Subject: Re: Australian Mac fans: what's wrong with MS Office for Mac?
From: "Martin Crisp" <deleted>
Newsgroups: aus.computers.mac, comp.sys.mac.advocacy, comp.sys.mac.apps

Sorry for the length of this, but when asked to vent....

On Fri, 5 Dec 1997 12:47 PM, David Flynn <deleted> wrote:
> The 'Icon' section of the Sydney Morning Herald is preparing a small
> preview of Microsoft's Office 98 for the Mac (although we're currently
> running under an NDA, so we can't say too much].
>
> We'd like to hear from Sydney or NSW Mac users (pref Icon readers, at
> that) about what you feel is wrong with the current version of Office
> for the Mac.

Well, I'm not any of those things. I read a couple of articles from an on-line
copy of Icon, decided it was a waste of space (for me, I don't feel
I'm part of the target audience) and went elsewhere.

> The best one or two quotes will be printed, with your permission, in
> the item.
>
> Please email your words of wisdon to wordsmith@msn.com.

> David Flynn
> Journalist, IT and Icon
> The Sydney Morning Herald [www.smh.com.au]

You're under an NDA to Microsoft? And your email address is @msn.com?
What conspiracy theory? (Anyone got Mr Littlemore's email address handy?)

But to your question:
Would you like that list in alphabetical order? Or something more
nonsensical (like, say, the way most of Office is laid out, in which case
click randomly in your scroll bar while reading, you'll get the idea)?

First an explanatory paragraph (this thing's so long an extra fifty words
or so won't make any difference now). I've owned 3 different macs over the
course of the last 12 years or so. I ran Microsoft Products through choice
on the first one, and on successive machines because by then I had
employment which involved using and supporting them. These days I spend
much of my time supporting users of microsoft products on both macs and
PCs. Where issues of speed are concerned the PC product is head and
shoulders above the mac product (even on macs which are much faster than
the same PCs in other applications), in all other areas they are pretty
much equal - equally stable, which is to say 'not very'; equally friendly,
also 'not very', and equally onerous - VERY.

A is for apple menu - why does office 4.2.x reinvent it (and the help menu)
with the 'office manager' (and cause innumerable bugs & complementary
patches)?

B is for behemothic - come on guys, I know HD prices are low but really,
80MB+ for an office suite, with substandard tools like the orgchart thing,
is ridiculous.

C is for choke - what it does to system resources, responsiveness &
stability. [I can run my work mac for weeks on end (I usually use word on
the PC next to it - it's much younger & faster) until I decide to run word
or excel on the mac, assuming it survives to the end of the session I can
be fairly sure it'll crash in an until-then stable application within
minutes.]

D is for disabled - Microsoft hailed the Office suite as a marvel of
cross-platform compatability - over 90% of the source code was the same on
mac & PC, they were simply compiled for different machine platforms then
tweaked. OK, so why can't I print an envelope to any tray (e.g. the
ENVELOPE TRAY!) except the manual feed tray from my mac, yet from the PC
next to it I can print to any tray I choose? Even trays that don't accept
that size paper.... (How come no Access for mac? Even though, from what
little I've seen of Access, I wouldn't want it anyway)

E is for Errors - does the term "Gate's Constant" mean anything to you?
Excel 4 & 5 for the mac and 4, 5 & 7 (MS can't count and we let them sell
Spreadsheets packages?). Came out with a bug (fixes available online for
the PC, dunno about the mac, they weren't last I looked - see (S)upport)
that would, when particular values were entered (or were the result of an
internal calculation), change the value to approximately double that
value...
(I have a web page which describes it in detail, but since your browser
probably supports a 'feature' that Microsoft introduced with Internet
Explorer you'd have to go to some trouble to read more than the explanatory
note at the top of the page...). How many patches have there been for
Office (either platform!)?

F is for ... need I say more? OK, F is for featureitis (sp?). I like
products that make things easier for users by automating processes. But
auto-numbering is a pain. Try typing minutes of a meeting where you want
auto-numbering on for dot points, but you also have to start paragraphs
with the initial and surname of the person speaking in the meeting. One
e.g. here is P. Sproule, looks fine, then R. Giason - uh-uh word insists
'he must be Q. Giason because, after all you want auto-numbering, you got
it, and Q comes after P you stupid user'.

