[whitedog]

mdawson accuses me of misinterpreting his posts and states that "If someone were posting an empty rant, I would be in agreement with you, but that is not the case here." In fact, there are several empty rants on this thread - and indeed they can reliably be found on any thread where Microsoft's name is mentioned.

As he explains, there are plenty of people who do depend on cross-platform compatibility in Office. Still, there is no empirical evidence of how many there are or what proportion of Office users they comprise. Criticism based on assumptions can have no more veracity than the assumptions themselves. Assumptions based on limited evidence can have no more than limited credibility.

I said at the top of my remarks that I hated to defend Microsoft - obviously there is much to dislike about how they do business. Nevertheless, that does not mean that every hateful thing said about them is true.

If Microsoft in fact ever wanted to kill the Mac, they would have rebuffed Steve Jobs' efforts to get their support when he returned to Apple years ago. Rather than doing so, they invested millions of dollars in the company at the time and signed a five year deal to provide support for Office on the Mac. And they continued that support long after the first agreement expired. Both investments have paid off handsomely for them. Why they have not developed other of their products for the Mac may be a puzzle, but I don't think the answer is that they want to drive Apple into the ground.

As for their support of Apple providing antitrust cover, that may seem obvious but is still just speculation. Yes, their Mac support is limited, but then so is their support for UNIX and LINUX. They have no obligation to support the competition, merely not to impede it. There is plenty of gray area in that equation and questions about it continue to land MS in court.

Respecting support for Virtual PC, obviously they had second thoughts about buying the product. In any case, VPC was never going to be more than a stopgap solution on the Mac. It was just too inefficient and no amount of tweaking was going to change that. It's still listed for sale by Microsoft, by the way, or was the last time I checked a few months ago.

Microsoft has certainly made many bad investments in lame or pointless products and paid out billions in anti-trust settlements, yet they still make tons of money. They must be doing something right, financially at least. Their business ethics are another matter entirely.

Again, I agree the absence of VBA support in Office '08 is a serious issue and I never said otherwise. But conspiracy theories about Microsoft's intentions shed far more heat than light on the subject. No, the Mac BU has made no commitment to bringing VBA to Office '08; yet, if there were no chance they might eventually do so, then all this noise on the subject is just flogging a dead horse. If you want your criticism to actually amount to something, then cut back on the conspiracy theories and focus your attention on the subject at hand.

[edb07]

Do not know what it is called but the box that appears in view header and footer "Footer -Section 1- Close | (X) and "Header -Section 1- | Close (X) is a real pain in a legal pleading document. They line up with the footer required for a pleading and cover it up. You cannot see what it behind it and it is difficult to change the footer. If you click the (X) box your out of the footer or header view and stuck. Tried to find a solution on Google but difficult to describe the box view. MS Help was useless as was my call to support.

Anybody else have this problem or a possible solution (except return to 2004) Thanks

[mistersquid]

I am a professor at a Midwestern college and I have been disappointed by Microsoft Word 2008 even though I haven't upgraded. This is not just a gripe about being unable to open Word 2008 documents in Word 2004.

This is about standards compliance, and it is important that Mac users reject Office 2008 just as they rejected .doc files as substitutes for HTML pages back when Internet Explorer loaded .doc files natively.

[whitedog]

mistersquid said:

I am a professor at a Midwestern college and I have been disappointed by Microsoft Word 2008 even though I haven't upgraded. This is not just a gripe about being unable to open Word 2008 documents in Word 2004.

This is about standards compliance, and it is important that Mac users reject Office 2008 just as they rejected .doc files as substitutes for HTML pages back when Internet Explorer loaded .doc files natively.

The .doc files in Internet Explorer issue was a long time ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. The big problem for Microsoft isn't going to be whether Mac users do or do not adopt Office '08. As far as standards compliance is concerned, Microsoft has much bigger fish to fry with the European Union, which continues to challenge them on this and many other fronts.

Whatever Office '08's shortcomings, it's going to be harder for Mac fans to rank on Microsoft now that Steve Jobs has announced Exchange Server compatibility for the next software update to the iPhone. Apple is finally taking the enterprise market sector seriously - which means dealing with Microsoft on a whole host of issues. I think those expecting an Apple boycott of Microsoft are going to be sorely disappointed.

[fredlf]

In the section on publishing tools, this "review" states: "you can drag and drop images and text".

Try dragging some text out of a Word doc. Admire the way it changes into a pictClipping. Oh and Ah at how this clipping pastes or drags as a graphic in other applications. Copy some text from a Word doc to the clipboard and then paste it in another app. Marvel at the way it sometimes pastes as a graphic, sometimes as editable text. Graphics aren't much better: drag in a jpeg, drag out a picture clipping. Very intuitive and useful.

Did the author of this puff piece actually try using the software he was reviewing?

After almost two decades having to work in this horrendous app, I'm sick of it. I'm starting a blog to catalog Word's faults. Feel free to stop by and post your own experiences. Will this make any difference? No, probably not. But maybe we'll feel a little better.

http://wordhurts.blogspot.com/

[jantar]

On a 1.8 ghz G5 Power PC iMac Word 2008 is very slow to start up, and keeps loosing the cursor.
I'm going back to Word 2004.
Very sad.

[bellevuefineart]

I'll have to agree that has always been an annoyance about Microsoft. Having worked there, I would hear in meetings all the time long explanations about how much work a feature would be, or how hard it would be to test etc. In other words, we would spend hours or days or months bantering back and forth about the work load. Personally, I don't care. Not my problem. Results count. I want to talk about users, scenarios, features, and usability.

It's a corporate culture thing at MS. You don't hear this with other products. You don't hear car manufacturers talk about how difficult it is to do crash tests - they talk about the safety rating of their cars.

All that being said, this isn't a bad version of Word if you don't have VB macros from an older version. Of all the office 2008 pieces, word is probably the best amongst them.

[Nogueira]

Is there a way to get rid of the Elements Gallery Bar or hide it completely?
If somebody knows a way, please post it.
Thank you.

[AlexKrenvalk]

I heard about not bad application-microsoft word text recovery, know how work with sometimes these files contain tens of pages with critical, sometimes confidential data, all operations take only several minutes and are performed in three mouse clicks, can work with .doc, .docx, .dot and .dotx files and with any version of Microsoft Word text editor, tool can recover only plain text, it means, that text formatting, graphics and all other elements will be lost, tool can recover your data from corrupted *.doc files, located on corrupted media: floppy and CD disks, flash and zip drives, etc.