If you want proof, open a semi-complex Word document in TextEdit right now. Apple claimed in Tiger that TextEdit (and other Cocoa applications) can open Office documents "seamlessly". Yet when I open a Word document in TextEdit that my coworkers gave me, it looks like somebody threw up on the screen. Even the Table of Contents is mangled beyond recognition. TextEdit outright ignores most of the document and mangles the remaining 20%. You can bet that Leopard's support of Office 2007 will be the same.
...
There seem to be two issues at play here. It is true that neither Text Edit nor Pages is 100% compatible with Word. This usually results in Text Edit's not displaying embedded graphics or a similar problem. The document is still readable. If your colleagues are giving you documents which look as bad as you describe, it is likely that they never learned to properly format electronic documents.
Back in the 1980's, there was a popular book entitled The Mac in not a Typewriter. It should be the basis of a required course for many of my Windows-using colleagues. I suspect that your colleagues need such a course, as well.
There seem to be two issues at play here. It is true that neither Text Edit nor Pages is 100% compatible with Word. This usually results in Text Edit's not displaying embedded graphics or a similar problem. The document is still readable. If your colleagues are giving you documents which look as bad as you describe, it is likely that they never learned to properly format electronic documents.
Back in the 1980's, there was a popular book entitled The Mac in not a Typewriter. It should be the basis of a required course for many of my Windows-using colleagues. I suspect that your colleagues need such a course, as well.
And this is why everything should just be exported as a PDF to begin with.... -_-
Look at the templates they demo! They are stolen right from Pages - even the Latin placeholding text!!! They even use the same phrase, "Lorem Ipsum Dolor", as Apple does in Pages!
Look at the templates they demo! They are stolen right from Pages - even the Latin placeholding text!!! They even use the same phrase, "Lorem Ipsum Dolor", as Apple does in Pages!
Megashaft's MBU needs to realize they will not be making software within 2 years. (Or rather, will not be making a profit.)
Someone needs to tell them that Parallels just made running a contrived, ubertwitchy, bloated, 500% slower, ineffective, impaired, zombie-PDF making version of Office completely unnecessary.
What complete shit - is that a floppy drive they are still using for the "save" icon? Jesus, I think MS hit a new low - which is quite impressive in itself.
Trust me that is not disgruntled. A part of that was a joke, though the UI is really... words escape me it is that bad!
To be honest about the MacBU, They are the absolute pit of sewers in the corporate eye. During my tenure there, I honestly never once saw any equal treatment to the group despite the profitability. Also, I am sure things are still the same and the group does not have "permission" to truly innovate the product and bring to where it should be.
Pilya
Everyone who has watched/used office:mac at all knows that the MacBU was established/kept in the mid-90s to take the heat off of MS and the anti-trust thing and the minute their current deal runs out hey will be gone from the platform.
They said like last year or mayb e 2 years ago that they were committed for 5 years, that means, assuming another 4 year refresh cycle, we may never see Office:Mac updated past '08.
They said like last year or mayb e 2 years ago that they were committed for 5 years, that means, assuming another 4 year refresh cycle, we may never see Office:Mac updated past '08.
Sounds wonderful!!
But only if Apple:
1. Does the rumored split-personality of Pages, so it can look more like a word processor
2. Allows Pages to open and save Word documents (instead of just import and export)
3. Does the same things for Keynote and Charts/Numbers/Whatever
The screenshots don't do the new UI justice. After seeing the demo at the Microsoft booth in person, i am really looking forward to the new edition of Office.
From what was shown, the new "elements gallery" is very slick. When opening and closing, it even uses a nice transition effect. The templates and "elements" can be re-arranged like icons in the Dock; the category "pills" above the "elements" can be slided to the right or left like you can with Favorites in Safari. When done using the elements gallery, you can just close it with a single click, again with the same slick transition.
While not mentioned in the presentation, it looks like Word has *finally* integrated the toolbar with the application window. This seems to be the trend these days and the results are clean. With the icon and text labels, it feels Apple-ish and makes the icons easier to understand. I'm speculating that they will go even further with the unified toolbar look if Leopard makes that standard.
I also noticed that they now feature the Inspector as does other newer programs. Again, it looks like Office is deliberately moving toward a more Mac look-and-feel.
