MacDailyNews - Where Mac news comes first

Mar 11, 08 - 05:37 pm Comment from: Wandering joe

Microsoft kneads the dough and I kneed the little impotent one

Unfortunately, I cannot work completely without Office 2004 (yet).

Keynote does not decode Excel graphics very well, which a lot of our students here continue to use despite my constant nagging (we have a ported Mac application on all our Windows machines that makes much nicer graphs...).

And my boss insists on using Endnote for referencing, which does not play well with Pages (basically, you have to keep a unreferenced version of your text for making changes. And you have to export to RTF to make the references, which may kill some formatting. With the Word Cite-While-You-Write macros you can go back and forth).

Very annoying with this update is that the Autoupdate that comes with Office 2004 DOES NOT FIND IT.

sigh.

Did I mention that I renamed Autoupdate to DDS? I guess you can decode...

Mar 11, 08 - 05:47 pm Comment from: Ampar

That's flawnovation.

Mar 11, 08 - 05:55 pm Comment from: Richie_mofo

As bad as Office is, I still prefer it to iWork, simply because no matter how good it is, there will still be small annoying compatibility issues with an Office dominated world!

[rant]
I hate, Hate, HATE Excel graphs.

They're fugly.

Unscientific.

Cartoonish.

I pray for the day when I can finally kick this s*** of my HD.

EVERYTIME one of our students comes up with one I tell them that they shouldn't use it, I will NOT accept them in a publication or their final thesis, so they better should stop using them NOW, before their work is stuffed with them. I tell them what app to use and how graphs should look like, and I help them make them if they ask. But they still use them. Heaven knows why.
[/rant]

Unfortunately, I can't use Pages as a replacement for Word. While Pages can open .doc files, it doesn't translate everything properly (auto numbering, indents, etc.), and therefore won't work for me.

And before anyone flames me stating how great and wonderful Pages is, I love Pages. I wish I could switch permanently, but it's just not possible right now. Maybe with version 3 . . . .

@elgarak,
What Mac software do you suggest for scientific graphs?

I tell them what app to use and how graphs should look like, and I help them make them if they ask.

As much as you (among others) hate Excel, how does banning its use in submittals help your students?

Someday they will graduate and enter the professional world. Again they will be told, and likely forced, to use a certain app. And they will be expected to be up to full speed, without needing any help or training.

Should they not at least be competent in the garbage rest of the world uses?

@j2k2,
We use Igor Pro from Wavemetrics. http://www.wavemetrics.com.

Not really cheap, though.

Mar 11, 08 - 07:56 pm Comment from: Lilochris

As much as I dislike Microsoft, I still need to use office. I'm a student and office is the standard at my college.

I've test driven iWork, I liked it but there were issues when opening office files.

@d'nomder,

It was a rant. I purposefully used harsher language than usual .

I'm not banning Excel per se; I discourage the use of graphs it produces. Some things, like making simulations for engineering semiconductors, work quite well with Excel.

In our scientific field, it does not matter with which app you produce the graphs. The graphs themselves matter.

You cannot produce the graphs acceptable for professional scientific journals with Excel. Period. That's why I recommend against it.

I have an 800-page Word document, which I saved in DOC and DOCX format. It contains only text.

Word 2008 loads the DOC version instantly, but the DOCX version takes about 30 seconds and I get to watch a progress bar.

Pages also loads the DOCX version slowly with a progress bar, but noticeably faster than Word 2008.

My conclusions are:

1. Word 2008's real default format is DOC.

2. Word 2008 is really a warmed-over Word 2004.

3. Apple is better at figuring out Microsoft's byzantine 6,000-page OOXML spec than Microsoft is.

I see where my future lies, and it is not in Microsoft's lies.

Post scriptum:

Unfortunately, bizlaw is right. That's why my future, not my present, lies in Pages.

There are some basic features that iWork still can't get right.

For example, iWork will not properly paste tables from websites. To find a good table as an example, use Safari to go to Wikipedia and look up your favorite music artist. There will probably be a table of the songs that were charted. Select the table and then paste into Word, Pages, Excel, and Numbers. What do you find? A nice looking table in Word including cell tints, and in Excel you'll have the information nicely put into rows and columns, albeit unformatted. When pasted into iWork apps, the result is fugly and unusable.

In Excel, I need pivot tables and features such as conditional formating that works with formulas (and not just static values). I also have many colleagues who rely on EndNote, and there's yet another reason to keep using Word.

Mar 11, 08 - 09:18 pm Comment from: CheekyGit

Long live OpenOffice!!!!!

