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Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: A New Hope - Page 2

post #41 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:33am
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheToe View Post

Can we just have Word 5.1 for OS X/Intel? That's the last version that wasn't crammed with poorly-functioning features that hardly anyone uses.

My favorite word processor was Word 3.01 on an SE/30. Lean, quick, easy to use. Powered my college newspaper (including AP feed) and my class papers.
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post #42 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:33am
What's wrong with this picture?

Apple displays are all 16:10 or 16:9 wide screen with no rotation capability
Word is used almost exclusively for documents in portrait orientation on A4 or US Letter
The ribbon of tools is displayed across the top of the document reducing the amount of vertical screen real estate

For people who write documents this "evolution" from the Portrait display of the 1980's to the 16:9 display of the 2010's has been 3 steps backward and none forward.
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post #43 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:34am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook View Post

The Inspector is hardly perfect either. Many simple tasks are hidden on tabs, numbered headings don't work very well either, especially for professional documents.

As for copying... seriously?

Yes, seriously!
Apple had me at scrolling
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Apple had me at scrolling
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post #44 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:41am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sky King View Post


Think of it this way: You go to the grocery store to purchase breakfast cereal. You are overwhelmed by the number of choices available (to say nothing of the marketers who intentionally move products around to keep you impulse shopping. You cannot find what you want is a reasonable length of time. You give up, grab something you don't want, and go home irritated because someone has made your busy life more difficult...on purpose.


Personally, this has never happened in my experience. Each and every time, I buy exactly the breakfast cereal I want.

And I'm always glad to have extra choices.

Your comments apply, however, exactly to the App Store. You need to wade through too much crap, and there's no good way to browse for interesting new stuff.

But in general, most folks are not overwhelmed by choice. And lots of people relish choice.

But some folks want others to pick the best breakfast cereal for them to eat, and to give them only one choice, and they think that would be best. Not most folks, tho...
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post #45 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:43am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bregalad View Post

For people who write documents this "evolution" from the Portrait display of the 1980's to the 16:9 display of the 2010's has been 3 steps backward and none forward.


Agreed. Years ago, there were monitors that swiveled into portrait mode for word processing.

Do they still make such things?
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post #46 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:50am
For those of you complaining about the screenshots, beta, and think it "crashed" maybe you shouldn't be using the beta... Actually you really shouldn't be. The beta was leaked by a Russian enthusiast site, none of you should even be on it - pretty sure it's illegal.
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post #47 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:51am
Hopefully now that Word has been out for 25 years, there can be a "save" function that does not have an erroneous "disk full" message. I understand Microsoft has great difficulty making even simple advances. But even Stephen Hawking coding through a blow tube should be able to correct that decades-old error.

Microsoft can possibly bring the Mac Office up to the Office 97 for Windows functionality. But personally I severely doubt Microsoft will approach Office 97. Instead it will be some gauzy eerie mess called "Mac Office" which no finance department could ever use, because it lacks core Office functionality across many different levels.
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post #48 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:55am
MS Office has very impressive features. However most of them are poorly implemented. Some examples.
Texts with footnotes/endnotes in MS Word cannot be cut/copy and past between applications.
Bibliograhy sources in MS Word cannot be exported, sorted or imported.
Cut and pat text from the internet into MS word does not display correctly, freezes screendisplay and slows down editing procceses.
Long documents (over 100 pages) to not longer format properly.
Entourage does not well integrate into MacOS
Compared to earlier versions of MSWord, MSPowerpoint for the Mac the graphic capabilities of these applications have not been improved.

Thirty years ago I was very impressed with MS Word 1.0 for the Mac (tables, graphics, page layout, printing etc.). In 1986 the next major upgrade was a huge disappointment. Everybody switched to Nisus Writer, MacWrite, Appleworks, Wordperfect, u.a.m. However, these companies did not offer powerpoint and a spreadsheet. As conseqence MS improved the office suite. Personally I do not consider iWorks an alternative to MS ffice. Did yo every open a Keynote application in MS Powerpoint? Graphic can no longer be modified, formatting has changed, etc.
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post #49 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:57am
I very rarely create any Office documents. I just need to open them when people send them to me. Sometimes I have to edit and save excel spreadsheets but Numbers does that just fine. If I really need Office I have a PC. I do wish there was an equivalent to Access in iWork that could open and save in Access format.

