Microsoft, how I love thee

[netmouse]

I work in a mixed-platform environment. One of my officemates just sent me a document from a PC. trying to open it on my mac, I receive the following notice:

Equations saved in Word 2007 for Windows are not supported in Word 2008 for Mac. The equations will be preserved so that they display correctly in Word 2007, but will appear as placeholders in Word 2008.

That really goes way up there in my book on the most clever and helpful design policy decisions ever.

Comments

[plasmonicgrid.livejournal.com]

Wow. I could understand if it was some crazy amount of VB script, how it wouldn't want to display it.

Can your machine run parallels, or another kind of Windows emulator?

[stardustgirl.livejournal.com]

In other words, Bill Gates is still bitter because Macs *are* cooler than PCs and he's going to take these petty little jabs via lazy software design throughout eternity. :-D

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, anytime I hear someone blather on about how they need "Office compatibility", I point out that even *OFFICE* doesn't have "Office compatibility". What they *really* mean is, "Everyone on the same version of Office, on the same OS version so nothing gets too badly fucked up. We hope."

An Office-only environment that runs on multiple OS versions (of even Windows) is going to have the same &*(%#$ issues that a Office/not-Office mixed environment is going to have.

They just don't/won't admit it.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

yeah, and the bitch of it is, it's not like you can get Office 2007 for the mac -- word 2007 for PC and 2008 for mac is the closest you can get to having the same version on both and being up-to-date...

[plasmonicgrid.livejournal.com]

I was hinting (above) at using XP in an emulator on your mac, to run office 07.

[encorecrazay.livejournal.com]

What happens if you open it with neoOffice?

NeoOffice/OpenOffice

[omnifarious.livejournal.com]

Point this out and float the idea of using NeoOffice and OpenOffice as a way to have compatibility across platforms. :-) And, as someone else pointed out, try opening it up in NeoOffice just to see if it works. It would be highly amusing if a non-Microsoft product was more compatible with a Microsoft product than some other Microsoft product.

Re: NeoOffice/OpenOffice

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

We tried using Neooffice during the last round of proposal writing and eventually had to give up on it due to a few incompatibility issues. For one thing, we collaborate with a fair number of people outside of the office, so we were always going to have to import and export, and it didn't go well, with figures and everything.

[mjwise.livejournal.com]

Office on the Mac is horrible. It's just a sloth compared to the Windows version, even comparing roughly similar vintage computers. We still use Office 2004 at work, despite the really annoying bugs, and we don't plan on upgrading, because Microsoft ripped out VBA compatibility from 2008. OpenOffice is actually more compatible with PC Excel at this point than Mac Excel is.

My latest favorite spreadsheet for graphing stuff though is GS Calc (http://www.jps-development.com/gs-calc.htm) (commercial, $19.95). Using it reminds me how thoroughly half-baked, unnecessarily difficult to use, and ultimately ugly the graphing features of Excel really are.

Can you tell I have some pent up hostilities for Office? :P

[aimeejmc.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Equation Editor!

I hate that program.