually necessary to bring stability to the application. Two consolations to this: 1) It does matter whether it is the Win version or Mac version, they both seem to have the same bugs; 2) if you kick up enough stink it can be possible to get an upgrade for a reduced fee. Office 2004 has its foibles but is not as bad as EndNote.
 
Having used Word 2004 (but not yet the rest of Office 2004) over the last week for 8hrs + a day I have to say that I am impressed by its stability (it appears to be sharing memory nicely for once). It has not crashed at all whereas Word v.X crashed at least once a day.

I was going to uninstall and sell Office v.X on ebay, but to be honest I couldn't do it to another human being. (How MS sleep at nights having putting such a program into the hands of millions I do not know.) It is a shame that MBU are ditching VB support, because it is a major tool in the work that I do. My only hope now is that nothing comes along that stuffs up the stability and compatibility of Office 2004 (e.g. docx), because I exchange hundreds of Word files in a year and every time the Mac version is put behind the Windows version in someway this has the potential to cause great headaches.

Having used Office 2004 I also have to say that although NeoOffice and OpenOffice have advantages (especially the ability to open docx) that in terms of speed and features Word is superior, and on a day to day basis on a five-year-old PowerBook, NeoOffice is too slow to open and operate.
 
I agree with a456 when it comes to NeoOffice. I believe that it uses the depreciated Java-Cocoa bridge. Java by itself can be a bit on the heavy side, in terms of overhead, and I'm sure the bridge to Cocoa probably doesn't lighten the burden.
 
Agree...

chatoyer said:
I use Entourage 2004 all the time, all day. I don't have too many problems with it. Couple of things annoy me, but over all it's been fine.
Click to expand...

I use Entourage 2004 on my main machine for several reasons, not necessarily unique to it.
- I can hook up to multiple accounts, including Exchange Servers, POP, and IMAP
- The Exchange server support is very good if your server are set up properly. Although the interface may be a bit different, meeting invites are handled the same (you have the Accept, Tentative, etc.). Public folders are viewable. It's better than OWA when using Safari.
- It's one stop for e-mail, calendar, address book and notes.
- I was able to successfully import my old e-mail that I had originally started saving in Outlook Express.
- I found project center to be helpful a couple of times, but Smart Folders in the Finder might do the same trick.
- I've gotten used to it, and among the entire Office 2004 suite, I use it more than anything else. I don't use the other items a lot. I got the full suite w/Virtual PC, for work compatibility. Now I wish I could just get Entourage by itself.

I had also used v.X and was also less than impressed, but I can't remember specifics now.

I have also been using Mail recently on another machine to check my .Mac account mail. Since it is IMAP, it doesn't matter which mail client I use. I like different things about each one. I think the Mail folder interface could be improved, but it displays HTML mail better than Entourage. I haven't taken the time to implement all the rules I have in Entourage in Mail, so I can't tell you how good that is. I will say that Entourage's Rule execution seems to be spotty. Maybe I haven't gotten them configured right.

Mail does support Exchange, but depending on how you access the Exchange server, you might have some problems. Entourage allowed me connect to my company's Exchange server via VPN by using the IP address. The Exchange Server support had the proper authentication protocol support (i.e. domain name). I wasn't able to connect using Mail. I'm going to keep trying, in case I ever do want to rid myself of Office completely.

So overall I've found Entourage 2004 to be quite capable and useful, even if it really is Outlook Express on steroids. I use it as my main e-mail app. Was it worth £90 ($180 - $200 for me)? By itself, no, but overall, Office 2004 is a much better OS X suite of apps than v.X, and that is worth it.
 
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