It is with great frustration that I find myself using Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. After years of putting up with the sluggish Office 2004, loyal users are rewarded with this piece of garbage. Though there are admittedly some improvements in the apps themselves, there is some inexcusable bugginess in the interface that is driving me nuts.

Microsoft Word is the biggest culprit so far. It generally misbehaves with Spaces. Windows will relocate to a new space for no good reason. Sometimes windows will not come to the foreground when clicked. This is not a general problem with Spaces, but is unique to Word as best I can tell.

Excel is giving me a rather unique problem at the moment. I have an external monitor hooked up to my MacBook. When I put an Excel window on the external monitor, it won’t let me drag it to the top of the screen. It only lets me drag it as far as the top of my internal screen, which is only about 2/3 of the way up the (larger) external display.

Microsoft tried to add new functionality by pop-up ribbons in both applications, but I have yet to find anything useful hidden in these interface monstrosities.

The educational version of Office also fails to connect to Microsoft’s own Exchange servers. Given the prevalence of Exchange use at academic institutions, this is mind-boggling.

The last complaint is admittedly not a bug, but rather a foolish feature restriction. The former issues are completely inexcusable and are likely completely due to Microsoft’s non-standard development practices. Add to this the fact that the apps are slow to launch, and I think there will rapidly be an emerging market for non-MS office apps.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 8:33 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.