Life is too short to drink bad coffee.

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Life is too short to drink bad coffee.

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post #50 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:58am
Quote:
Originally Posted by razorpit View Post

Relax, I'm pretty sure that was a joke...

I don't think the original poster was either joking or serious; he was just crying out for attention.
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post #51 of 105
4/30/10 at 11:13am
And how exactly does one zoom this document?
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post #52 of 105
4/30/10 at 11:30am
Does anyone know if the new version of Office will be able to offer support for key commands identical to / very similar to those offered on Windows. As a spreadsheet cruncher, the biggest downside to Excel for Mac is that so many of the functions / formatting that can be accomplished via key commands on Windows require using the mouse on a Mac.
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post #53 of 105
4/30/10 at 11:34am
support for RTL writing their version for MS 2011 is discriminating a world of hundreds of millions persons their language is written fro Right to Left
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post #54 of 105
4/30/10 at 11:39am
iWork is all you need.
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post #55 of 105
4/30/10 at 11:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamG View Post

Agreed. Years ago, there were monitors that swiveled into portrait mode for word processing.

Do they still make such things?

Some. A friend just bought two dell 19" or 20" that do that. Flipped them up and put them side by side and did a split screen across them Why not just buy one big monitor? That setup is dirt cheap.
To distracting for my taste.
Crying? No, I am not crying. I am sweating through my eyes.
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Crying? No, I am not crying. I am sweating through my eyes.
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post #56 of 105
4/30/10 at 11:48am
I want two things in Office 2010:

1. For it to load as fast or faster than iWork does.

2. My vertical space back.

That is all.
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post #57 of 105
4/30/10 at 12:12pm
I know there are people out there who will never use some of the functions Excel has to offer but for power users Numbers is no substitute for Excel.

iWork (Numbers) can't handle pivot tables on any kind of professional level so if you're a power user of Excel a better Mac version is good news. I was so disappointed when I tried to run a pivot on Numbers. I was hoping it could replace my need for Excel but it's not in the same ballpark, league etc. For those who don't know, a pivot table allows you to take tens of thousands of lines/hundreds of columns of data, in my case, and dig down into it to find all sorts of useful information.
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post #58 of 105
4/30/10 at 12:13pm
not if you're a serious spreadsheet user, Numbers is lame compared to Excel when it comes to pivot tables for example
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post #59 of 105
4/30/10 at 12:31pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rene View Post

MS Office has very impressive features. However most of them are poorly implemented. Some examples.
Texts with footnotes/endnotes in MS Word cannot be cut/copy and past between applications.
Bibliograhy sources in MS Word cannot be exported, sorted or imported.
Cut and pat text from the internet into MS word does not display correctly, freezes screendisplay and slows down editing procceses.
Long documents (over 100 pages) to not longer format properly.
Entourage does not well integrate into MacOS
Compared to earlier versions of MSWord, MSPowerpoint for the Mac the graphic capabilities of these applications have not been improved.

The biggest one for me that drives me nuts is the way it handles paragraph formatting. You create a paragraph, then click at the beginning of the NEXT paragraph and make a change to the first paragraph. WTF? I sometimes spend minutes just trying to change the formatting of a paragraph without messing up the surrounding paragraphs - and I've been using Word since one of the earliest versions.
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post #60 of 105
4/30/10 at 12:33pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by webpoet73 View Post

I can't stand OO.org. I tried to make some postcards and I got so very frustrated. ...

Yeah, I can never figure out why people think Open Office is anything like a useable product. I've never found anyone who likes it except hard-core open source freaks.

If the "problem" with MS Office is that it's an ancient, bloated, overly-integrated suite of software that's laboured with an old fashioned design and pumped full of extraneous features that no one uses or needs, ...

... how can the "solution" be an open source copy of the ancient, bloated suite that's even *more* integrated, even *more* outdated in it's design, and pumped full of even *more* extraneous features that no one really needs or uses?
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post #61 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamG View Post

Personally, this has never happened in my experience. Each and every time, I buy exactly the breakfast cereal I want.

