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Word for Mac - Why does it suck so much?

nadyne said:
(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.

Regards,
Nadyne.
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I knew there was a reason I liked you...;) Thanks for putting a good "face" on what so many mac users see as a soulless company. We may yet avoid the apocalypse.:D
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Nadyne, I wouldn't mind MS paying me to use a Mac.
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Hmmm, I just checked, and we don't currently have any open positions. But if you're a developer or tester with Mac coding experience, feel free to PM me with your résumé and I can get it in front of our managers for the next position that opens. Also, we're listed on Microsoft Careers; under the Product listing, select "Mac Office". You can have the site automatically send you an email whenever a position opens up on our team, just create a job agent.

spork183 said:
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?
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Short answer: No. We would've if we could've. :)
Long answer: See the first VBA post that I linked to earlier.

spork183 said:
I knew there was a reason I liked you... Thanks for putting a good "face" on what so many mac users see as a soulless company. We may yet avoid the apocalypse.
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Shhh, don't say that too loudly. You don't want anyone else here to think that you might actually LIKE Microsoft! :eek:

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
nadyne said:
Hmmm, I just checked, and we don't currently have any open positions. But if you're a developer or tester with Mac coding experience, feel free to PM me with your résumé and I can get it in front of our managers for the next position that opens. Also, we're listed on Microsoft Careers; under the Product listing, select "Mac Office". You can have the site automatically send you an email whenever a position opens up on our team, just create a job agent.
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Well that was slightly tongue in cheek, but my Mac coding experience isn't a resume worthy skill quite yet. But I have done the conference room Acoustics at your MV offices.
 
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.
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Who in the hell uses a million rows...

I'm not an excel pro; but anything over 10,000 seems excessive! VBA sounds like it would be a better allocation of that developers time...

And I officially put your job in the top 10. You play with Macs all day, hang around MacRumors, and get paid! (I'm sure there's a lot more too it... but you get my point)
 
OmniGraffle

Lostatsea3 said:
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
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You need to make shapes, arrows, tables, flowcharts, chemistry diagrams and equations? You need OmniGraffle.
 
Lostatsea3 said:
Who in the hell uses a million rows...
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Me, for example.

Well, not a million, but 30+K happens routinely.

Before Excel 08, we had to split ChIP-chip data files into several chunks, which was a major pain in the posterior. Excel 08 is a blessing. Incidentally, the issue of VBA is entirely separate one and is not at all connected with the number of rows the program can handle. I would be ideal if Excel could do both.
 
Lostatsea3 said:
Who in the hell uses a million rows...

I'm not an excel pro; but anything over 10,000 seems excessive! VBA sounds like it would be a better allocation of that developers time...

And I officially put your job in the top 10. You play with Macs all day, hang around MacRumors, and get paid! (I'm sure there's a lot more too it... but you get my point)
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I've never needed a million but I have done data dumps into Excel with over 600,000 rows of data that needed to be broken up into a dozen smaller downloads. Pivot tables are very useful for manipulating that much data.
 
nadyne said:
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.
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Thanks for being on this forum Nadyne. However, I beg to differ. You just need to face the fact that you didn't start right from the beginning developing a windowing model bowing to the OS's model. You can't blame the OS very much, IMHO, for things which other applications can do without breaking a sweat and Office fails. ..not exactly this topic but showing the same inclination of drawing battle lines is the exclusion of the "Dictionary" service from Office apps. My biggest gripe apart from stability issues and heartbreaking feature dropping which don't make sense.
 
I understand some of the feature dropping... I'm sure they had a deadline, and since it had to be reprogrammed from the bottom up basically, crunch time means loss of what they determined to be "non-essential"

And I stand corrected on excel row usage...
 
Wow, since a Microsoft person is here I may as well ask an Office question I have.

Nadyne, I talked to my local independent Mac store about Office or iWork. They told me since I am doing a management traineeship in a corporation that uses Windows and Office I better stick to Office so I have no compatibility problems with files I create.

Since Office 2007 and 2008 don't match 100% feature for feature would I be better off from a compatibility point of view using Office 2007 in Fusion or would I be alright going and getting Office 2008. I need to do PowerPoint presentations and Word doc's with embedded Excel spreadsheets and charts.
 
chaosbunny said:
"Word for Mac - Why does it suck so much?"

Well because Word generally sucks. :)
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wow- you're tons of help.

@deltasnake: you could get office 08 but just be careful about saving your files so you can open them in older versions of office.
 
mmulin said:
Thanks for being on this forum Nadyne. However, I beg to differ. You just need to face the fact that you didn't start right from the beginning developing a windowing model bowing to the OS's model. You can't blame the OS very much, IMHO, for things which other applications can do without breaking a sweat and Office fails. ..not exactly this topic but showing the same inclination of drawing battle lines is the exclusion of the "Dictionary" service from Office apps. My biggest gripe apart from stability issues and heartbreaking feature dropping which don't make sense.
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Any Carbon app has the same issues. However, our use of windows is more extensive than most other apps, and our apps are some of the most widely-used on the platform, so it's much most readily apparent in our apps.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, we've shown our code to Apple and asked for suggestions for how to fix it. We've implemented their suggestions in our code, and they've also made changes in dot-releases of Leopard, which have improved but not completely fixed the problem. If you'd like to know more of the nitty-gritty details about this particular issue, including the extensive work that we've done with Apple to try to resolve this, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards. (It's a long post; the stuff that's specific to Spaces comes down about halfway in. Look for the paragraph that starts with "Bear with me while I shift gears now".)

