Wow! Big response to my post, made with tongue only partly in cheek, accusing Microsoft of designing its apps to crash on Macs.
Several people commented that they never have trouble with Office under OS X; others say Word crashes all the time for them, others that they have trouble with other apps. klausp contributed what sounds like a useful discussion of MS's use of CFM for binding under OS X, but it's beyond my expertise.
I'm sure users' differencees are due to differing configurations. But in my case I've been watching MS apps, especially Word, crash on a long line of Macs going back to the mid-90's. I've gotten into the habit while using Word of twitch-saving every minute or so, or any time I've written more than a sentence or two. I find that Word is especially unstable if I try to do anything beyond basic typing, such as using a text box.
Unfortunately, the times when work should be at its best--i.e. when I'm in a state of flow--are the times when I'm likely to temporarily lose the habit of twitch-saving. And that means that I'm likely to have just done quite a lot of work that I'm happy with when the app crashes, thereby driving the potential for frustration towards its theoretical limit.
The sheer efficiency of it leads to "intelligent design"-style thinking: This is too elegant not to have been planned!
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why?
That's exactly it! If Endnote ever supported openoffice or Pages, I would be done with Word FOREVER!!! Endnote supports any rtf document, but when you are collaborating with 2 to 5 other people who insist on using Word, it's impossible to avoid it.
MS software - dumb as rocks
I had that problem, too. I deleted some gigantic useless fonts to save space, and the next thing that happens is that Office components start failing.
Yes, MS makes truly frustrating software. And, of course, it's their fault. We never experience this with any other piece of software.
Of course, it's difficult to say whether this is deliberate sabotage of the Mac platform because the Windows version has about as many quarks. Resize an image on page 5 and all of a sudden it appears on page 13. What the f&&k happened?!!!???
Ultimately, like most of the pros seems to say, it's a symptom of having software that is patched together, instead of being designed from the ground up. This is why Windows has so many holes, and why Office is so unpredictable after nearly two decades! Most functions seem to be simply added for the sake of saying that they exist, instead of being carefully integrated into the the entire structure so that they actually work, not simply exist.
And, yes, this is why so many of us use openoffice and Pages+Keynote whenever we can. Sure they do not offer as many bells and whistles, but they actually do what they claim to do reliably. In this day and age, this is not too much to ask for. It should be, in fact, an expectation on which one should simply not compromise.
What helps sometimes.
I have had problems with MS Word since the day switched to OS X. Word X would crash all the time. Word 2004 crashes less often, but today I started experiencing the problem after a few months of crashless (though HARDLY smooth) operation with Word '04.
What I did try a few months ago was running the "Remove Office" utility, which appears inside the "Additional Tools" folder of the "microsoft office" folder inside "Applications" *IF* you elected to install it during Office installation. If not, you must run it from your install CD. You do NOT have to remove office when you run this program. It searches for remnants of previous installations of Office, and it will remove those remnants.
I think this removal of remnants of previous office versions is what gave me a few months of at least safe operation of Word, but I cannot say for sure because the same problem reared its ugly head today. It only happens with Word files that were created on Windows, of course, and it seems to be rooted in Word's pathetic handling of graphics.
I am an academic researcher, and contrary to popular belief, most academics are hardly techno geeks. People still insist on using Word and embedding the graphics in it even though Word's capabilities to wrap test around graphics are abysmal. I think this problem happens mainly because Word on the Mac gets confused by some instructions having to do with graphics that were embedded by the Windows version, but I can't say for sure.
Heck, maybe it's one of the MS updates that screwed up my system again.
Why do I stay with Word? Because people insist on using it for incomprehensible reasons and because of the cottage industry around Word. Endnote works only with Word. So, if I want to manage my citations, I must eventually work with Word. Soon enough, however, I hope to find the time to switch to Bibdesk and move entirely over to Pages (for which Bibdesk integration is in the works) or OpenOffice (which does have a citation manager, albeit a primitive one).
