Khoji On Tech (and more)

I’ve now been using Office 2008 for about five days and I’m already ready to remove it from my Mac. It is painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly bad. Either the Microsoft Mac team screwed up completely and lost all track of what they were trying to do or Microsoft is consciously trying to force users away from the Mac and back onto Windows. Possibly a little bit of both. This isn’t just my opinion — c’t, Germany’s most reputable professional computer publication, comes out very strongly and warns all users against installing Office 2008 in their new issue due to be published on Monday.

There is no speed increase, so the main reason for wanting the Intel version is already a failure right from the start. With the exception of very slightly less sluggish response while typing all the Office 2008 apps are just as slow on an Intel Mac as Office 2004. I didn’t even bother to install Entourage (thank God), but that is reputed to be just as bad. Reports from G4 and G5 Power PC Mac users say that Office 2008 is actually a lot slower there than Office 2004.

Buggy buggy buggy: Word, Excel and PowerPoint all crash frequently and auto-recover doesn’t work when they do. You just lose your work. If you use Leopard Spaces documents constantly disappear into one of your other spaces and the only way to get them back is to close and reopen. Calculations performed on fields in Word make massive math errors in forms set to use decimal commas and dot separators. Selection in Word constantly goes crazy so that you have to restart to be able to select text again.
And did I mention that everything is painfully slow? You probably need a Mac Pro to be able to work at normal office program speed.

User interface, what user interface? They couldn’t drop the menu system because of the OS X UI requirements but they didn’t want to let go of their fancy new ribbon either. The result is kind of bastardized, but if everything else worked I guess I could live with it.

Abandonment of macros and VBScript: This is even bigger than it sounds, because it means bye-bye to exchangeable Office documents between the Mac and Windows worlds. Also, all the little helpers you set up over the years stop working overnight, your productivity suddenly takes a nosedive. Microsoft claims it would have been impossible to port VB to Intel Mac, but coming from a company with Microsoft’s resources I say crap. This is a declaration of divorce, Microsoft is no longer interested in collaborating with the Mac platform, and canning VBA is their way of saying that if you want compatibility you are going to have to use Office on Windows.

More incompatibility: In addition to the removal of VBA, Microsoft’s new OpenXML format is not compatible between the Mac and Windows versions. As soon as a document contains functions not supported in the Mac version of OpenXML you can’t open or edit it properly. For example, the Mac version can’t read documents that contain formulas created in Word 2007 and Mac Excel can’t read Office 2007 worksheets with conditional formatting. You can edit the rest of the document but you just see placeholders for the bits Office 2008 can’t handle. So much for “Open” XML. Maybe this will get fixed in time, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Windows-style installation sprawl: I am told that just like big suites on Windows, Office 2008 is a pandemic that infects every nook and cranny of your Mac. If it’s really like Windows, I have a suspicion that the only way to really get rid of it will probably be to reformat your system partition and do a clean install of OS X.

All this leaves me with a kind of WTF feeling, and I can’t get rid of the suspicion that at least to a certain extent, Microsoft wants the experience to be negative. They no longer really want to encourage the use of Office on the Mac. The strongest indication of this is the removal of Macros and VBA, because that violently breaks the compatibility link between the two worlds forever. If they cared about the Mac as a platform for Office maintaining that link would have been their number one priority.