This has been a couple of weeks dealing MS Office issues without end for me and I’m now at the point of saying it’s just not worth it to me any more. On top of all of the horrible UI issues and outright bugs that are carefully documented by Pierre Igot over at the Betalogue, it’s just not sufficiently stable for me to use as a tool for managing documents professionally.
Upgrades from h*ll: I have one machine at the house that is primarily a media machine, but there’s a copy of Office installed so that my wife can use it to open up various documents from time to time. Since the last update, Office (or at least Word) doesn’t want to open anything. Double clicking on a Word document results in Word firing up, bouncing icon and all, followed by… nothing. Word is ostensibly running, but refuses to open any documents, and doesn’t send me any messages that anything’s wrong. No “this document couldn’t be opened because…”, nothing at all.
The documents are fine since they open quite happily in both Pagesand TextPad. Which is easier - rooting around in the Console looking for error logs, or just removing Office and using Pages?
Moral of the story - for basic documents, there’s absolutely no reason to use Word. The iWork suite works almost seamlessly and of the incompatibilities that I’ve encountered have more to do with the byzantine Office format that isn’t even properly respected by Microsoft on the Mac version anyway.
On the PC:
Just sticking to Office on the PC is no guarantee that things will work properly either.
Powerpoint idiocy: Aside from the sometimes bizarre UI reactions to dealing with bullets and text, last week hit the low point for me. I started from a standard corporate template using Office 2003, made a basic presentation and then sent it to a colleague. While updating the presentation, he tried to demote a bullet from the second to the third level. Except that somewhere Powerpoint became convinced that the vertical spacing ought to be something like 8cm above and below the paragraph in question. And there is absolutely no means of correcting the problem. Changing everything even vaguely associated to spacing still generates the problem.
Oddly, on my copy of Powerpoint 2003 (same version as my colleague’s) I only get the vertical spacing below the bullet, and my text is invisible. WTF? After wasting far too many hours on trying to figure out how to correct this, I copied the presentation to a USB key, opened it up in Keynoteon the Mac, where it worked exactly as expected. The best/stupidest part is that exporting back to Powerpoint seems to have corrected the problem.
Moral of the story - the best product for fixing Powerpoint problems is Keynote. So why bother with Powerpoint at all?
Learn how to fail gracefully: If I copy an item between documents and the item refers to a document property, just put a visual indicator that it’s unavailable - don’t screw up the entire layout as a result. And it would be useful to think through the situation. If you encounter an item referring to an object that doesn’t exist double clicking should give me the option of mapping to an object that does exist or creating the missing object instead of making me drive through I don’t remember how many menu, windows and tabs to get to the property I need to create.
Language issues: Lately I’m working on various documents in French and English, and for some reason, Powerpoint and Word are incapable of sticking to a choice. You can set the language for the document, for paragraph styles, for individual paragraphs and so on, but it seems that every change is not necessarily applied convincingly enough resulting in much swearing as words are highlighted as being mispelled left and right, after I’ve selected the appropriate language. Completely inconsistent.
Pseudo compatibility combined with outright bugginess just isn’t worth the headache for me any more. There was a time (circa Word 5.1-6.0) when it was a wonderfully stable product that was only slightly bloated, but still sufficiently light weight that the performance was decent. Since then it’s been nothing but downhill. In fact, I can’t think of a new feature that’s been added since Word 6 that I actually need or use.
Calendars
The only thing I’m going to miss is the iCal to Entourage to Exchange calendar synchronization, but it appears that the tools for Outlook/Google/iCal have improved immensely in the last little while, so I’m going to try and switch over to that mechanism, although it does require that I keep my XP virtual machine open a lot more of the time.
So it’s off to “How to uninstall Office” for me this evening. I’m downloading OpenOffice 3 in the hopes that it handles numbered headings better than Pages.
The only saving grace of the situation is that I bought Office Mac through a work sponsored home use program for about the cost of the media and shipping.I don’t even want to think about my state of mind if I’d paid full retail for the ensemble.