And I'm always glad to have extra choices.

Your comments apply, however, exactly to the App Store. You need to wade through too much crap, and there's no good way to browse for interesting new stuff.

But in general, most folks are not overwhelmed by choice. And lots of people relish choice.

But some folks want others to pick the best breakfast cereal for them to eat, and to give them only one choice, and they think that would be best. Not most folks, tho...

Actually they've done some experiments showing astonishing results when choice was cut back in consumer environments. However, despite what the experiments revealed about people's behavior, your point that people relish choice still holds.
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post #62 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:11pm
I love Office 2008. It was way better then 04 (excluding Macros) and 2011 is gonna fix that! All the people saying you lose formatting or something - not true, use Office 08 at home and 07 at school, as long as you save as docx you are good to go. Open office does not save in docx (i think, its been a while since I used it though). Once we got our Macros back with 2011 productivity on mac is gonna be on par with PC. iWork doesn't come close (except for keynote). Can't wait.
--SHEFFmachine out
Da Bears!
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--SHEFFmachine out
Da Bears!
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post #63 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamG View Post

Agreed. Years ago, there were monitors that swiveled into portrait mode for word processing.

Do they still make such things?

Ha ... I bought one of those right before OS X came out, and the company never released an OS X driver, and I never even got to use the swivel feature. No idea if anyone still makes them, though.
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post #64 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:21pm
Frankly, I don't much care what Office 2011 looks like, though speaking as the author of a book on using Word for onscreen editing on both Windows and Mac platforms, it would make my life enormously easier if they finally standardized the interface. It would cut my documentation time by more than half, and trim the book length by (crude estimate) about 10%.

What I really care about is whether the software works. Word 2008 is ridiculously slow, even on a previous generation MacBook Pro. It hesitates trying to open even simple documents, staggers every time I copy a line or two to the clipboard, and takes forever to launch Applescripts. Plus, it doesn't run macros, and something about its clipboard doesn't work with Dreamweaver (though I blame Adobe for this; DW MX 2004 is a botch job).

Microsoft should forget about the bells and whistles and give me software I can actually use. Nowadays, I use Word 2003 (under Parallels) for all my paying work, and only use Word 2008 for basic writing or when I'm too impatient to launch Parallels. Microsoft should be ashamed that Word 2003 is so much faster, bug-free, and functional than the version of Word (2008) released more than 5 years later for the Mac.
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post #65 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:30pm
Man, I hate that ribbon concept. When I first learned to use a Mac, one of the first concepts was the menu at the top of the screen. It's neatly organized by category and you can always find the command you're looking for, and see the scope of the application's functionality, by glancing through a few of the menus. This approach encourages you to think rationally about the task you're trying to accomplish, what other tasks it's related to, and therefore where its command is located.

Ribbons, on the other hand, try to just put in front of you whatever the application thinks you might want to do, without regard for any relationships or hierarchy. So rather than using some modest cognitive power to find what you're looking for, you're at the mercy of the program because if what you want isn't there, there's no reliable way to find it. I feel like that's the opposite of Apple's software principle -- rather than empowering users, it makes them feel helpless.

It's the same design principle as Facebook. That site has no consistent navigational structure, it's just like "here's some friends," "here's some news items," "here's some other stuff." "When you reload the page it will all change." I can visit the site and have fun randomly clicking around, but if I want to find a specific piece of information, I usually end up going in circles.

Meanwhile, I'm a web developer and I see more and more users coming to my sites and completely ignoring the MENU which clearly lays out the site structure, and having no idea what to do if whatever they happen to be looking for isn't magically placed in front of them. I truly believe that computer literacy is decreasing and that the Microsoft/Facebook approach to interface design is the biggest culprit.

Argh!!!
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post #66 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:30pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by nycundone View Post

Does anyone know if the new version of Office will be able to offer support for key commands identical to / very similar to those offered on Windows. As a spreadsheet cruncher, the biggest downside to Excel for Mac is that so many of the functions / formatting that can be accomplished via key commands on Windows require using the mouse on a Mac.

You can attach your own keystrokes to any Office command through the "Customize" command, under the Tools menu. Open this dialog, click the "Keyboard" button, and then navigate to whatever command you want to create a keyboard shortcut.

