Word for Mac - Why does it suck so much?

[Lostatsea3]

Seriously this sucks. Word for windows in infinitely better.

My main complaint - autoshapes.
I use a lot of arrows for chemistry labs because we have to label all parts of our equations. But these arrows are impossible to use... theres only 5 or 6 ways they can point, you have to start them in weird places... its hard to explain. When you put one in, and try and aim it at something, it jumps past what you're aiming for and you have to settle for a little off.

Also the equation writer isn't as good.

Are there plugins to help with this? Or just something! Thanks

 

[Gray-Wolf]

I have had it for months, and it gives me no problems at all. Best bet, is if it doesn't suit you, try iWorks, NeoOffice or another program

 

[Lostatsea3]

Yeah I've tried iWork. Not a huge fan. The arrows are better but overall its worse.

I'm downloading OpenOffice now...

 

[klaxamazoo]

If you want better control over arrow placement you need to go into publishing layout instead of print layout.

 

[jeremybuff]

OpenOffice and NeoOffice suck from my experiences. Slow to open and they do not feel nor operate like mac apps at all. If you can, try iWork again..

 

[nadyne]

The best way to get feedback to us about Word is to go to the Help menu, and select "Send Feedback". Tell us what you're trying to do and why you can't do it. Tell us what you're doing to try to workaround what you can't do.

If you're in the Redmond, WA, or Mountain View, CA, area, you can sign up to participate in usability studies, too.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[MidwestStuck]

I know people have posted about this already, but what's up with Office 08 and its incompatibility with Spaces? That must be the one thing that pisses me off the most about the app. Microsoft needs to issue a fix for that before I decide to trash the damned app and install OpenOffice or something.

 

[tkim82]

Midwest I totally agree with you. Every now and then I'd be writing an essay or something on Word and the little toolbar at the right just randomly runs off to another space. It does this multiple times, and it can get pretty annoying.
So I tend to stick to Pages for now, lolz

 

[chaosbunny]

"Word for Mac - Why does it suck so much?"

Well because Word generally sucks.

 

[richard.mac]

The best way to get feedback to us about Word is to go to the Help menu, and select "Send Feedback". Tell us what you're trying to do and why you can't do it. Tell us what you're doing to try to workaround what you can't do.

If you're in the Redmond, WA, or Mountain View, CA, area, you can sign up to participate in usability studies, too.

Regards,
Nadyne.

Cool, a guy who works for Mac: Office. can you please make the suite more snappier like iWork and Mail? they just take too long to load and feel 'bulky'. because iWork is snappy and 'lighter' and has Office compatability i love iWork now and dont use Office on my Mac anymore. i dont know if it has to do with being the first Universal version and the code messy or something

also make the UI consistent with OS X. i know it may seem pretty consistent atm but there are a lot of inconsistencies like dont make it exactly like Windows Office but with a Mac skin and use the default Preferences API.

 

[dwd3885]

Cool, a guy who works for Mac: Office. can you please make the suite more snappier like iWork and Mail? they just take too long to load and feel 'bulky'. because iWork is snappy and 'lighter' and has Office compatability i love iWork now and dont use Office on my Mac anymore. i dont know if it has to do with being the first Universal version and the code messy or something

also make the UI consistent with OS X. i know it may seem pretty consistent atm but there are a lot of inconsistencies like dont make it exactly like Windows Office but with a Mac skin and use the default Preferences API.

I believe she said to suggest things through the program. But in general, Word on the mac, like most office-like apps on the mac, aren't nearly as good as Word on Windows. Still, Word on the Mac is better than iWork

 

[drossad]

I know people have posted about this already, but what's up with Office 08 and its incompatibility with Spaces? That must be the one thing that pisses me off the most about the app. Microsoft needs to issue a fix for that before I decide to trash the damned app and install OpenOffice or something.

I agree completely with this and tkim82's post.

Totally annoying since I use Word alot. It happens every single time without fail. I will be buying iWork soon... because it is that annoying.

I just wonder if Microsoft made it incompatible with spaces to:

1. stick it to Mac users
2. or just because of inability to create quality apps.

Probably a little of both.

 

[Lostatsea3]

Wow the fact that a Microsoft person actually noticed that just increased my opinion of Microsoft... they actually do care! ... Maybe? Whether they change anything will be the real clue.

Oh I have another complaint... Doesn't support MathType.

Thank you for the Publishing View advice - that works a lot better. Although Word just crashed in that...

 

[nadyne]

I know people have posted about this already, but what's up with Office 08 and its incompatibility with Spaces? That must be the one thing that pisses me off the most about the app. Microsoft needs to issue a fix for that before I decide to trash the damned app and install OpenOffice or something.

The short answer: Our windowing code is complex, and the OS X window manager is complex. Our code and Apple's code aren't working together very well. We've shown them our code and, other than "rip it out and start over", they don't have any suggestions as to what we can do to fix the problem on our end for Leopard. They do know what they can do on their end, but it's a big and expensive change (just as re-doing all of our windowing code is a big an expensive change), which is something that no-one likes to do.

Cool, a guy who works for Mac: Office. can you please make the suite more snappier like iWork and Mail? they just take too long to load and feel 'bulky'. because iWork is snappy and 'lighter' and has Office compatability i love iWork now and dont use Office on my Mac anymore. i dont know if it has to do with being the first Universal version and the code messy or something

Make sure that you're up-to-date with your service packs. We're currently at 12.1.5, and we've made some big performance improvements across the suite in these updates. I noticed in the thread here that announced the availability of 12.1.5 that lots of people were reporting zippier performance, which was nice to see.

(Oh, and ... I'm a girl. )

also make the UI consistent with OS X. i know it may seem pretty consistent atm but there are a lot of inconsistencies like dont make it exactly like Windows Office but with a Mac skin and use the default Preferences API.

Heh. There's users who will complain that it's not at all like Windows Office.

But to your point, we do want to be a good Mac citizen, which of course means having a UI that's consistent as much as possible with the Human Interface Guidelines. It's a big suite of apps, so sometimes we're more successful than not. If you see something that really jumps out at you as being un-Mac-like, please submit feedback about it.

Oh I have another complaint... Doesn't support MathType.

Yes, sorry.

The technical reason is that we were forced to remove VBA support in Office 2008. VBA support is coming back in the next version of Office. We're planning on a 2-3 year release cycle for it (the Office 2008 release cycle was much longer than we had planned, but then we didn't plan on the Intel transition in the middle of it!). MathType has said that, once VBA is back, they'll be able to support us again. Personally, I'm looking forward to that -- I've got a math degree, so I miss it.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[Lostatsea3]

Thanks for the response! I'm now looking forward to Mac '10/'11... but I wish they could stick it (VBA) in a service pack instead. It's like taking away something, and then promoting it in your next version... why take it away in the first place.

The interface is just my personal complaint coming from the amazing Windows "Ribbon"... I'm sure through-and-through Mac users like this UI better.

How about some multi-touch support... that'd be nice! Zoom in/out... maybe Undo... Switch between documents... make them customizable so that we can set something such as rotate to the right = open equation editor. Its a pain always having to go Insert > Object > equation.

 

[jw2002]

If you are trying to do a lot of precise stuff with arrows, then perhaps take a look at OmniGraffle. You can control every aspect of any shape in OmniGraffle, and unlike Office products, you can even enter numerical values instead of being at the mercy of mouse clicking. There also exist many templates (both OmniGraffle developed and end-user developed) that facilitate drawing for specific disciplines.

 

[Lostatsea3]

I don't need super precise just enough to be able to point it at the damn number...! Publishing View works for that... Print Layout view doesn't come close...

 

[michael.lauden]

if you are using 2004 it may be a lot slower because it is running under Rosetta. the 2008 version is a universal binary (correct me if i'm wrong, but i know it runs a LOT better under Intel).

i have 2004, and still wish i had '08

 

[Lostatsea3]

I'm using 08, newest update.

I actually don't really have a complaint about the "snappiness." Slower then Apple programs, but still fast.

 

[Nydator]

i have 2004, and still wish i had '08

I have '08 and am planning to go back to '04, which plays much better with Spaces. It drives me nuts they way those windows jump around between different spaces, and for some reason the cursor in Word '08 disappears a couple of times each day and I have to quit the app and re-open it to make the cursor reappear.

 

[r0k]

The best way to get feedback to us about Word is to go to the Help menu, and select "Send Feedback". Tell us what you're trying to do and why you can't do it. Tell us what you're doing to try to workaround what you can't do.

If you're in the Redmond, WA, or Mountain View, CA, area, you can sign up to participate in usability studies, too.

Regards,
Nadyne.

Hello Nadyne! I read your blog. "A mac girl in a microsoft world". Very nice. No M$ jokes from me this time, but I would like to mention my reasons for bailing on Office 2008. I had iWork 08 and OpenOffice 2.4. Those programs were the Office solution on all the Macs in our household. I was tempted to pick up Office 08 until our IT folks at work forced us to switch from Office 2003 to 2007. What a shock. The windows no longer obeyed the XP color palette and the window handles were misplaced. The ribbons took up entirely too much screen real estate and I hid them. It took longer for me to do things in 2007 than in 2003. It's been months and I still don't like Office 2007. So when I saw how much I disliked Office 2007, I bailed on buying Office 2008 at home.

I mention this because you work in usability. There are a few usability points I'd like to offer, though as a Mac user I'm sure you already know some of them.

Here are some of the things I wish Windows did differently:

* Constant dialog boxes where "yes to all" really means yes for another 5 seconds.
* Start up takes too long
* Sleep takes too long
* Shut Down takes too long and the "end now" dialog fails to time out on its own
* Thumbs.db should be off by default (.ds_store and ._* files offer the same annoyance on OS X)
* Timeouts are excessive, especially network timeouts which seem to take 90 seconds or longer to respond if a network resource isn't available.
* Having the default palette incompatible with older versions of Office is a mistake. There should be an option in Word and Excel to set the default text and cell background color palettes to be compatible with older versions of office so I'm not faced with yet another annoying incompatibility dialog whenever I save a file as xls instead of xlsx and doc instead of docx.

I would think a lot of my issues would be handled by hacking the windows kernel to replace all dialog boxes with ones that timeout automatically. Also modal windows arrogantly presume to tell me what I should be doing with the machine and OS I paid for. Bad form. Very bad form.

Sorry I don't have more to offer about things to improve Office 2008, but my experience with Office 2007 scared me away.

 

[nadyne]

Thanks for the response! I'm now looking forward to Mac '10/'11... but I wish they could stick it (VBA) in a service pack instead. It's like taking away something, and then promoting it in your next version... why take it away in the first place.

Removing VBA was a really hard decision to make, and it was one that we really didn't want to have to do. The VBA code was tied very closely to the old PowerPC architecture. Moving it to the Intel architecture was going to require a lot of time of one of our most senior developers. This isn't code that we could just hire some poor kid fresh out of college and throw him at, it's code that needs someone with lots of experience (and preferably experience with low-level code like this). It's bad enough that it would take a very senior developer so long to do that, but it also meant that we couldn't allocate that senior developer to other really hard work that was done in Excel 2008, such as our support for 1 million rows and 16K columns in spreadsheets.

If you want to get into the technical details of why we made this decision, here's the blog post from one of our lead developers, which was posted when we announced the decision back at WWDC 2006. As for why it's coming back, that same developer has another post about that. The first post is pretty long, but it's the whole story.

How about some multi-touch support... that'd be nice! Zoom in/out... maybe Undo... Switch between documents... make them customizable so that we can set something such as rotate to the right = open equation editor. Its a pain always having to go Insert > Object > equation.

Awesome feedback. Thanks.

So when I saw how much I disliked Office 2007, I bailed on buying Office 2008 at home.

Office 2007 for Windows and Office:Mac 2008 don't have the same user experience. The Ribbon in Windows Office, as it stands today, isn't appropriate for Mac users. If you'd like more details about how we evolved the user interface that's in Office 2008 for Mac, check out my blog post to our team blog, evolution at work. For Office 2008, we kept our menus and the Formatting Palette (which, if you've only used Office on Windows, you're probably not familiar with that either), but we did add an element to the UI to help users get at some of the features that were previous buried elsewhere.

Not to sound all corporate shill on you , but you might want to give Office:Mac a go sometime. It's installed on every Mac in your friendly local Apple Store.

(Oh, about your Windows feedback ... I almost never use Windows, so telling me about it is completely the wrong thing to do. Microsoft pays me to be a Mac user, which is good because I was using a Mac long before I came here. I don't use Boot Camp or VMWare on my Macs. I do have a Windows computer in my office, but I use it very infrequently, and only for things that I can't do on our internal network on my Mac (some websites, for example). I only access it through Remote Desktop Connection from my Macs.)

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

This is a problem that comes up often enough on this Board. My advice is to just deal with it, cause nothing's going to change anytime soon. Or use Office on a PC. Though I will admit the fact that an MS rep reviews nearly every thread about Mac Office is a fairly big kudos to MS. It at least let's "me" know they're listening.

Nadyne, I wouldn't mind MS paying me to use a Mac.

 

[petermcphee]

I like this thread a lot. It was made infinitely better by nadyne posting.

 

[nick9191]

Thanks for the feedback Nadyne.

One thing however, was it not possible to include the PPC version of Visual Basic for apps in with Office 08 until you could get the Universal version ready?