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.

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.

The new design of the toolbars, called the ribbon, is the first thing any new user will notice. This took a lot of learning to get used to, as not only is the location of many things changed from Office 2003, but many shortcut combinations have changed as well. For example, my old Alt > I > S key combination to get to the insert signature menu when composing an email in Outlook is gone – replaced with Alt > H > G. The (I)nsert (S)ignature combination I get, but H > G? What does that stand for?

This is only the start of the issues I have gone through, though. One thing that really annoys me is that Word 2007 seems to include only a French thesaurus. Great if you are French, no good for me.

Search is another issue that has gotten to me. I was an avid user of MSN Desktop Search, but after installing Outlook 2007, it told me that to utilize search in messages and contacts, I would need to upgrade to the Windows Desktop Search v3 Beta. This is not a big issue, so I did – the problem arises that the v3 beta includes no front end, and so it is only possible to use it from within Outlook, so no searching for anything but emails and contacts. As such, I have had to install Google Desktop Search alongside Windows Desktop Search (thank goodness for dual core processors). In addition, the WDS v3 beta seems unable to search in the ‘Notes’ section of contacts, which is a space I use often for finding contacts.

For some reason, after installing the Office 2007 beta, Windows Live Messenger does not appear in the notification area when I boot my computer. It is running and connected, as I can receive IMs, but I need to run the program again from the Start menu before I can see the contacts list.

The above issues seem to be purely because the product is in beta, and should be fixed by the time the product goes gold.

All is not bad though, and there are some nifty features in this build as well. For example, I am posting this from within Word 2007 using the MetaWeblogAPI. Clicking the large Office logo in the corner of the Word window (a button that took me a long time to find) brings up a Start menu-like box, within which is a Publish > Blog option. Clicking this for the first time brings you to a box where you can set up your blog, with native support for MSN Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint, and Community Server (very MS centric, no?), with an ‘Other’ option also available. Clicking Other allows you to custom set up a blog using either MetaWeblogAPI or Atom. If you know your settings, this is easy, but may be daunting for blogging beginners. Once in blog mode, the default ribbon is changed to ‘Blog Post’, with options such as Publish, Manage Accounts, and Open Existing, and all is very easy. The only thing I miss is the ability to tag posts, but this is a very proprietary feature between blogging platforms.

Update: It seems that when the post was published through Word, it gave it a timestamp in December of 1969. I don’t know if this is an issue with Word or my server, but I will have to look into it.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with the evolution of Office, and once the beta bugs are worked out (someone PLEASE give me an English thesaurus), it should make for quite a good platform – once you change the theme from the default gaudy blue to the more tame black/grey Vista style.

Update: As I was typing this post, the thesaurus seems to have changed back to English. I don’t know how, but gee I’m glad.