What you can't do, which is Microsoft's fault for following Apple's UI guidelines, is navigate the menus with simple keystrokes. In WinWord, you can get to any just about any menu command in 2 or 3 keystrokes: Alt plus the menu's underlined letter, then the underlined letter for the menu option. The closest you can come to this on the Mac is activating the menus (I believe Control+F2 by default), then scrolling with the arrow keys, which is slowww... I'd love to see the Alt-key navigation added to MacWord, at least as an option.
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post #67 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:38pm
Things i'd like to see

Word:
Function within some notion of logic.

Excel:
Function, period.
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post #68 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by zindako View Post

iWork is all you need.

iWork is as worse as Microsoft in what is concerne support to RTL writting, and it is not funny that Apple ignore this market as well. Ignore or discriminate.
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post #69 of 105
4/30/10 at 1:48pm
I wish someone could explain to Microsoft that sometimes the best feature to give users is the ability to HIDE controls for features that they don't need.

I am a very happy Macbook, iPad, iPhone, and AppleTV user, but I also have to keep a JOB to pay for the fun stuff, and that means Word. Unfortunately, the 7,999 features of Word that I don't use get in the way of the three features that I DO use.

I would be perfectly content with Word 2008 if I could just get rid of every button, option, ribbon, element bar, and any other clickable spot that I don't need so that I could have more screen real estate within which to create a damn document!

Does anybody in Redmond realize that most documents are portrait and most displays are landscape? It just seems like such an obvious and easy problem to fix...

Oh well. Maybe in version 2015 we will get a word processor that just gets out of the way.
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post #70 of 105
4/30/10 at 2:10pm
The subdued the coloring, that's predominantly all they did. The remainder of their UI elements is still as excessive as always, there are enough divider lines and bars and gaps to build a 1980's Cadillac.
How Office users tolerate this I will never know? Oh that's right - they're forced to tolerate it.
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post #71 of 105
4/30/10 at 2:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigdaddyp View Post

Some. A friend just bought two dell 19" or 20" that do that. Flipped them up and put them side by side and did a split screen across them Why not just buy one big monitor? That setup is dirt cheap.
To distracting for my taste.

Good points. I was wondering why the format died. One big 16x9 monitor makes a lot more sense.
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post #72 of 105
4/30/10 at 2:18pm
Quote:
Meanwhile, Apple has established a standard Toolbar user interface for apps in Mac OS X, which allows users to customize the buttons they use, present them with or without text labels, and depict icons in large or small sizes. The company has also standardized its own apps to make heavy use of Inspector palettes. Within iWork, Apple has also introduced the Format Bar as a way to optionally present a contextually relevant strip of controls under the standard Toolbar.

That's because Cocoa and Openstep were designed with the main view to be minimal in clutter and your inspectors [with short-cut key combos] to be your area to customize when you need it.
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post #73 of 105
4/30/10 at 2:29pm
Forgive me, but today's software reviews resemble nothing so much as précis of press releases. Writers now seem to automatically accept the product on its on terms, making significant criticism unlikely. Imagine architectural criticism where the writer focused on the fountain in the lobby, barely mentioning the site of the building, its relation to the surrounding landscape, or available of transportation.

To me, the most important aspect of any application is how well it integrates with the OS and other applications I'm already using. Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for arrogant ghetto thinking, fixing what isn't broken and inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks. Both companies try to gain market share by domination rather than cooperation, and using the products of either entails and endless series of unnecessary "my way or the high way" compromises.

For example, OS X offers a common interface for accessing fonts. It allows the user to keep several thousand active all the time without clutter or confusion. Both MS and Adobe products fail to implement this, instead supplying a useless, monolithic menu from the Dawn of GUI. Ditto color pickers, spelling dictionaries, toolbar customization, and a host of similar issues. What's most important about such features is their consistency. Even if a new approach is demonstrably superior, it has to be enormously so to justify departing from a standard.

More generally, neither MS nor Adobe every met a feature they could resist, and the resultant interface is always reminiscent of some nouveau riche Long Island party girl in clown makeup who, unable to pick a coherent outfit, just wore everything in the closet 'cause Daddy said it's good marketing. The resulting user experience is like cooking in a kitchen where the refrigerator is 100 meters from the stove, with the intervening space occupied by an obstacle course of winking, blinking, chirping children's toys.