G is for GUI (Grotesque User Interface) - hints to the programmers at
microsoft: If your preferences settings are as complex as those in Word
you're doing it wrong; DOS required menus that launched choice boxes that
had sub-choice boxes off them, (well designed) GUI's don't.

H is for haphazard - Why can't I have the same text manipulation abilities
in word & excel when dealing with graphic objects? After all Microsoft were
so proud of their code re-use (see (D)isabled above). Why, when I've chosen
the preference "typing replaces selection", does word show a dialog box
(asking if I'm sure I want to do this) if I select more than about 900
characters and start typing? If I've made a mistake I've got 100 levels of
undo available to me, I'm sure I'll get over it.

I is for idiocy - Why do Word documents from a PC, page size set to A4,
come across to a Mac with a 'custom page size' that is exactly the same
size as an A4 but due to the change isn't accepted by most printers. Didn't
the programmers that wrote the mac translation library know that macs have
A4 paper trays (and envelope trays - see (D)isabled above, again). Why was
the first translator available for Word 5.1 to read Word 6 documents able
to read Windows versions & not Mac versions? (The doc format is the same
isn't it? - see (D)isabled, yet again)

J is for Joke - Word/Excel/Powerpoint are scriptable, the one true
mac-specific thing that Microsoft put into the office products. Shame it's
such a cryptic, crippled mess. It's easier to write scripts that emulate
mouse movements/clicks and keyboard activity than to 'tell'
word/powerpoint/excel to do things directly (which is how AppleScript
works). I will be most interested to see if it has improved to a useable
state in '98. (see my sig)

K is for killing - what the herd 'we must be 100% microsoft compatible'
mentality is doing to the innovators in the rest of the word-processing and
presentation markets, what it has done in the spreadsheet market and what
it, fortunately, seems incapable of doing in the database market.

L is for lemon - what Word is, what PowerPoint feels like (at work I use a
Quadra 840av, the fastest of the 68040 macs, powerpoint crawls when it's
given 3 times it's memory requirement, on my home 7500/100 (a much more
recent & hence faster machine) it's useably fast. But I'd rather make my
presentations using my database development tool of choice: it's more
reliable, it's faster and it's layout editor is better than powerpoint's
slide editor. Plus I can program it to request CD's and forward thru slides
at specific points in the music. Word displays all sorts of odd symptoms if
it's 'registration database' files are slightly corrupted and you can't use
the installer to successfully de-install or re-install office. Since they
bear no identifying marks to indicate they belong to a microsoft product
most users don't know that getting rid of them is usually sufficient to fix
most strange behaviour. (e.g. asking to insert disks that you haven't had
near word in months, crashing as soon as you access the file menu)

M is for Macintosh - The Mac 'experience' is one of seamless integration
enabled by *reasonable* adherence to apple's interface guidelines and
through the use of well-documented API (Application Programmer Interface)
calls. But Microsoft, in their incredibly finite wisdom, only provide the
Microsoft flavour of extensions; e.g. Drag & Drop is fine, until the
application doesn't speak Microsoft's slow & proprietory OLE (Object
Linking & Embedding), the converse being that a user can't drag & drop from
a Mac-savvy product to an Office product either. This is why MS products
are often referred to as "windows products on a mac".

N is for Nuisance - Having to know how to work around the massive number of
'gotchas' in office products to get things to work. (Try creating a
timesheet in excel that allows workers to accumulate hours, fine - until
you get someone who has accumulated more than 24...). I want the
technological revolution to work for me, or better yet, instead of me, not
the other way around.

O is for Odious, Overweight, Overblown, Obese, Obstructive, Obstreperous,
Oxymoronic ("Microsft Technical Support"), but apart from that last (see -
(S)upport below) you should have gathered that by now.

P is for PowerPoint - a clipart gallery of files with errors in them that
crash applications, an associated orgchart tool that lacks all but the most
basic features, an insistance that you must open a windows powerpoint file
in 'read-only' mode, but it allows you to save straight over the top of
it...P is also for POS.

Q is for Quantum Leap - backwards in productivity if you choose these
products on a mac.

R is for Rabid - What the installer is like when it comes to scattering
objects hither, thither and yon on your hard drive.

S is for Support - Yeah, Right. After spending half an hour trying to get
to a human with an install problem that I'd tried every trick known to man
to solve (this was when Mac Office was new), finally I get through:

Me: Hi, I'm trying to do a network install from my Mac to another Mac,
before you ask, yes we have sufficient licenses and I've got the reference
number here when you need it.

MS: OK sir, what seems to be the problem?

Me: The Installer keeps crashing at a particular point. I've done normal
sanity checks on the disk, reinstalled the system, booted with the minimum
number of extensions I can to perform the install. I've even tried doing a
floppy install (33 floppies!) with no extensions on.

MS: Have you tried booting from a floppy...

Me: No, because I really want to do it across the network and I don't
really feel like downloading a network access floppy from the States today,
the international link is doing all sorts of weird things. But OK, I'll
give it a go.

[an hour and 10 minutes pass, an hour and 5 minutes to get the floppy, 5
minutes to discover that you CANNOT boot from a floppy, or CD and install
Office]

Unimpressed, they should have known that wouldn't work, I called them back

Me: [after half hour voice message maze] Hi, I rang earlier, job reference
#<whatever it was>. The other technician suggested I try installing from a
floppy, would you mind taking a marker pen and blotting that out of your
suggestions booklet - it isn't possible, the installer tries to shove about
5MB of stuff into the active system directory...

MS: Oh, well, what else have you tried...?

Me: I thought that was what job reference sheets were for? But OK, <long
description of 10 failed install attempts>

MS: Have you tried removing the network card and trying a different one?

Me: Wouldn't cutting the network circuitry off the motherboard void my
warranty? <click> After all it was meant to be mac tech support and I had
stated what type of mac it was, and that model comes with Ethernet on the
motherboard (and I'd told them the install had worked fine on an identical
mac sitting next to it).

As it turns out the registration database file was corrupt...

T is for Troubleshooting - If using MS Office teaches you anything, this is
it. Where the hell does it put temporary & autosave files? (That
depends..., what settings have you chosen?). Why does word put page breaks
throughout this document when the sections are meant to be 'continuous'
(because you've put the text before that invisible character not after it).
Why does word insist on changing my 12 point address area to 10 point when
I do a mail merge using this template? (I don't know, but you can fix it
with a find & replace like this...).

U is for User - The one poor soul microsoft appear not to give two hoots
about. The default settings for autocorrect include "trap double words" (I
don't want to risk launching word after getting this far thru writing this
screed and risk losing the lot just to get the exact wording of the
setting), it's a pity that that setting doesn't make sense in english. If
you get my drift. Bearing in mind that Office is being installed in offices
where frequently there isn't someone around with a high degree of computer
literacy, finding these annoyances and putting an end to them is not the
kind of thing a novice user should be put through.

V is for Virus - Yep, having macro languages in Word and Excel has been a
real winner, especially for the anti-virus software manufacturers. The mac
hadn't had a single new virus for about 18 months, and then word 6 came
out. Now there are hundreds of variants on the original 'concept' virus and
because of the much vaunted cross-platform capability of Office, the
malicious out there can attack 2 birds with one stone. (Fortunately AFAIK
no-one has tied the virus idea to Word's delete file command...yet)

W is for Windows - I mentioned it earlier, this is not a mac product, it's
a windows product that has been ported to the mac and tweaked so that it
doesn't crash every 2 seconds on all machine configs (it did on some for a
while!). It appears to suffer from the same thing that all others (that I
can think of at a moments notice) made with Microsoft's Visual C++ and
ported to the mac (Netscape: buggy, resource hungry & slow; Internet
Explorer: buggy, resource hungry & slow; Lotus Notes: buggy, resource
hungry & slow).

X is for Xanadu - The mythical land of Microsoft-free macs.

Y is for Yesterday - How I long for Yesterday, I first started using Word
at version 1.05 on a mac 512K and Excel 0.95a on the same machine (back in
1985). They were small (I could put Excel & a System folder on a RAM disk
(booting off a 400K floppy) and still have enough memory from my 512K to
run Excel!), they were innovative, they did the job at hand. Admittedly not
as well as was possible on later, faster machines, but they did a good job
for their time. Standard mac tricks worked, because the applications
complied (on the whole) with and used what was available in the system
without re-inventing the wheel.

Z is for zzzzzzzzzzzz - what powermac users could catch up on when
launching the 6.0 version of word if they had more than 10 fonts installed
(and god forbid one of them might be slightly corrupt). It's also what I
should probably do about now and what I've probably already done to those
who've tried to read all of this.

Apologies again for the length of this