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

[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