Adding a new app to one's virtual environment is like adopting a new family member. But the analogy fails in that adopting an autistic child would be a supreme act of selfless charity, but acquiring apps that can't communicate, integrate, and blend well with the whole is merely stupid.
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post #74 of 105
4/30/10 at 3:12pm
I like Office 2008. 2011 looks better. Apple's iWork is nice, but it lacks a lot of the features of Office.
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post #75 of 105
4/30/10 at 3:14pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rbryanh View Post


Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for...inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks.


Lots of Windows users feel exactly that way about iTunes.
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post #76 of 105
4/30/10 at 4:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rbryanh View Post

Forgive me, but today's software reviews resemble nothing so much as précis of press releases. Writers now seem to automatically accept the product on its on terms, making significant criticism unlikely. Imagine architectural criticism where the writer focused on the fountain in the lobby, barely mentioning the site of the building, its relation to the surrounding landscape, or available of transportation.

To me, the most important aspect of any application is how well it integrates with the OS and other applications I'm already using. Microsoft and Adobe are notorious for arrogant ghetto thinking, fixing what isn't broken and inventing their own, tediously special, product-centric ways to accomplish common tasks. Both companies try to gain market share by domination rather than cooperation, and using the products of either entails and endless series of unnecessary "my way or the high way" compromises.

For example, OS X offers a common interface for accessing fonts. It allows the user to keep several thousand active all the time without clutter or confusion. Both MS and Adobe products fail to implement this, instead supplying a useless, monolithic menu from the Dawn of GUI. Ditto color pickers, spelling dictionaries, toolbar customization, and a host of similar issues. What's most important about such features is their consistency. Even if a new approach is demonstrably superior, it has to be enormously so to justify departing from a standard.

More generally, neither MS nor Adobe every met a feature they could resist, and the resultant interface is always reminiscent of some nouveau riche Long Island party girl in clown makeup who, unable to pick a coherent outfit, just wore everything in the closet 'cause Daddy said it's good marketing. The resulting user experience is like cooking in a kitchen where the refrigerator is 100 meters from the stove, with the intervening space occupied by an obstacle course of winking, blinking, chirping children's toys.

Adding a new app to one's virtual environment is like adopting a new family member. But the analogy fails in that adopting an autistic child would be a supreme act of selfless charity, but acquiring apps that can't communicate, integrate, and blend well with the whole is merely stupid.

Best. Post. Ever.
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post #77 of 105
4/30/10 at 4:50pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cubert View Post

When is Micro$ucks ever going to replace that floppy disc "save" icon???

Well I don't think of them as $ucks, but you're right. When are they going to update that icon? Nostalgia maybe?
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post #78 of 105
4/30/10 at 5:54pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cubert View Post

Oh, and nice Star Wars reference in the title, AI.

Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: A New Hope

Are you sure this isn't
Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: The Empire Strikes Back
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post #79 of 105
4/30/10 at 6:41pm
I use MS Word to create CVs, save as PDF and then email them. I don't need Office for work so I'd like to use iWork 2009 instead.

Any risks of switching over? Anything I should know about? I don't need to open Word docs but if I do can iWork open them?
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post #80 of 105
4/30/10 at 6:53pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by success View Post

I use MS Word to create CVs, save as PDF and then email them. I don't need Office for work so I'd like to use iWork 2009 instead.

Any risks of switching over? Anything I should know about? I don't need to open Word docs but if I do can iWork open them?

Pages supported Word's DOCX format before Word for Macintosh did. However, that doesn't mean your documents will open flawlessly. Many of Word's features are not supported in Pages (forms is an obvious one, but there are plenty of formatting options unsupported). One of the nice things about the iWork apps is that there is an error viewer that will immediately show incompatibilities--both when importing Office documents (showing how the unsupported conversion was handled) and when exporting iWork documents to Office formats (also showing how the incompatibility was handled).

Another nice feature in iWork: the error viewer will also show uninstalled fonts being used, and allow you to substitute.
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