One thing is for sure. I cannot wait to dump MS altogether. Their software titles cause nothing but pain and frustration. The crashing is just the tip of the iceberg. They do not take advantage of OS X's native pdf support, they create lousy looking presentations and documents, and they produce lousy html code. Let's not even talk about compatibility. After all, Keynote and Pages do a better job of importing Windows produced Powerpoint and Word files than do Powerpoint and Word '04!
At work I insist on installing the latest openoffice version on all computers. Slowly--VERY slowly--people are starting to see its merits. It's the only hope we have for a sane software environment.
Open Office
Been running OpenOffice in the form of Neo-Office for about 6 months and it works good enough considering that while using it doesn't crash or bog my computer down like MS-Office. This kinda makes me laugh because OpenOffice is major bloatware, the NeoOffice implementation is running in JAVA which is a long way from C speeds on the desktop and it's still lighter than Office for Mac. While I woudn't put it past MS to deliberately sabotoge Office on Mac I'm more inclined ot believe they simply don't give the Mac Business Unit sufficient resources... thereby sabotaging office on the Mac.... Can't blame 'em though, cause I can't say I'm any different.
why?
TexEdit has been part of every Mac system I've ever owned. It's a pure act of altruism on the part of Tom Bender, but it's never been a replacement for MS Word, it's replaced SimpleText as a more robust and intelligent text editor.
The last useful MS Word for the Mac was Word 5.1; after that we were given "Word for Windows," and when Word 6 came out, the Mac version was true crap. Remember? It took about 4 minutes to launch? You could look up the reasons for this in any elementary text on Mac programming, but it slipped by the wizards at Redmond.
There was a Usenet thread at the time about "next we'll have 'Word for Windows for the Mac' that turned out not to be a joke.
Warren.
why?
I do try to type in something other than Word whenever possible. Thanks to a tip from O'Reilly author/blogger/editor David Battino, I've been using Tex-Edit Plus (www.tex-edit.com) a lot and love it. It's a simple text editor with lots of useful features and extensions.
But it's very hard to avoid Word entirely, since it had become a standard by the time we all realized what we were going to be dealing with.
MS software - dumb as rocks
I hope you're not suggesting that Apple software doesn't obfuscate error messages on a fairly regular basis?
why?
Because document compatibility is what lets me use a Mac, not the operating system.
And I produce complex documents, so I need to produce them in word, not convert them.
Except if I had my choice, everything would be distributed in PDF. I can't believe Micros**t has only just announced PDF integration. Thanks guys for brining us into the 90s...
why?
Indeed. Type it in something that doesn't crash, and if you need to go back and put it in Word format for some publisher, just copy and paste it once you're done.
MS software - dumb as rocks
Recently I decided to start clearing/re-arranging my sundry font folders (the only really dumb aspect of OSX) and I accidentially deleted a/some fonts that ENTOURAGE needed - needed in what sense I have no idea because 8 out of 10 MS fonts looks like bad greeting card typeface design - honestly, who above the age of 4 would want that as a desktop/file typeface but yet ENTOURAGE refused to run ... but wait it gets better. ENTOURAGE couldn't just come out and say : yadda, yadda fonts missing - nope, got an error code -32 if I recall. I went to look at the MS site, did a search - thought I'd get a listing, right - here was the explanation for the error code of -32
ERROR CODE
Yea, thanks. Thanks for the power of thousands of MS' servers cranking away - draining lakes of hydropower in the northwest (or India) to give me back the search result of "-32 error code" as
ERROR CODE
I finally realized that it must've been the fonts I moved around but reinstalling MS Office did not do the trick. Fortunately, I found abcakup clone of my system and carefully dragged an exact duplicate of the MS Office fonts to the various folders - lo and behold, ENTOURAGE started working again ... OFFICE & PP did not function correctly under the "missing fonts" scenario but strangely EXCEL was functioning fine.
So, everyone who has crashing OFFICE - make sure your typefaces have not been altered/changed/ moved, etc ... because a $3k OS & hardware + a $500 app just cannot function if the CURLZ MT is not in its exact right place, you have unleashed the demons of hell not just on Earth but in several portals of time and space.
why?
If word has been crashing for a decade, why bother using it?