Filed under: Software
MacBU promises Office 2008 fix
Software is a cruel mistress, and no one knows that better than the fine folks at Microsoft's Mac BU. They work hard to bring us the best Mac software they can, and yet there are some in the Mac community that won't cut them a break just because they work for Microsoft.That's why I feel for them, given the flaw that has been found in the Office 2008 for Mac installer. It would seem that the Office installer incorrectly sets some permissions on files, allowing a second local user on your Mac, i.e. a user other than the admin user installing the software, to modify the Office apps and some supporting libraries. This, of course, is not a good thing but the Mac BU has posted instructions on their blog to fix this via some Terminal commands. They also promise that an update to Office will be coming along shortly which will fix the problem for those of users who aren't comfortable in the Terminal.
A great response to an unfortunate mistake, but something tells me TUAW commenters will not be kind to our friends at the Mac BU.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Rob said 8:05AM on 1-26-2008
I've got nothing but respect for the Mac BU team. Without them, I'd have to use an alternative. I cannot stand Pages or OpenOffice and feel more comfortable using Office. They put out good software for us and I'm thankful.
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Howard Jeffrey said 8:10AM on 1-26-2008
Well aren't I the dope. Silly me. I bought and installed Office 2008 immediately and, outside of the VM disappearance, like it a lot.
But this little issue is not so little. Hopefully they will have an update to us immediately....
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Larson said 8:17AM on 1-26-2008
This should have been caught before but it's not like they aren't going to fix it. And yeah they might work for Microsoft but they're still programming for Macs.
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W.R. said 8:32AM on 1-26-2008
Already found a bug in Excel as well, triggerd by nothing more than cutting and pasting some data from a spreadsheet into a Word document and then deleting the row that the data came from in Excel. Caused a crash of Excel every time.
In good news though, Entourage seems to look and behave better.
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Jared said 8:36AM on 1-26-2008
Too bad they're not fixing the solver issue in Excel as well. I appreciate the MacBU as much as the next person but omitting VBA and the Solver function (critical to processing large, spreadsheet-based models) is probably the biggest to-do as far as the larger business community is concerned.
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ramond said 9:00AM on 1-26-2008
Maybe they could fix expose in Word aswell? What they really need is a forum where we can discuss our problems.
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cain said 9:14AM on 1-26-2008
I would love if they had a road map forward.
Are they going to rewrite the VBA compiler or write a .NET compiler for Universal Binaries?
I have had crashes in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Is there a easy way to communicate the issues?
When it works it is great, but when it fails it horrible.
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Andrew said 9:20AM on 1-26-2008
I can't believe that Office 2008 doesn't support VBA macros in Excel! This means I can't run many excel documents from the office. Instead of installing Offic 2008, I'll run a windows version through boot camp.
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DJCarbon43 said 10:55AM on 1-26-2008
Which is exactly what M$ wants...
Ken Cohen said 9:45AM on 1-26-2008
As a general rule, I never expect newly released software to be perfect - I assume there will be problems, including some serious ones, so I avoid it until at least the first bug-fix version appears. The more complex the software (i.e. MS Office, OS X 10.5, many Adobe apps), the more likely there will be serious flaws in the first release. So, give them a chance, folks - if they didn't release the software until it was perfect, we'd never see it.
As for the lack of VBA, it's unfortunate but I understand their position. Alternatives: Office 2007 (???), Office 2004, try the Automator functions in Office 2008, learn Applescript.
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Mark S said 9:47PM on 1-26-2008
I know this isn't a solution for most people, but an alternative would be to use the current version of NeoOffice as it has support for Office macros still.
I hope that within the coming year the Mac BU will be able to add support for Visual Basic back into Office. It would be pretty cool to have AppleScript and VBA support together.
sageimac said 9:51AM on 1-26-2008
Now that Macs have Intel chips, will MS Office for Mac ever include Access?
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jason mark said 9:59AM on 1-26-2008
Ramond said:
> Maybe they could fix expose in Word aswell? What they really need is a forum where we can discuss our problems.
I've had a few problems in office, and just gone to their site and reported the problems and they've had GREAT followup. Better than ANY other software in terms of:
* Polite (even when the problem turned out to be user error in at least one instance)
* Knowledgable
* Talking english, instead of geek speak.
* Follow-up - they followed up often, and made 100% sure I was satisfied before closing the ticket. I've worked with many other companies where their support thinks that if the email back a snooty "that's by design you idiot" sort of email, they can close the ticket, and get on with their day, but that's NOT my experience with MBU at all... :)
In my world, tech support like that is 100% better than a forum any day. With one issue they escalated it and got a developer involved, and we worked together to reproduce it.
Assuming you have a purchased copy, you should just contact them...
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Podymouth said 10:13AM on 1-26-2008
Expose in word 2008 is SUPER-DUPER F'd up. This makes me wonder if they ever hit F9 in all of their bug testing This is a terrible bug, and one of the worst because its so obvious and causes window draw errors all over. (try notebook view)
Jon said 10:03AM on 1-26-2008
In re Access: be careful of what you wish for...
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MoonMan said 10:07AM on 1-26-2008
I can't say that I'm at all impressed with Office 2008 for Mac. I was hoping to see a significant performance increase on my MacBook Pro over Office 2004, since it now runs natively on the Intel processesors. But instead, Microsoft has chosen to bloat the software, and all I have now is another Microsoft pig that runs slow on my MacBook Pro.
Let's not forget to mention it's more unstable than Office 2004, as I have had Excel crash on my numerous times. It seems Excel can't handle actually having more than one spreadsheet open at a time.
All in all, I cannot recommend 2008. It's not worth it, as there is no improvement in the quality or speed.
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Jason Alexander said 10:16AM on 1-26-2008
Well, that's yet another reason why I will certainly not be shelling out the money for Outlook on the Mac.
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Brian Reed said 10:57AM on 1-26-2008
I really like Office. Tried using Pages and Numbers, but each had too many quirks to viably replace Office.
But wow, does Office bring some quirks of its own. It's not entirely compatible with Spaces, and Office has broken Final Draft's ability to export a readable RTF. I'm an ex-software tester, so I've done every install/re-install/clean machine thing there is to do, and it's definitely a post-Office install issue since before Office gets near a Mac, FD exports to RTF just fine.
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geeksinlove said 11:16AM on 1-26-2008
Office Mac 2008:
- Unusably slow on a G5 (I can outtype it, take forever to load)
- Just plain slow on a MacBook
- Word spellchecking is badly broken (skips errors, crashes)
- Excel is so slow, even on a MacBook, that it seems slower than v2004 in emulation. Wait! According to xlr8yourmac, Excel 2008 on a MacBook is 4 times slower than Excel 2004.
- The app icons make me want to gag.
I'll gladly forgive them for the screwed-up permissions. Not for the above. I've removed it from both my Macs. I have better uses for a Gig of HD space :-(((
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cambridgeJason said 11:48AM on 1-26-2008
I ordered Office 2008 months ago from Microsoft directly and still haven't received it. Has anyone else gotten scammed by by their "Buy Office 2004, Get Office 2008 Free" campaign? They suckered me into purchasing the old version over Thanksgiving and since emailed me multiple times letting me know it's delays ('till late February). If you don't respond to their emails to confirm that you're still interested despite the delay then you lose the deal -- it's all very shady!
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