FFS Microsoft Word Mac 2008 is THE, as in THE ABSOLUTE, embodiment of SHIT

[otispunkmeyer]

i swear to fucking god, who ever is responsible for creating this turd, im gonna find them and im going to make them ingest their own bloody software. its a pile of shit so tall you just cannot comprehend it.

i've wrestled with this half baked, ported-by-a-dyslexic-five-year-old and slopily coded brain fart for the past week now and had nothing but problems.

every single time i go to write a big report on this it starts off innocent enough. it can handle a few paragraphs just fine, but add the following

images
tables
equations
figure captions and the appropriate cross referencing
citations and bibliography
automatic table of contents based of headings

etc etc... i.e. all the bloody useful stuff, it falls flat bang on its face. images wont go where you want them, they randomly disappear when you move them or they relocate 5 pages away in the middle of another picture. lets also not forget the random corruption that leaves your images strewn across the page like a plane crash.

tables refuse to be formatted, sticking to their colours and alignments like glue, and if you do manage to move these bastards random cells will just become blank and unreadable

equations randomly become fuzzy blurry splodges on the page as word sees fit to convert them to a crummy jpg when you save your work

figure lables do what they please and sometimes even hide from the software itself so that you cant cross reference them! yipp-fucking-eee!!

as far as citations are concerned the bell ends who made this must think only politics students were gonna buy it because there is no numeric referencing method.... i had to splice the one included with word 2007 for windows into this one just so i could have the proper reference style for our engineering papers.

and while im ranting i might as well tell you about the absolute cluster-fuck its just dropped on me. having just saved my report, replete with a complete citations list, to a new file.... all my citations have just booked it, packed it and fucked off outta there because theyre not on the citations list anymore and ill be mother fucking banjaxed if im finding where they went. just lost the digital abyss that seems to make up most of this cunts inner workings

i should also mention that any of the above can also cause random freezing and crashes.

so there you go

if you wanna type more than say a few coherent sentences..... buy something else. dont buy this gash attempt at a word processor because it was obviously the result of a cleveland steamer and a few donkey punches. utter trash.

oh yeah the rest of the office mac 2008 suite is just as bad as this crap pile too. they all feature the same jerky operation that makes you think your computer must be coughing up blood under the strain to run it.

Entourage is gash and they managed to muller power point so baddly it has trouble playing even the simplest presentations.

i dunno how you can get something so fucking wrong. i just dont. its like they never even bother to test it. i cant believe trustedreviews.com give this their software of the year.... i just cant.

[M_Bolc]

You're an egineering student using a Mac? You should know better....

[Greatgraddage]

http://www.lyx.org - any scientific document needs to be written in this. Or learn LaTeX, but that's harder.

[BlaRo]

Originally Posted by M_Bolc

You're an egineering student using a Mac? You should know better....

Besides, are you forced to use Word for the .doc format or something? Because there's far better Mac equivalents for those programs, like Keynote instead of Powerpoint.

Also, get a real computer!

[BerserkerCatSplat]

Originally Posted by M_Bolc

You're an egineering student using a Mac? You should know better....

This. Enjoy having to switch back when you realize there are no decent CAD or 3D programs that run natively on Mac.

[FATMOUSE]

^Works ok if you are CS. But I agree, MechE's and the like out in the cold.

[Dann]

Originally Posted by M_Bolc

You're an egineering student using a Mac? You should know better....

is there actually a CAD/CAM program available for mac?

a fellow mech.eng. I know was so smug about owning a macbook pro, now all he does is run windows in bootcamp

[NecroJoe]

There is...can't remember what it's called...my girlfriend used it at her firm until they switched to Revit for Windows...but they run it all on Mac hardware.

[teeb]

In fairness, I find Word 2007 (for pc) just as unhelpful and annoying.

