bradKELLETT

I have in no way given Office 2008 a thorough working over so do not take this post as a final conclusion, but after installing the new Mac version of Microsoft’s beast and having a little poke around, I have a few first thoughts.

Microsoft Office 2008 is a prime example of Microsoft taking the proven Mac way of doing things and trying to make it better. At this task, they have failed, and what results is a mess of Microsoft thinking on a Mac framework.

The first thing that I noticed is the toolbar, which indeed mimics the standard Leopard toolbar, but is actually Microsoft’s implementation of it and as such the look just isn’t the same. This make Office stand out amongst other Mac applications, and I have absolutely no idea why Microsoft couldn’t just use the standard toolbar. These little user interface inconsistencies are one of the reasons I left the Windows platform, yet Microsoft has again felt the need to make things that little bit different.

The second most annoying thing I have come across are the useless and absurd effects applied across the UI, especially in the Mac equivalent of the ribbon from Office 07. Every click on any element in this area triggers transition effects, and while they might look pretty the first time you see them, it adds a significant amount of time to navigate around and find things in the applications. These effects extend to most of the UI, and even the small view change icons in the lower left-hand corner of the windows glimmer and blink when you point at them. Why?

The design of the Preferences window also bugs me, albeit to a lesser extent. The window pointlessly attempts to mimic the Mac OS System Preferences window, and this really just makes accessing preferences cumbersome and slow – why can the preference windows not look like they do on every other Mac application?

In any event, these UI-level problems aren’t completely deal-breakers, and I am yet to really evaluate the Office 08 applications for their intended purposes. Word is my most used Office application and I will be using the new version to put together my next review, so time will tell if it is good enough to drag me away from Pages.

It seems that I’m not alone in my problems blogging with the Word 2007 Beta, detailed here. Ed Bott, in a post about a free AV for Vista beta testers, notes that when he tries to publish from Word 2007 to his WordPress blog his posts seem to disappear into the ether.

I don’t believe that this is a problem with posts disappearing, just that they are getting a post date of far into the past – in my case, it was December 1969. For everyone having trouble posting from Word 2007 to a WordPress blog, fire up your admin console and head to Manage > Posts and change the browse month dropdown to whatever is the abstract date.

Along with over 200,000 other people, I downloaded the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 when it was released to the public the other day. In my job, I basically live in Word and Outlook, and as such was hesitant to install beta versions of these products. Nonetheless, I bit the bullet and did it, and overall my experience has been fairly good. Read more after the jump.

Continue Reading