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Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: A New Hope - Page 3

post #81 of 105
4/30/10 at 7:06pm
Since the introduction of the ribbon, Office has become very pleasant to use. Since my primary machine is a Mac, I bought iWorks along with Snow Leopard (the "Mac Box") and tried to use it everyday (especially KeyNote), but after one month I came back to the VMWare + Office 2007 (now 2010) solution.
Of course, I tried the Office suite on the Mac, I even bought it. Office 2008 is ugly, buggy, inconvenient to use and anyway does not include a lot lot of functionalities that the Windows Version has. And did I say it was ugly ? And the 2011 version does not look better so far (but I will try it as soon as possible)
I mean, I can not forgive MS for the crappy level of their Mac suite, while the Windows version is so neat. They must do that in purpose; I can picture their team meeting: "you should add some bug here, and I think this widget is a bit too polished: ask you 6-year-old child to re-design it".
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post #82 of 105
4/30/10 at 7:18pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by djames42 View Post

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.

But this is only for opening Word docs which as of now I don't need to do. I'f I'm just creating my own CVs and saving as PDF I'm good to go with iWork yeah?
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post #83 of 105
4/30/10 at 8:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii View Post

It looks like a big improvement on the '08 version. Good work!

Yes it does, but 08 is perhaps the most cumbersome program I 've used, such a bad mismatch of different interface elements. In word the simplest thing takes ages to do... I 've had to use it recently for a scientific paper, instead of pages...and good god...

The funny thing is that ms were claiming that it was apple's fault because they had to use apple's human design interface, so they did away with the ribbon and made that crap interface that they have now on the mac... and now all of a sudden, no problemo, they just stuck the ribbon underneath like they should have done so years ago. But it's always like that from microsoft they give you a piece of shit, and then they add the minimum functionality required so you will be forced to sell out your hard earned cash again.

Literally word's current interface is the worst I ve ever seen, those pointless four tabs (?) floating on top... and that you ll have to go through the work around from the system shortcuts menu to get a damn paste special, instead of the seamless paste and match style pages has.

Can't wait for the next iwork btw.
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post #84 of 105
4/30/10 at 8:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by success View Post

But this is only for opening Word docs which as of now I don't need to do. I'f I'm just creating my own CVs and saving as PDF I'm good to go with iWork yeah?

Oh yeah - My resume has been done in Pages now for years (not that I've needed it, thankfully!). Pages can export to PDF, and of course there's always the built-in print->pdf. This is how I create most of my documents at work as well.
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post #85 of 105
4/30/10 at 9:04pm
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 that it is not
Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: The Empire Strikes Back
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post #86 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:31pm
I agree whole heartedly with just about everything that's been said here so far.

As usual, M$ is a day late and a dollar short.

The UI looks atrocious... even if it is far better than the UI in 2008. But still, it shows they still just don't get it, do they? Everyone is moving to widescreen displays but they keep packing toolbars in? Don't they realize all that does is leave less room to see the document, and make it harder to find the button you're looking for? Idiots as usual.

I use iWork for just about everything I do. On the extremely rare occasions I need to swap files with a Winblows user I have VMware and XP available. Thank god I don't have to use it all that much.

I will never buy any MS product ever again. Now their products have to compete on their own merits, everyone is seeing just what a pile of steaming, stinking feces their stuff really is.
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post #87 of 105
4/30/10 at 10:48pm
I am forced to use the latest version of Word on my PC at work.
I absolutely loathe the Ribbon.

I have been using Word since it first arrived on the Mac, and use it every day at work, so I have been pretty familiar with it.

After about 18 months with this new approach, I STILL find myself searching for commands!
It was so much better when they provided menus, along with the option to load strips with your most used functions.
Why fix what ain't broke?

The busy Ribbon is SLOWER than the old menus, because I am always searching for the right icon.

I am still on Word 2004 for my Mac, and will stick with it.
I have been slowly migrating to Pages, but Word (with menus) is in my comfort zone.

I'm with the guy who said there was never a need to change Word after 5.1. I honestly cannot think of a single improvement since then.
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post #88 of 105
5/1/10 at 12:41am
Quote:
Originally Posted by yopmaster View Post

I mean, I can not forgive MS for the crappy level of their Mac suite, while the Windows version is so neat. They must do that in purpose; I can picture their team meeting: "you should add some bug here, and I think this widget is a bit too polished: ask you 6-year-old child to re-design it".

Office for OSX is like iTunes for windows

awful

Household: MacBook, iPad 16gb wifi, iPad 64gb wifi, iPad Mini 32gb, iPhone 4S 32gb, iPhone 32gb, iPod Touch 4th gen x2, iPod touch 16gb gen 2, iPod nano 16gb gen 5 x2, iPod nano gen 3 8gb, iPod...

