How do I send an angry letter to Microsoft regarding Office 2008?

[i_like_macs]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Hello,

Well, perhaps it doesn't have to be so angry in tone, but I would like to let someone in Redmond know that what we need in future versions of Mac Office isn't ripple effects for view-change buttons, but feature parity with its Windows counterpart.

Office doesn't have to be cute and slick, I for one, am content with a perfunctory interface, as long as my professor can open my Word 2008 files in Windows Word 2003.

I digress, but if Pages had equation editor functionality, I would have jumped ship a long time ago!

 

[i_like_macs]

Is it only me who has the faint gut feeling that Office 2008 could have been designed to be crappy deliberately by Microsoft? Why else would Windows Office 2007 work much better?

Maybe the solution here is to just buy Office 2007 for and use it under Parallels.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Is it only me who has the faint gut feeling that Office 2008 could have been
designed to be crappy deliberately by Microsoft? Why else would Windows Office
2007 work much better?

Maybe the solution here is to just buy Office 2007 for and use it under
Parallels.

You can use the send feedback option in the help menu of any office
application.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Is it only me who has the faint gut feeling that Office 2008 could have been
designed to be crappy deliberately by Microsoft? Why else would Windows Office
2007 work much better?

Maybe the solution here is to just buy Office 2007 for and use it under
Parallels.

No, it is not only you. There are many conspiracy theorists who decide
emotion and baseless conjecture is always more important than facts and
reason.

 

[Bates]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Hello,

Well, perhaps it doesn't have to be so angry in tone, but I would like to let someone in Redmond know that what we need in future versions of Mac Office isn't ripple effects for view-change buttons, but feature parity with its Windows counterpart.

Office doesn't have to be cute and slick, I for one, am content with a perfunctory interface, as long as my professor can open my Word 2008 files in Windows Word 2003.

I digress, but if Pages had equation editor functionality, I would have jumped ship a long time ago!

You know, Office 2007 on the PC and Office 2008 both share a new file
format right? You know that Word 2008 can save files in the old
format right? You know that you can set it to do this by default
right?

Just because you do not want to take the time to figure out how to use
the software properly does not mean Microsoft is at fault. Microsoft
switched to this new XML format due to pressure to adopt a more open
standard and so they did.

Office 2007 and Office 2008 do in fact have a great deal of feature
parity with one notable exception which I agree was a mistake - the
elimination of VBA macros. Office 2008 does not however have "feature
parity" with the 5 year old Word 2003 for the PC. That would in fact
be foolish.

 

[i_like_macs]

Yes I am aware that Office 2007 and Office 2008 use the .docx format, which I avoid.

Most of my woes come from Word 2003 not being able to display TIFF image files created in Word 2008.

A reliable version of Word for Mac that doesn't misbehave with Spaces would be nice also.

Have a pleasant day.

 

[CyberTaz]

Aw, C'mon Bates - How about allowing a little slack

Objectively speaking, 2008 doesn't even have "feature parity* with 2003, let
alone with 2007... Even if ya throw in VBA. Word is fairly comparable in
core features, but PPt & Excel on the Mac have been so far outdistanced by
their PC counterparts that anyone relatively new to Office wouldn't even
recognize them as "siblings" if it weren't for the names.

This is an issue that has been evolving & has finally gotten to the point
that [IMHO] MS is feeling it in the pocketbook. There is always some degree
of dissention & clamor when a new version is released, but I've never seen
this level of user discontent. Even the jump from 5.1 to 6.0 didn't have the
repercussions & reactions evoked by 2008, and the tsunami dissipated to
ripples within a few months. Jeez - Adobe's transition from Pagemaker to
InDesign was a cakewalk compared to the 04/08 - PC/Mac disparity. In the
case of Office the "Pain to Gain Ratio" simply hasn't been as favorably
perceived by a large part of the market.

Everything you say is true, but nobody should have to go through contortions
of that type if the software is proclaimed to be compatible. If they're
using *Word* they're using *Word*, not "Word Lite" or "Mini-Word" or
"Semi-Word" or "WannaBe Word". But we can debate the issue for eons

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Bates]

Aw, C'mon Bates - How about allowing a little slack

Objectively speaking, 2008 doesn't even have "feature parity* with 2003, let
alone with 2007... Even if ya throw in VBA. Word is fairly comparable in
core features, but PPt & Excel on the Mac have been so far outdistanced by
their PC counterparts that anyone relatively new to Office wouldn't even
recognize them as "siblings" if it weren't for the names.

This is an issue that has been evolving & has finally gotten to the point
that [IMHO] MS is feeling it in the pocketbook. There is always some degree
of dissention & clamor when a new version is released, but I've never seen
this level of user discontent. Even the jump from 5.1 to 6.0 didn't have the
repercussions & reactions evoked by 2008, and the tsunami dissipated to
ripples within a few months. Jeez - Adobe's transition from Pagemaker to
InDesign was a cakewalk compared to the 04/08 - PC/Mac disparity. In the
case of Office the "Pain to Gain Ratio" simply hasn't been as favorably
perceived by a large part of the market.