The My Day widget looks very promising too. The screenshots show it with too much transparency so you can see too much of the background. The presentor was able to go to the preferences and change the degree of transparency, which is nice feature. Another cool feature of My Day is you can just enter a "task" into My Day and it just sends it to Entourage.
The demo at the booth was only 10 minutes but it was packed with people. Like many others I wished they showed more. In particular, i was hoping to see the presenter click on the Charts buttons. Considering what they showed is still work-in-progress, I'm sure the final product and the rest of the Office will be great! I can't wait to get the universal versions of Creative Suite and Office on my machine!
The screenshots don't do the new UI justice. After seeing the demo at the Microsoft booth in person, i am really looking forward to the new edition of Office.
Any Idea how good it will look on my Macbook's 13.3" screen?
I've been using Google Docs for awhile now. Sure it's not as robust as Word or Open Office and requires an internet connection, but for my basic needs it's perfectly fine. I've never used 95% of WOrd's features, anyway.
"With Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, we focused on what our users want the most -- compatibility with PCs, along with unique features for their Mac experience," Roz Ho, general manager for the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU).
So "compatibility with PCs" is the reason why they are dropping support for VB macros? And how about full support for Exchange server features in Entourage? Is it the lack of these features that make their Mac experience "unique"?
I actually feel for the Mac devs at MS. Their apps used to be pretty good, and still are of course the lingua franca for file exchange (not that they should be, just talking about in practice). But developing in Carbon must suck and they really must reconsider that after this version. Cocoa in Xcode is where its at and where it's all going to be. Considering the farce surrounding their dumping visual basic in Mac Office (which really screws a bunch of people as talked about in comments here) and the recent antics going on with the .docx etc. converter for Office 2007 files, you'd think they realise that their long term struggle is only ever going to get worse if they keep going where they have been.
Office 2007 is an advance on the Windows side, but what I'm seeing of Word 2008 at least does not give me much hope. I do want to give the MacBU the benefit of the doubt though, because having tried Pages with some real life work, my faith in iWork is far from complete. Apple's typical secrecy around its development really doesn't help. And for all you may or may not think about MS's style of UI and so forth, their apps are going to be used professionally in a way that Apple's iWork is not for a few years to come.
Nice ideas about a file database / iTunes inspired office app by the way. A code shop out there could be well advised to take that maxim and create their own up to date, robust, and responsively developed productivity app. I know a few prospective buyers including myself. For such an old genre, there's a world still left for improvement!
Comments
But I guess that would make it look like Pages.
....
If you want proof, open a semi-complex Word document in TextEdit right now. Apple claimed in Tiger that TextEdit (and other Cocoa applications) can open Office documents "seamlessly". Yet when I open a Word document in TextEdit that my coworkers gave me, it looks like somebody threw up on the screen. Even the Table of Contents is mangled beyond recognition. TextEdit outright ignores most of the document and mangles the remaining 20%. You can bet that Leopard's support of Office 2007 will be the same.
...
There seem to be two issues at play here. It is true that neither Text Edit nor Pages is 100% compatible with Word. This usually results in Text Edit's not displaying embedded graphics or a similar problem. The document is still readable. If your colleagues are giving you documents which look as bad as you describe, it is likely that they never learned to properly format electronic documents.
Back in the 1980's, there was a popular book entitled The Mac in not a Typewriter. It should be the basis of a required course for many of my Windows-using colleagues. I suspect that your colleagues need such a course, as well.
There seem to be two issues at play here. It is true that neither Text Edit nor Pages is 100% compatible with Word. This usually results in Text Edit's not displaying embedded graphics or a similar problem. The document is still readable. If your colleagues are giving you documents which look as bad as you describe, it is likely that they never learned to properly format electronic documents.
Back in the 1980's, there was a popular book entitled The Mac in not a Typewriter. It should be the basis of a required course for many of my Windows-using colleagues. I suspect that your colleagues need such a course, as well.
And this is why everything should just be exported as a PDF to begin with.... -_-
Sebastian
Incredible gall.
Look at the templates they demo! They are stolen right from Pages - even the Latin placeholding text!!! They even use the same phrase, "Lorem Ipsum Dolor", as Apple does in Pages!
