Office X is such a POS Arrrggghhh!!!
For once I thought I'd give Office X a chance, and try to get some real work done on it. Oh My God what a horrible Piece of Sh*t!!! Arrrggghhh...
I am trying to update a Word document from Office for Windows (Office 2000 which shares a common format with Office X) with a large table and am encountering all sorts of weirdnesses and obstacles, when I had exactly zero problem on the PC:
- extremely slow display: the window also keep refreshing every time I make a change or trying moving the cursor
- extremely slow and blocky scrolling
- unresponsive mouse clicks: often I need to click twice to get the scrolling arrow buttons to become active.
- 20% CPU usage in idle state. Add that to the 15% of iTunes (4) and u get 35%-40% CPU usage doing close to nothing (listening to music)... how pathetic is that???
- in Normal View and to a lesser extent in Page View, the window displays starts showing some "tear" as I type and/or scroll... can't get any frigging work this way!
- slow slow slow: takes a full second to paste a block of text into a table cell (!!), takes 2-3 seconds for document window to come to the foreground when doing an alt-tab back to Word
- ugly font display: claims to be using Quartz but somehow I am not convinced. The text looks rather ugly at small sizes (8/10).
- and on and on and on
I am doing this on an iBook 700, with 640 MB RAM.
If I took time away from continuing my work to write this piece, that should tell you how frustrating of an experience it was.
Why oh why is the state of so many OS X applications oh so pathetic??
I am trying to update a Word document from Office for Windows (Office 2000 which shares a common format with Office X) with a large table and am encountering all sorts of weirdnesses and obstacles, when I had exactly zero problem on the PC:
- extremely slow display: the window also keep refreshing every time I make a change or trying moving the cursor
- extremely slow and blocky scrolling
- unresponsive mouse clicks: often I need to click twice to get the scrolling arrow buttons to become active.
- 20% CPU usage in idle state. Add that to the 15% of iTunes (4) and u get 35%-40% CPU usage doing close to nothing (listening to music)... how pathetic is that???
- in Normal View and to a lesser extent in Page View, the window displays starts showing some "tear" as I type and/or scroll... can't get any frigging work this way!
- slow slow slow: takes a full second to paste a block of text into a table cell (!!), takes 2-3 seconds for document window to come to the foreground when doing an alt-tab back to Word
- ugly font display: claims to be using Quartz but somehow I am not convinced. The text looks rather ugly at small sizes (8/10).
- and on and on and on
I am doing this on an iBook 700, with 640 MB RAM.
If I took time away from continuing my work to write this piece, that should tell you how frustrating of an experience it was.
Why oh why is the state of so many OS X applications oh so pathetic??
Comments
Tables do not translate properly between Mac and Windows using Office X, nor Office 2001. I've been "nearly" been screwed on Powerpoint presentations because of this (trying to do a Mac-created presentation on a Wintel--always check the night before). The ONLY logical explanantion I can think of is that Micro$oft is intentionally giving it to Mac users over a barrel.
Word X is full of totally bizzare bugs. I constantly lose menu items. For example, "insert page break" suddenly vanished from it's rightful place in the pulldown menu, along with several other commands. NOTHING would restore the menus to their default configurations except for wiping Office X from my HD and doing a reinstall. I tried deleting preferences, and all the other BS that M$ strews around my HD, but only a complete reinstall would fix the problem. Yeah, I was fscking pissed off that I couldn't have ended it with wiping Office X from my system, but I need it for compatibility reasons.
I don't have these sorts of problems with any other OS X app, or even Classic apps (sans Office 2001).
Actually, I find that "so many" Mac OS X applications are pretty good. Most of the ones I use on a typical day are fantastic. Mail, iTunes, Safari, OmniWeb 4.5, Hydra, Final Cut Pro, Snapz Pro, Cinema 4D -- these are just a handful of the apps I use regularly that perform fantastically on Mac OS X.
It's just the big stragglers like Office that make the apps look bad overall. I believe you'll find that most of the apps that are poor performers are those that are Carbon "ports" from OS9.
Note that this does NOT reflect badly on Carbon itself. Carbon is great. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are Carbon, for example. The problem is just that developers like Microsoft aren't up to speed (or too lazy?) with updating and optimizing the Carbon code for operations in Mac OS X. Remember that there can be a LOT of legacy code in Carbon apps since many can be backwards compatible and run in Mac OS 9. They just need to get on task and write some clean OSX-only Carbon code.