[otispunkmeyer]

WTF seriously now

im redoing my citations and word has just counted 1, 2, 3, 7

i mean, c'mon it is it me or something? am i doing something inherently wrong? why the fuck would it just jump from 3 to 7? there arent any references inbetween the 3rd ref and one im doing now but its going 3 -> 7

gay

yeah i have to use word, lecturer wants it in .doc or .docx

and i dont see why, as an MechEng guy i cant have a mac?.... yeah theres no cad packages, but if i need cad they have better machines for that in the university and all the software i could want, so i dont need cad.

VMware runs Fluent just fine as well. so theres no problem there. for everything else EXCEPT using word..... A microsoft product btw.... this mac works wonderfully, i have no complaints and it doesnt stop me doing my work. though spaces can be a bit retarded sometimes, and the combo of words little pop out tool box and spaces is just a recipe for disaster. it manages to leave portions of itself spread over all the spaces you visit and then when you click on the tool box to use it, you go flying through all those spaces in double time. its annoying.

word is pretty much the only MS product i use and i just find it funny that of all the software i do have the one thats by far the most fucked up is the microsoft one. even the Adobe software i have isnt this bad and LR 1.4 isnt exactly a model of greatness.

[Final Daihatsu]

Sounds like Word 97.

[killpanda]

Office 2008 is also so sloooow... For fuck sake, I have a 2GHz computer with 4GB of RAM, how can it be so slow?

Get iWork (you can download a demo version) and you will forget Office quite quickly, it's so much better. And you can read and export Office documents with it.

[amandalea]

images wont go where you want them, they randomly disappear when you move them or they relocate 5 pages away in the middle of another picture

I'm still using Word 2000 for a PC and it does that.

Good to know crossing platforms does nothing. Nor does 8 years and numerous versions.

[cvrefugee]

http://www.openoffice.org/

[otispunkmeyer]

grrrr this is just being deliberately obtuse im sure

some how, books i havent even referenced....but are on the list have some how referenced themselves, invisibly somewhere in the opening paragraphs. i've been through a few lines and literally found the invisible mark where your references will be 1,2,3,4 or 1,2,3,5

how the fuck has it managed to do that?

[Hidden_Hunter]

Use openoffice or lotus symphony

[katwalk]

I don't have any issues with it, but I'm a design major so I only use it for essays.

[mmap]

Yeah... I HATE Ofiice as well. I have to use it at work on my Mac and it keeps crashing, misplacing pictures (or loosing them completely). And best of all it keeps making my keybord crash. I have to go to another program every once and a while to get my keyboard running again...

[Ramseus]

I use NeoOffice (which is essentially a port of OpenOffice for Mac... but IIRC it's useless now because OpenOffice runs natively now instead of having to use stupid buggy X11)

And as far as 3D programs on Macs... well ok CAD folks get screwed, but for the rest of us there's Modo (totally awesome, what I use now), Zbrush, Maya, C4D, Lightwave, Houdini, Silo, and Blender. Plus Mac photoshop is cooler, what with not having a background in non fullscreen mode.

There's nothing wrong with dual/triple booting, Linux users have been doing it for a long time whenever WINE won't run something and there's no alternative, so why do mac users always get bitched at for having to boot into the OS that the vast majority of people use and therefore develop for? Honestly.

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally Posted by Ramseus

I use NeoOffice (which is essentially a port of OpenOffice for Mac... but IIRC it's useless now because OpenOffice runs natively now instead of having to use stupid buggy X11)

And as far as 3D programs on Macs... well ok CAD folks get screwed, but for the rest of us there's Modo (totally awesome, what I use now), Zbrush, Maya, C4D, Lightwave, Houdini, Silo, and Blender. Plus Mac photoshop is cooler, what with not having a background in non fullscreen mode.

There's nothing wrong with dual/triple booting, Linux users have been doing it for a long time whenever WINE won't run something and there's no alternative, so why do mac users always get bitched at for having to boot into the OS that the vast majority of people use and therefore develop for? Honestly.

in OO can i do all the stuff i can in word? like the automatic referencing of books n journals etc? can i caption figures and then cross ref them in text? etc