Everything you say is true, but nobody should have to go through contortions
of that type if the software is proclaimed to be compatible. If they're
using *Word* they're using *Word*, not "Word Lite" or "Mini-Word" or
"Semi-Word" or "WannaBe Word". But we can debate the issue for eons

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

You know, Office 2007 on the PC and Office 2008 both share a new file
format right? You know that Word 2008 can save files in the old
format right? You know that you can set it to do this by default
right?

Just because you do not want to take the time to figure out how to use
the software properly does not mean Microsoft is at fault. Microsoft
switched to this new XML format due to pressure to adopt a more open
standard and so they did.

Office 2007 and Office 2008 do in fact have a great deal of feature
parity with one notable exception which I agree was a mistake - the
elimination of VBA macros. Office 2008 does not however have "feature
parity" with the 5 year old Word 2003 for the PC. That would in fact
be foolish.

Yeah all right - chalk it up to a bad day.

And to the OP's second post, it does appear that there is a TIFF file
issue between 2008 and 2003 - in fact it appears there is one between
2007 and 2003 as well from a quick google search. That being said,
having dropped TIFFs into documents before and shared them with people
using Office 2003 (including myself on my Win computer) I've
personally never had the problem. Are you saving it as a TIFF via
MDI?

 

[i_like_macs]

Hello Bates,

I hope you're doing better.

Anyhow, if it helps, I create TIFFs using either Preview or Photoshop CS3.

Have a good weekend.

 

[i_like_macs]

If it helps, I do not use any compression on my TIFFs (i.e. LZW), although it seems that's what Windows Word is complaining about (lack of decompression functionality).

 

[Bates]

If it helps, I do not use any compression on my TIFFs (i.e. LZW), although it seems that's what Windows Word is complaining about (lack of decompression functionality).

Hi again,

So, just to see, I've tried making the TIFFs in Preview, CS3, and a
couple other proprietary packages we have. All saved without LZW. I
put a TIFF into a Word doc in Word 2008 and saved as a .doc
(not .docx) and then opened on a PC running Word 2003 SP3 and all of
them opened fine. I've not tried it with earlier SP versions of Word
2003 as I don't have a computer with an earlier version.

Still not sure where the incompatibilities are coming from. I do know
that if you cut and paste the image from Preview into Word that can
causes a problem but it caused a problem back in Office 2004 as well
as it had something to do with how OSX uses Quicktime to generate the
TIFF. If I save the TIFF and import into Word no issues.

Really not sure what is going on in your situation. I work with
fairly rich documents in Word (and Excel and Powerpoint for that
matter) and have not really had any problems with sharing docs with PC
users using Office2003 with the obvious exceptions of Macros, as well
as certain features that are new in 2008.

Strange.

Bates

 

[CyberTaz]

That suggests that you're using the Drag'n'Drop or Copy/Paste method to put
the TIFF image into your doc. If so you're bypassing Word's import filters
which causes the OS X Clipboard to dump a QT variation in.

If that's the case, try using the Insert> Picture> From File method & see if
you get better results.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[i_like_macs]

I believe I have been cutting in pasting TIFFs from Preview into Word. Of course I cannot insert PDFs nowadays into Word, so this is out of the picture.

I have read on the Word MVPS site to use

Insert >> Picture

and that's what I have been doing lately, just to be safe. I'm also avoiding TIFFs like the plague, sticking to BMP and PNG image files.

Many thanks for your freely-given help.

 

[Bates]

I believe I have been cutting in pasting TIFFs from Preview into Word. Of course I cannot insert PDFs nowadays into Word, so this is out of the picture.

I have read on the Word MVPS site to use

Insert >> Picture

and that's what I have been doing lately, just to be safe. I'm also avoiding TIFFs like the plague, sticking to BMP and PNG image files.

Many thanks for your freely-given help.

Hi Again,

You can save a PDF as a TIFF (or PNG or JPG) from Preview if you
like. You can also marquee select an area on a PDF and then use
Preview to open a new document from clipboard which will just be the
selected area and then save that as a TIFF/PNG/JPG and in that case if
you Insert>>Picture the TIFF image it should not be a problem As
CyberTaz pointed out, the problem is when using Apple's Clipboard it
uses Quicktime to create a compressed TIFF which causes problems.

 

[CyberTaz]

Just to clarify further, there's nothing inherently *wrong* with TIFFs. If
you need that level of raster image quality (i.e., photos for medium to
hi-res printing) there's no reason to avoid them as long as they are
properly spec'd when created & properly inserted.

The problem is with the *technique* used to put them into the document. If
the import filters are bypassed the resulting object is - effectively & long
story short - no longer a TIFF. It gets converted based on the defaults of
the OS on which it's done & lacks much of the identifying metadata that
would be preserved by the Insert> Picture method & therefore isn't
recognizable on another platform.

The same thing can happen with *any* image file format, it's just more
prevalent with TIFFs because of their sophistication. They rely more heavily
on a larger volume of metadata in order to be interpreted accurately. IOW,
the *image* is there but the interpretive information *isn't*.

Nor is it isolated to or entirely the fault of Word. It can happen with
InDesign or QuarkXPress publications, spreadsheet files, or any others that
support embedded objects - take your pick.

Copy/Paste & Drag'n'Drop are great conveniences but you have to be judicious
in how/where & for what you use them.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac