Office 2008 update?

Rumor had it that the first update of this incredibly slow, buggy program was supposed to happen today. So far, nada. Anyone have any news on when this might happen? The Microsoft site is still saying 3/11 for the update...

 

Ms office was the very first thing to make the trip to the trash bin on my machine because I didn't want to have it pop up simply because I double-clicked on a doc file. The very next thing I did was install neooffice. Thirdly came activation of iWork. I am a long time MS Office user on the pc side but I want my Mac experience to be M$ free for a while at least.

Your inquiry about bugginess lends credence to my decision. Another piece of evidence was my experience at the local Apple store. I asked a question that required opening a pdf file to get the answer. Immediately a "terminated abnormally" dialog came up because M$ Office had somehow gotten in and associated itself with pdf files on the demo machine we were using. At the time, I didn't know the "change all" technique to fix broken file associations so we moved over to another machine and picked preview from the list of apps rather than simply double-clicking the offending pdf file.

So far, I've been able to get the most reliable handling of complex Doc files in Pages but Neoofice does a decent job with simpler files. I open simpler documents with Neooffice because it opens and saves docs by default whereas Pages forces you to "export" to get a doc file saved.

I don't rule out ever getting M$ Office, just not right now.

 

I can't comment on when there might be an update, but save for some dual-screen issues I've not had any problems with 2008. It's not incredibly fast, but it's certainly not breathtakingly slow. I just wish they'd adopted more of the office 2007 interface instead of only going halfway!

What bugs, in particular, are you concerned with?

 

I use Excel a lot for my business and it is verrrry slow. Saving a worksheet causes it to freeze for up to a minute. Similar issues with Word, although not as bad as Excel. Both programs can also crash unexpectedly, and weirdly, my Word program is missing some basic options from its menu. (Like "bullets and numbering" is in the Toolbox, but not in the Format menu, although I've seen it there in other people's Office 2008 programs. ) Also had a problem with fonts being installed on the computer's library but not mine (I'm the admin) so that I had to manually copy them all over in order to get the Symbol font to work, so that I could use bullets in Word.

My computer is only a few months old and I keep it pretty clean, so I doubt any of my issues are related to memory or bugs on my end.

I've thought about using neo and iOffice, but because I'm using the programs for work stuff, I can't risk not having the full functionality of Excel or non-compatability. But at this point I might just have to create a few test documents to try out these alternate programs.

 

I use Office 2008 (word, execl, powerpoint) all day, every day and never have any issues.

 

I'm with Rogue on this one. I don't use it all the time, but it's leaps and bounds better than anything Open Office or MS Office 2004 has.

It's MUCH faster than Office 2004. Only bug I've come across is the inability to save to network drives.

 

No problems with Office 2008 for me. I'm curious to know though: for the people reporting slowness and such, what version are you running? I'm running Home and Student, and like I said, no problems

 

I'm half and half, that is there are definite issues with 08, a few radom crashes, and some slowness is some parts, but this is also some what random. But that said its still alot better then 04. I'm hopefully that the patches will come soon and add some polish.
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ps I heard midi-late march for the patches, where did you here the 11th?

 

Ok so you can get it directly from microsoft, The autoupdater doesn't seem to be working yet.
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I just installed the update. So far so good.

Here it is - http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx

 

Update says I can't install. Weird. I'm on 12.0 right now. Weeeeird.

 

Installed here as well. So far nothings broken down!

 

Didn't Office 2008 for mac just come out a month ago? And already an update to bug fixes....good and bad I guess. Good that they're fixing things quick; bad as in 'what kind of QA joke is this?'.

 

Glad you guys told me to check the Microsoft download site again. Because no matter what program I'm in, when I run the Microsoft auto-updater, it tells me no updates are available. (And when I click the "show installed updates" link it shows nothing- not even the "auto updater" that was installed a few weeks ago.) Duh. So I am downloading the update directly from the website - hope it works.

And to answer the question - I'm running Home and Student.

 

That's what I'm running. Doesn't work for me either. Nothing available from the updater, and then manual download won't install.

 

Just did the manual install - no problem. Restarted my computer, just to be sure. With all programs, had to do the deny/accept incoming communications again. [And as I'm typing this, even though I said "always allow" Entourage seems to be asking the question every 10 minutes when it checks for email. Ack.] Excel does seem to be a bit more stable, and to open/save docs more quickly. Word doesn't seem all that different, but it wasn't as slow as Excel before. I wasn't having any problems with Entourage or Powerpoint, so no difference there, so far as I can tell. So - first impression is that the update did address my frustrations with absolutely slow loading and saving of documents.

