Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Last week, I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008, and have been disgruntled ever since. Having bought a MacBook Pro almost immediately after they came out (two years ago) I was reassured by the Microsoft spokeswoman at the launch (Jan 10th 2006 - video on the internet, but can’t find it now) who said that a universal version of Office would be out in May. The last two years have been a bit of hate relationship with both Word and Excel. Word was the only application that consistently crashes on my Intel Mac, and mail merging with Excel, stopped working some time ago. Re-installing made no difference. Somehow I’d coped, and assumed that once the universal code arrived, the problems would be over.

The crunch came last week when I needed to use an Excel spreadsheet that has four conditional statements in one of its macros and therefore would only run fully on Excel 2007 (Windows). The time to upgrade had come, as although the sheet worked fine on my Mac, it only completed the first three conditions. Likewise on OpenOffice, the fourth condition was not implemented.

So my first task on installation was to run the sheet, and what did I find:

So whereas the previous version at least worked partially, the new version just does not work! What sort of upgrade is that!

As to robustness of the applications, well now Word is joined by Excel and PowerPoint as the only applications that consistently crash on my machine, particularly when I close a document. I must admit I have not tried a mail merge yet in order to avoid a potential heart attack.

It’s rather like buying the newer model of the same car you’ve been driving for years, and finding they’ve removed the internal computer.

… and by the way, clicking “Open and Remove Macros” does not remove the macros, simply ignores them, they are still there when you run the file again, even when saved, on Office 2007.

Image credit: Barry Schwartz

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