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Household: MacBook, iPad 16gb wifi, iPad 64gb wifi, iPad Mini 32gb, iPhone 4S 32gb, iPhone 32gb, iPod Touch 4th gen x2, iPod touch 16gb gen 2, iPod nano 16gb gen 5 x2, iPod nano gen 3 8gb, iPod...

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post #89 of 105
5/1/10 at 12:48am
I can honestly say I have never heard so much bloody whining. You guys really need to grow up or get a life.
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post #90 of 105
5/1/10 at 2:26am
I used word pretty heavily writing a thesis and papers etc. up until 3 years ago and now use Pages to run a consultancy business and Keynote give lectures at university. I ditched PowerPoint when the first iWork came out and only ditched Word about 2007. I have never been happier. Pages when it first came out was too simplistic to replace word from my needs, but in the last few versions its matured into a winner.
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post #91 of 105
5/1/10 at 2:59am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Applecation View Post

I have been slowly migrating to Pages, but Word (with menus) is in my comfort zone.

Take the jump. You really might like Pages, if only for the breath of fresh air of simplicity.

Quote:
I'm with the guy who said there was never a need to change Word after 5.1. I honestly cannot think of a single improvement since then.

I might not go as far as that but certainly since Word in Office 2000, there has never been a distinct improvement in usage. Office 2000 though had the blight of the ill-received PaperClip, IIRC...
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post #92 of 105
5/1/10 at 5:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marktrek View Post

Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: A New Hope

Are you sure that it is not
Road to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: The Empire Strikes Back

It depends what they do with it but certainly hope is not a word I'd have used.

I think it just needs to be much less bloated. Almost every single Word document I get is all text and tables yet the program hogs 150-200MB of RAM for this and takes ages to open the first time. Yet if I hit spacebar on a Word file, I can see the contents instantly albeit scrambled due to Apple not decoding it right.

The floating panel does get a bit annoying too. More so than floating panels in other programs. I'd like to see an all-in-one interface like the following:



Open documents would be in a list like in the bottom right. Obviously there will be occasions that you need to compare two documents but you'd just drag it out on its own or there could be a side-by-side mode. The majority of the time, only a single window would need to be open to contain every open document.

So many times, I see people minimizing about 5 Word documents in the dock to hide the app. They should use command-h of course but a single window just makes it easier and no more floating palettes.
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post #93 of 105
5/1/10 at 7:11am
Spolier alert:

Steve Ballmer is Luke's father. This story doesn't end well.
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post #94 of 105
5/1/10 at 7:37am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cubert View Post

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

As soon as they abandon the hourglass-as-cursor
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post #95 of 105
5/1/10 at 7:40am
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?

It's called an iPad
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post #96 of 105
5/1/10 at 7:52am
What visually impaired Mac users want to know is -- will it work with VoiceOver? All previous versions of Office for Mac have not been accessible.
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post #97 of 105
5/1/10 at 8:00am
Quote:
Originally Posted by rbryanh
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.

I agree with all of this. I have noticed that when the web first started to gain momentum, there was such a sense of accomplishment among people when they put a site on the web that they threw in lots of bells and whistles JUST TO SHOW THE WORLD THAT THEY COULD.

It seems to me that MS is still stuck in a mindset of adding everything that they possibly can, while Apple has taken the distinctly opposite approach of removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary.

Considering the fact that 99% of computer users don't know enough to exploit more than 15-20% of what their computers are capable of (my opinion), it seems to me that Apple is taking the right approach.

Anyhoo...Here is my attempt to create a clean menu bar for Word 2008. It is tolerable for me, and probably enough to keep me from upgrading if I can't create something similar in the new version.

http://www.joshpix.com/public/WordBar.png
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post #98 of 105
5/1/10 at 6:42pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bwik View Post

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.

Dude that was funny, almost spit out my drink. Seriously.

Anyway yeah. I went to use Analysis Toolpak in Office 2008 last night. oh wait. 2008 doesn't have VBA. W.T.F. Talk about a downgrade, that and the fact 2008 after years of updates just barely climbed back up to the speed of 2004 under Rosetta. Wow.

I agree with the other nostalgic folks--Word 5.1 was better. 98, decent. 2001, okay. 2004, pretty good! 2008, crap, and a downgrade. 2011 looks like it'll be a cross-grade to crap with a "New Look, Same Great Taste".

But...they're adding VBA back in. GOOD! Because I actually love Excel. It's amazing what it can do. And Word even with the interface getting worse lately is still pretty nice.