WilliamG - can't figure out why you can't install. Looks like your computer is the same configuration as mine, and you've got the same version of the program. I downloaded from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948057

 

Just ran the update, everthing seems quicker and more stable so I'm happy!
It is kinda funny that the autoupdater which they patched a few weeks ago, still doesn't work... great work MS.
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Well, Office 2008 has been out 2 months now. Apple's track record for premature releases seems to be even worse considering iLife '08 received updates within 3 weeks of release, iTunes 7.4.1 was released the day after iTunes 7.4 was released, and I believe the iPod Classic got a firmware update within a week of launch. Seems everyone is taking a launch first, patch later attitude or it's just that some bugs can't be found until there are many more users using the release than a beta program.

Anyways, the Office 2008 update seems okay so far. But, it strange that I still find Excel 2004 more responsive than Excel 2008 when trying to graph really big data sets.

 

for some weird reason, when I minimize any window on the desktop, word seems to shrink its window size to 1/4 of its original size when I run word on external monitor, very inconvenient!!

 

I certainly agree with this - I've been running into this issue and it's a pain in the arse.

 

I found kinda annoying as well. They include an autoupdater but for whatever reason they couldn't release this patch through it. What is it good for then?

 

Thought you'd like to know that after applying the patch from MS's website this problem is gone!

 

So now when I open Excel files for the first time since the update I get "file error: data may have been lost." So far, it doesn't look like anything was actually lost or not saved, but is anyone else getting this kind of error? (I have never seen it before doing the update yesterday.) The next time I open a file, I no longer get the error message.

 

Ran the update yesterday. So far my MPB has not exploded!

 

I got an error message the first time i ran office after the update, from memory it was something about the office history database maybe corrupt or something like that can't remember it was 1am! Anyways closed it all down then tried again, since then no problems here.
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Re-downloaded. No dice...

 

Strange. I uninstalled and reinstalled Office 2008, and now the update applies with no issue.

 

These issues are encouraging me to stick with my older Office version.

 

Well I must say that on the whole the new version is much better, and a worth while upgrade for serious office users.
Its a definite improvement, and at least for me the old 04 version was just if not more buggy and would crash quite often... more so than the new version. The increase in speed thanks to universal compatibility is also very noticeable, and this latest patch fixes most of my initial problems, so don't be too turned off.
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Installed the update a couple of days ago. So far i'm impressed with the improvements to word. But one little problem, well a big one actually. In the last day if I try to expand any Excel window using the + button on the window bar my MPB goes into a kernel panic, every time. No option but to hard reset the lappy. Really pissing me off as i just lost a load of research quotes open in textedit. Tried a re-install but no change. Anyone getting the same thing? Didn't happen to me before the update.

 

Well, I'm just a glutton for punishment. Decided to see if I could replicate Jurisprudence's problem. And I did - kinda. I didn't get a kernel panic, but everything froze except for the cursor, and I too had to do a hard reset.

BTW - this update hasn't much fixed the Excel problem I've had with it frequently freezing for 30-60 seconds when I make a change or save something. I'm really getting fed up.

And while I'm ranting...the auto updater doesn't show that I made this update, so basically, the auto-updater is useless. Go Microsoft!

 

few... just tried excel, no prob's here!
i'm on a mb, so wonder if this is a video driver conflict?
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Sorry guys, bit of an error on my side. I thought the spinning beachball of death was actually called a kernel panic. Its the beachball effect I get not a KP. Still have to do a hard reset though so still sucks. Feel like a noob.

Thanks for that GeekGrrl, my bad.

 

off topic but happy St Pat's day Jurisprudence !
I'm off the the local irish pub for a pint of Bemish Red!
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Hey Underpantman thanks. Don't have just one pint, go Irish on it and get mashed. Also, don't drink the special Paddy's day green Guinness. Every year us Dubs drink far too much of the stuff. Everyone says what goes up must come down. We reverse that. It looks like the exorcist multiplied by 10,000 on Irish streets at 3am in the morning. You don't want to see the look on your girlfriends face the next day if she has witnessed that. Long live the hangover. Vive le everyone.