OK, I've got the feedback tool working, but it isn't as good as I was
expecting. I can't submit something as a bug to get it straight to the product
team.
Where do you think it goes? I was taking to the lady who has to read it all
yesterday (and her boss). Her command of bad language has improved quite a
bit since taking the job. Her boss's language was always pretty bad...
This equations business is getting worse. I just effectively lost 12 pages of
course notes because Word now cannot recover the underlying equation objects
for most of my work. All I have are the blurry image representations which I
take it are fallbacks.
Yes, they are. If you double-click the equation, Word will re-find the
underlying equation object and re-instate it. You will have better luck
with this on a PC than you will in Mac Word, currently.
If you save back to .doc format, the original code is stripped, and after
that you can't restore the equation. So stay in .docx.
This product is so buggy, it's disgusting. This is not what I paid for.
Yeah. They know. They're fixing it as fast as they can.
As an engineering student, I often have to build things. You get the specs,
you work it out, and you build something to fit the customers requirements. If
I produced something this unreliable on my course, I'd fail it. I have exams
from next week, and what I don't need is having to go back and rewrite every
equation.
{Giggle} I know how you feel. However, by the time you become an
"engineer" you will deeply understand that life is not that simple
In
engineering disciplines we have a couple of sayings that you will use all
your career (if you haven't begun already):
* Smaller, Better, Cheaper, Sooner: Pick any three!
* You can't make a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
As engineers, you and I will always be working for a Bean Counter and a
Marketing Droid. Neither will ever have a clue what it takes to make a
quality product. Or even be capable of recognising one when they get it.
But each of them will insist that you make something that doesn't work
properly and release it before it is ready. And when you point out to them
that they just pooched the product beyond all recognition,
They will look affronted and try to blame you for the mess.
Let me give you a tip that may help you avoid making a Microsoft Office 2008
during your career: "Marketing droids and bean-counters cannot hear ANY
form of "maybe"." They mentally turn anything other than a "no" into a
"yes". But it's YOU who will get fired when it fails to come true.
Remember this
Never answer a question immediately: "I'll run up an estimate for you and
get back to you!" "But do you think it's possible?" "No. Not without an
estimate. Definitely not."
If you can learn to say a variation of that every time, you will have a long
and secure career
Word is a critical application for most people that use it - reliability is a
must. Adding features is secondary. I don't want to sound like a mad heckler,
but the number of bugs I'm experiencing with this software is just staggering!
And when I read the mac team's blog, and see them highlighting such
insignificant features as the availability of different skins in notebook
view, I get the feeling that the product team is living in an alternate
universe, and that I wasted my money.
Hang in there. Things will look a lot different by June. There are several
announcements coming. Watch that blog: things have changed
Cheers
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:
http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:
[email protected]