Since you seem to be quite knowledgeable about how software should interact with OS X, I'll assume that you have some professional experience developing Mac software. In that case, we're always looking for great developers to join our team. Feel free to PM me with your resume -- the pay's great, the benefits are awesome, and you get to work on Mac software that's used by lots upon lots of people. :)

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
DELTAsnake said:
Wow, since a Microsoft person is here I may as well ask an Office question I have.

Nadyne, I talked to my local independent Mac store about Office or iWork. They told me since I am doing a management traineeship in a corporation that uses Windows and Office I better stick to Office so I have no compatibility problems with files I create.

Since Office 2007 and 2008 don't match 100% feature for feature would I be better off from a compatibility point of view using Office 2007 in Fusion or would I be alright going and getting Office 2008. I need to do PowerPoint presentations and Word doc's with embedded Excel spreadsheets and charts.
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I'd check with other employees of the company and see what they're using. You'll find a Mac user there somewhere. They'll be able to tell you more about what kinds of files you can expect to get from others there, and tell you what works for them.

If the company is doing anything with VBA macros, you should either get Office 2004 for Mac, or you can go with running Office 2007 via VMWare or Boot Camp.

Other than that, you're unlikely to run into compatibility issues. But after you've gotten some more information from others at the company as to the files that they use, you can ask specific questions here.

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
Thanks to Nadyne for all the feedback in this thread. I have passed on details to MS regarding Office in the past. Just in case you missed any of it...

I bought '08 but I've had to stick with '04 because...

• The Spaces issue is maddening and I prefer Spaces to Office '08.
• I have macros I use in some Excel files.
• I can't get rid of the unwanted 'clipart bar' wasting space at the top of every document.
• It is not significantly quicker, even on an Intel machine.
• I get extra dialogues warning me about compatibility mode, etc.

I have also moved as much of my workflow as possible to iWork (all slideshows, all new docs and some new spreadsheets) because...

• WYSIWYG is for real in iWork, not layout which changes depending on the printer you select.
• Office 04 and 08 are just not providing the user experience I have got used to using iLife, iWork and a multitude of amazing third party apps which draw so well on the strengths of OS X.
• All my other apps share the same custom dictionary, language settings, etc.
• Office apps still quit on me regularly, particularly Excel.
• Excel 04 has a bug with Leopard (on my setup) which causes typing to stop working randomly unless you click on a different application or save the document. There seems to be no pattern or workaround. It's just a massive irritation I've had to put up with. Hence starting new projects in Numbers.

Obviously I'm a bit narked off that I wasted money on '08. However, I would buy a new version of Office if it was non-ugly, reliable, fast, compatible and, most importantly, like using other Mac applications. Good luck.
 
Any chance OneNote will make its way over to the Office Mac suite in the next update??

I know Notebook view in Word for Mac is similar... but it's not nearly as good. No charts in it really bugs me...
 
Ever tried making a PDF in Word? :(

This was actually a huge problem for me once, and I'm sure it'll be so again. Simply making a PDF version that looks identical to what you see on the screen is close to impossible! :( … and isn't that the whole point of making a PDF in the first place? :confused:

+ Office '08 is slow!
 
nadyne said:
Any Carbon app has the same issues. However, our use of windows is more extensive than most other apps, and our apps are some of the most widely-used on the platform, so it's much most readily apparent in our apps.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, we've shown our code to Apple and asked for suggestions for how to fix it. We've implemented their suggestions in our code, and they've also made changes in dot-releases of Leopard, which have improved but not completely fixed the problem. If you'd like to know more of the nitty-gritty details about this particular issue, including the extensive work that we've done with Apple to try to resolve this, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards. (It's a long post; the stuff that's specific to Spaces comes down about halfway in. Look for the paragraph that starts with "Bear with me while I shift gears now".)

Since you seem to be quite knowledgeable about how software should interact with OS X, I'll assume that you have some professional experience developing Mac software. In that case, we're always looking for great developers to join our team. Feel free to PM me with your resume -- the pay's great, the benefits are awesome, and you get to work on Mac software that's used by lots upon lots of people. :)

Regards,
Nadyne.
Click to expand...

Nadyne, the read makes good sense. Still would be fun to go through M$'s source code as well.

In that respect, thanks for the offer, but I can't complain about my current coding engagements despite I wouldn't like to move to the US. No offence ;)
 
Lostatsea3 said:
Any chance OneNote will make its way over to the Office Mac suite in the next update??
Click to expand...

Sorry, we haven't announced any details of the next version of Office:Mac yet, other than the fact that we're bringing back VBA. We probably won't start talking about it until we're just a few months from release. Our current plan is to return to a 2-3 release cycle, so I don't have any dates to share with you about when we'll start talking about the next version.

In the interim, you should submit feedback to us to tell us why you want OneNote and why the current Notebook Layout View in Word:Mac isn't sufficient. In Word, go to the Help menu, and select "submit feedback". Tell us how it impacts you to not have it, and what you're using as a workaround (OneNote via VMWare? just using the Notebook Layout View but unhappy with it? something else?). Give lots of details -- just saying "I want OneNote" isn't nearly as helpful to us as "I want OneNote, and these are the reasons why".

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
try iworks it's official from apple so it's made only for macs not cross platforms like word can be. But saying that I've had no problems with my word for mac :p
 
The problem is the equations are all entirely integrated with a ton of text and I have to be able to change them often and easily, and its a pain to go back and forth between programs.

And the arrow key issue isn't about inserting them, its about aiming them. Publishing view solved that...
 
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