I have to say for people that may want to switch from Office...I downloaded OpenOffice last week. Wow! It's actually great now. Preferences are idiotically organized such that I couldn't figure out how to turn off the autofill but nonetheless that's a cool feature. Moreover on my MBP i5 it opens in seconds, unlike on my C2D where it took a minute. Check OpenOffice out folks if you haven't in a while..
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post #99 of 105
5/2/10 at 1:52am
Quote:
Originally Posted by arlomedia View Post

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.

You don't need a driver for it. When you tilt the screen, you go into display prefs and set the rotation. The screen isn't meant to be swivelled regularly but you would turn it vertical for a word processing session or something and then switch it back. The best use is to look at portrait images - they look so much bigger than in landscape mode but that does get a bit annoying turning the display round for one picture.
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post #100 of 105
5/2/10 at 2:55am
Quote:
Originally Posted by yopmaster View Post

They must do that in purpose; I can picture their team meeting: "you should add some bug here, and I think this widget is a bit too polished: ask you 6-year-old child to re-design it".


LOFL. That's basically what they do. I already said, Office 97 for Windows was much more powerful (and stable) than Office 08 for Mac. I spent years working a 9-5 job running Excel 97 and none of Microsoft's products truly deserve the Office name.... not like their Windows product, which is excellent.

Reason? Most likely because of sabotage. Microsoft would be crazy to put out Mac Office good enough to allow serious companies or govt bureaus to run Macs.
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post #101 of 105
5/2/10 at 8:46am
We havent used MS Office for years. All our machines have been running OpenOffice ever since they brought out a native Mac version. MS Office is just an unnecessary expense
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post #102 of 105
5/2/10 at 11:52am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquatic View Post

But...they're adding VBA back in. GOOD! Because I actually love Excel. It's amazing what it can do. And Word even with the interface getting worse lately is still pretty nice.

For my needs, Excel has been so out of it's class for so long it would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

Honestly though, if it meets your needs, that's great, and more power to you.

For me though, it's crappy charting, weak statistical and mathematical functioning, and it's limited data manipulation features long ago made me jump to MATLAB. For what I do it is so much more powerful and so much easier to use, I have never looked back.

Yeah, not everyone needs to manipulate 100K spike train data points from neurophysiology experiments, or 50+ trials from an infrared reflectance eye tracker sampling at 1KHz, perform fourier series analyses, hierarchical logistic linear regressions, but I do, and for those things, Excel is a joke.
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post #103 of 105
5/3/10 at 4:59am
I like what they have done with it so far, but I would like them to go one step further and get rid of all the floating palettes. Perhaps if they were in a sidebar I would not mind so much, but you are often shuffling them around on smaller screens.

It is great to see that the formula bar in Excel has finally been incorporated. Some of the design decisions for 2008 were very strange.

The beta is available on bit torrent, but is very buggy and things like the equation editor do not work. I was able to install it parallel to 2008, so could remove it without problem. Might try on an external with a clean install.

I am pleased to see what they are doing with this. I have tried to like iWork, but it lacks so many technical features that I find it is almost useless in science and engineering.
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post #104 of 105
5/3/10 at 5:25pm
Bowser I do concur actually. The charting in Excel is kind of weird and not the most intuitive. And it's ass-ugly. It's like a turd with a little spritz of Mac Aqua on it. I usually create in Keynote then import and save in PPT.

I'll be doing stuff with lots of data, e.g., lidar, remote sensing, GIS. I'll have to look into Matlab. I've heard a lot about it and seen things produced with it that must have required a lot of power and capability in statistics and mathematical programming for lack of a better term. It runs on OS X interestingly, I will probably be checking it out for my thesis at some point.
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post #105 of 105
5/4/10 at 3:03pm
I am a consultant and work with msft office all the time. I have tried iWork but compatibility was an issue in excel, powerpoint and word. Moreover pivot tables are essential for me.

I still use iwork for personal stuff and love it. But at work sharing files with the team is critical.

The fact is that the 2008 version of msft office sucks. It's unstable, lots of compatibility issues with MSoffice for windows (Isn't it made by the same company?), doesn't have macros in excel and is very limited compared with the windows version. For the 2008 version I was expecting something better, but had just the same s***t with some nice colorful menus minus macros in excel. No innovation, no stability, no compatibility, nothing relevant.It crashes every day.

So in fact I don't really believe in the new office version. With microsoft track of vaporware I guess we will have just the same thing with some cute menus. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope so.

For the future I'm patiently waiting for apple to produce a version of iWork that will allow me to replace office and the just dump microsoft for ever.

I have already replaced msf project with Merlin and achieve the same results.

Miguel
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