maccam
Technology Novice
I am not a heavy user of office any longer. My most common use is of Excel and Word. I have tended to use Nisus Writer Pro and more recently Pages largely because Pages is compatible with Word’s reviewing and collaborative editing tools. I have a duel processor G5 tower and G4 PowerBook; I have not noticed that Office 2008 is particularly slow once it is up and running, although start up is long and the initial release was very unstable (possibly due to the owner being mistakenly being set to user 502, rather than 501, the default admin account).
The real problems come with the lack of VBA support. I have already run up against this in Excel, in fact my Department in a University uses Excel macros in spreadsheets to process and track the grades of several hundred students. The majority of staff are Mac users, so we cannot move to Excel 2008 exclusively.
A surprising incompatibility that I have not seen reported involves PowerPoint. I present exclusively with Keynote, so I usually arrange to have my PowerBook connected to the projector. I was reporting some research at a meeting this week, and it so happened that several other speakers asked to use my laptop, one for a PowerPoint presentation and the other for an Acrobat presentation. I was surprised (well maybe not too surprised) that a PowerPoint 2004 file would not display correctly in PowerPoint 2008. The missing items were embedded Excel Graphs. VBA seems to be used by Office 2004 in the embedding process, and PowerPoint 2008 apparently does not handle the conversion of Excel Graphs. I personally advise against embedding Excel charts and tables in other applications, so this problem was in part a bad design decision by the speaker, but it is nevertheless surprising that the MBU could not do better on this.
While I am complaining, why does the MS Auto Update service take so long to identify version numbers and list the updater? No other application that I use that does version checking takes anywhere near the amount of time the MS Updater requires (I have a hard wired 100 MBit ethernet connection).
The real problems come with the lack of VBA support. I have already run up against this in Excel, in fact my Department in a University uses Excel macros in spreadsheets to process and track the grades of several hundred students. The majority of staff are Mac users, so we cannot move to Excel 2008 exclusively.
A surprising incompatibility that I have not seen reported involves PowerPoint. I present exclusively with Keynote, so I usually arrange to have my PowerBook connected to the projector. I was reporting some research at a meeting this week, and it so happened that several other speakers asked to use my laptop, one for a PowerPoint presentation and the other for an Acrobat presentation. I was surprised (well maybe not too surprised) that a PowerPoint 2004 file would not display correctly in PowerPoint 2008. The missing items were embedded Excel Graphs. VBA seems to be used by Office 2004 in the embedding process, and PowerPoint 2008 apparently does not handle the conversion of Excel Graphs. I personally advise against embedding Excel charts and tables in other applications, so this problem was in part a bad design decision by the speaker, but it is nevertheless surprising that the MBU could not do better on this.
While I am complaining, why does the MS Auto Update service take so long to identify version numbers and list the updater? No other application that I use that does version checking takes anywhere near the amount of time the MS Updater requires (I have a hard wired 100 MBit ethernet connection).