@Excel user

FWIW: I tried your exercise with Nisus Writer (my favorite Mac word processor) and the table pastes in perfectly. I have never had a problem opening Word docs or saving a Nisus doc in Word format (.doc). Admittedly, I do not receive complex Word docs and so have not had the chance to see how Nisus handles them.

I have Microsoft Office 2008, did a manual software update, but nothing came up. I wonder if it was pulled.

Why?

After I started using Pages from iWorks I haven't used my current copy of Office X once... just haven't found or come up a need!

And yes, I run a business on My Mac and OS x 10.5.2

"MacDailyNews Take: Do you really need Microsoft Office?"

Yes I do! Pages and Keynote are still not replacements so I have to put up with this only piece Microsoft software on my iMac. Hell, I even trashed Halo (I got sick of it) but I can't do the same with Office 2008. Bummer!

A little note for MDN: if you're so affected by Microsoft Office why don't you criticise Apple for including a trial copy on new Macs. For the record I'd prefer not to use Office but I have to. It's a bit hypocritical to push that line without saying anything about the software being included on Apple hardware. Perhaps you should be consistent about the whole issue.

You should note that being able to use Office on Macs is a huge draw card for switchers. After they've switched many stop using Office because they don't need it anymore.

I'll now have to have a shower to get rid of the Microsoft soil for writing the above.

Mar 12, 08 - 01:15 am Comment from: Spudly

@ Excel User

The problem with pasting into iWork apps is well documented on Apple's discussion boards. Until there is a "fix" you have two work arounds. #1- use Firefox to copy tables from the web...or #2- create a single line AppleScript "set the clipboard to (the clipboard as text)" and save the .scpt file to your ~/Library/Scripts folder, then run this between copying from Safari & pasting into Numbers... both will "solve" your problem until Apple fixes this somewhat embarrassing problem.

Mar 12, 08 - 05:32 am Comment from: Lilochris

Well, this also applies to Office 2004 since I got the update for it.

"create a single line AppleScript "set the clipboard to (the clipboard as text)" and save the .scpt file to your ~/Library/Scripts folder, then run this between copying from Safari & pasting into Numbers."

And then recompile the kernel?

There has been a constant grumble here from the mac fanboi community about how great iWork 08 is. And yes, I'm going to call them fanbois because I'm convinced that they are locked into the mindset that anything Apple touches is gold and should be lauded, even when is deserving of well-founded criticism. We're all not perfect in this world here, so let's try to get some rational perspective for a moment.

I have iWork 08 on my MBP. I purchased iWork right away, and couldn't wait to open it up and play with it when I got home. And you know, it's a fun program to play with. I love making graphs in Numbers, and have used Numbers to make graphs in all my presentations, and papers that I have written since. I like all the templates in Pages, too, although I haven't taken advantage of them. And, I'd love to make presentations in Keynote but the projectors in my classes are all hooked up to Dells and I'm forced to use PowerPoint. I'm stuck with Office, and I'm OK with it. Why? I can say, as both a Mac user and an advanced Office user that iWork needs some serious upgrades before it becomes commercial grade software. When it makes that final leap, I'll be there to embrace it. However, the ruckus caused by all you fanbois serves only to show you up as complete idiots.

Let's put it this way. I'll convert to iWork full time when Numbers contains a data analysis package that can run even the simplest regression.

If you work in an enterprise where most people use PC's running Windows, you need Office for Mac if you want to live in the Mac world. Creating presentations is great in Keynote but they do not export well to PPT and always require touchups. For the types of things (pivot tables etc.) Numbers does not fit the bill. I do use pages over Word and the exports are fairly accurate except for replacing some fonts in some templates (which makes the docs in Word for PC look terrible).

I have to tell you, I am a Mac fan but have NO problem with the Mac lovers over in the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft. They create superior work (within their allowed constraints - ie. no MS Project version) compared to the PC release of Office. I give them a lot of credit. The only thing people here have a hard time getting around is that they are attached to a company people here despise.

You should love Microsoft though as a company....without a benchmark you would never know how good Apple is!!!!!

Apple's Mail program sucks. When Apple makes a kick ass email program that is exchange friendly I switch. Until then, Entourage 2008 is what I'll be using.

installed 2008 with patch and its working just as fine, and much more beautifully than 2004 on a powerbook 1.67 with 10.4.11 ...

It is patently false that Excel graphs are not accepted in scientific journals and publications. I routinely assist scientists at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in doing just this.

The entire Microsoft Office suite is a dreadful, clumsy application, but it is indisputable that is used when submitting charts and graphs to scientific journals.

-- WEP