For what it's worth, I find Office v.X to be one of the best "worst" Carbon ports. It looks fairly nice (something many "bad" Carbon apps can't even pull off) but as you mentioned the performance is sub-par in many areas.
Here's one trick for you:
The reason it eats up idle CPU is due to the live spell and grammar checking. Turn these off in the preferences and you'll find the constant CPU usage will drop.
It uses a method called ATSUI that uses Quartz antialiasing with QuickDraw metrics.
Here's a page that partly explains this:
Quartz anti-aliasing: Jaggies be gone! but at what price?
Originally posted by Brad
Add to the list "it can't save files with more than 31 characters in the name".
That drives me crazy. I have to ask, what's the point of porting it to X, when it can't even do this basic thing? Photoshop does, and it's Carbon. We had to rename many of my wife's file when I threw out, er, when she switched from her old PC to her TiBook. Dumb.
And the worst thing is, everything the MBU sneezes journalists everywhere hop on the "yes, MS is evil, but Office:mac is really incredible!" bandwagon.
It's not incredible. It's never been incredible. It's the only option for a lot of people, but that's the best that can be said for it. Blech. All the MBU seems to be able to manage is a slightly more competent application of lipstick on the same old sow every other year.
I hate it.
Office: X hasn't crashed on me at all since 10.2.6, and while it's a little slow, I wouldn't consider it terrible.
Supposedly Microsoft helped Apple fish more bugs out of OS X than any other single vendor. They also pushed Apple into merging some of the Carbon and Cocoa stuff.
Originally posted by Hassan i Sabbah
It is an obese, belly-wobbling, ketchup-stained wifebeater, this Microsoft Office X. Its weird bugs piss me off. I can make it crash at will. Try opening multiple documents of any decent size.
I hate it.
Try not to repress your inner feelings. Tell us how you really feel.
BTW: My wife wants to beat Office whenever she starts experiencing random crashes in Word and Entourage.
smoothly.
Still, hoping for a new Apple replacement so I can be Microsoft free.
Office SEX!!!!
The Windows folks get the special fetish version:
Office Sex Pee! Ewwww.
But seriously...Office X sucks pretty bad.
edit: is this a family forum? Mods, you may edit or delete this post if you wish.
Or are you just gonna blow-off future Office X patches, screw us all and release Office 11 and charge us again?
"Gee look at that neat product packaging, the MBU sure 'thinks diffrent', huh guys?"
Here is an idea: let's car-bomb a certain building in Redmond.
Clarus Jihad!
(OK, I really need to go to yoga class. Bad.)
Sales will come when/if they release a product that deserves the asking price.
BTW, turning off the sounds in Office helps the speed immensely.
Concerning Quartz fuzziness, I think that this is generally a problem in OS X, not just in Office. Further, I think that 10.2, if anything, is worse in this regard than 10.1. Has anyone else noticed that Jag has made fuzziness worse, or is it just my imagination? Regardless, I really think that Apple has to work on Quartz a bit more. I hope that 10.3 provides an improvement.
Finally, I have just switched from Mail to Entourage. I found Mail a bit limited, but I must admit that so far, I am not jumping up and down with joy about Entourage. Has anyone found a OS X mail application that they really like?
Also, I've found that fonts can look much darker than they should if on uncalibrated displays. you might should go through the ColorSync options and play around with the controls.
I, for one, think Apple's antialiasing is the best yet. It puts Classic's and Microsoft's "font smoothing" to shame.
Originally posted by Brad
The overall Quartz rendering has not changed significantly since the Public Beta. However, in 10.2, Apple introduced the option to use subpixel antialiasing for LCD screens. You might should look into this if you don't like the default setting.
Also, I've found that fonts can look much darker than they should if on uncalibrated displays. you might should go through the ColorSync options and play around with the controls.
I, for one, think Apple's antialiasing is the best yet. It puts Classic's and Microsoft's "font smoothing" to shame.
Don't get me wrong. I love OS X and think that Quartz produces great displays in many cases. However, the fuzziness is not just my imagination (even if, based on your post, it is my imagination that 10.2 is worse in this regard).
I still hope that there is room for improvement, but perhaps there is only so much Apple can do with pixels of a given size on screen.
It's a bit like the metric system vs the imperial system. One's more nature based, and one's more scientific.
I like knowing that what you see on a pixel is the average colour in that .01"x.01"* area.
Barto
*I hate the use of imperial mesurements for technical items...