Incredible gall.
I hope you're joking about the "Lorem Ipsum."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
May I be the first to say: looks like a nice UI!
May I be the first to say: looks a little like iPhone UI.
Someone needs to tell them that Parallels just made running a contrived, ubertwitchy, bloated, 500% slower, ineffective, impaired, zombie-PDF making version of Office completely unnecessary.
MBU isn't dead; it just smells funny.
Trust me that is not disgruntled. A part of that was a joke, though the UI is really... words escape me it is that bad!
To be honest about the MacBU, They are the absolute pit of sewers in the corporate eye. During my tenure there, I honestly never once saw any equal treatment to the group despite the profitability. Also, I am sure things are still the same and the group does not have "permission" to truly innovate the product and bring to where it should be.
Pilya
Everyone who has watched/used office:mac at all knows that the MacBU was established/kept in the mid-90s to take the heat off of MS and the anti-trust thing and the minute their current deal runs out hey will be gone from the platform.
They said like last year or mayb e 2 years ago that they were committed for 5 years, that means, assuming another 4 year refresh cycle, we may never see Office:Mac updated past '08.
They said like last year or mayb e 2 years ago that they were committed for 5 years, that means, assuming another 4 year refresh cycle, we may never see Office:Mac updated past '08.
Sounds wonderful!!
But only if Apple:
1. Does the rumored split-personality of Pages, so it can look more like a word processor
2. Allows Pages to open and save Word documents (instead of just import and export)
3. Does the same things for Keynote and Charts/Numbers/Whatever
From what was shown, the new "elements gallery" is very slick. When opening and closing, it even uses a nice transition effect. The templates and "elements" can be re-arranged like icons in the Dock; the category "pills" above the "elements" can be slided to the right or left like you can with Favorites in Safari. When done using the elements gallery, you can just close it with a single click, again with the same slick transition.
While not mentioned in the presentation, it looks like Word has *finally* integrated the toolbar with the application window. This seems to be the trend these days and the results are clean. With the icon and text labels, it feels Apple-ish and makes the icons easier to understand. I'm speculating that they will go even further with the unified toolbar look if Leopard makes that standard.
I also noticed that they now feature the Inspector as does other newer programs. Again, it looks like Office is deliberately moving toward a more Mac look-and-feel.
The My Day widget looks very promising too. The screenshots show it with too much transparency so you can see too much of the background. The presentor was able to go to the preferences and change the degree of transparency, which is nice feature. Another cool feature of My Day is you can just enter a "task" into My Day and it just sends it to Entourage.
The demo at the booth was only 10 minutes but it was packed with people. Like many others I wished they showed more. In particular, i was hoping to see the presenter click on the Charts buttons. Considering what they showed is still work-in-progress, I'm sure the final product and the rest of the Office will be great! I can't wait to get the universal versions of Creative Suite and Office on my machine!
The screenshots don't do the new UI justice. After seeing the demo at the Microsoft booth in person, i am really looking forward to the new edition of Office.
Any Idea how good it will look on my Macbook's 13.3" screen?
Sebastian
"With Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, we focused on what our users want the most -- compatibility with PCs, along with unique features for their Mac experience," Roz Ho, general manager for the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU).
So "compatibility with PCs" is the reason why they are dropping support for VB macros? And how about full support for Exchange server features in Entourage? Is it the lack of these features that make their Mac experience "unique"?
In case you're not...
That is so cool--thanks for the education...
Office 2007 is an advance on the Windows side, but what I'm seeing of Word 2008 at least does not give me much hope. I do want to give the MacBU the benefit of the doubt though, because having tried Pages with some real life work, my faith in iWork is far from complete. Apple's typical secrecy around its development really doesn't help. And for all you may or may not think about MS's style of UI and so forth, their apps are going to be used professionally in a way that Apple's iWork is not for a few years to come.
Nice ideas about a file database / iTunes inspired office app by the way. A code shop out there could be well advised to take that maxim and create their own up to date, robust, and responsively developed productivity app. I know a few prospective buyers including myself. For such an old genre, there's a world still left for improvement!
That is so cool--thanks for the education...
Wikipedia is everyone's friend.