Tell The Truth, Someone: Microsoft Deliberately Crashes On Macs

The reason I am here is that I am searching the Internet to determine if anyone else has had problems with Microsoft products on the Mac. My MS Office for the Mac has crashed so often that I have deleted it from my system. Alas, my Mac did not come with an adequate word processer. As a result, I will purchase a PC dedicated solely to word processing. That is the only reliable solution.

(Un)stability factors
Any Fonts that are corrupt or damaged in any way seem to affect the stibility of MS Products also!

OmniWeb
Or a Safari user!
See my O'Reilly blog for several guaranteed ways to make Safari crash (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7152) .

(Un)stability factors
I found several factors that make Office X / 2004 unstable:

1.) Importing files from the Windows version with a lot of complex formatting and / or graphica elements

2.) Using it on a multiprocessor Mac

3.) You need a lot of memory. 512 MB is often not enough and 1 GB should be considrered minimum

4.) Avoid Windows metafiles in the document as they slow everything down

5.) Import graphics as pictures not metafiles if possible (s. above)

Entourage 11.2.1 memory hog
I upgraded to the latest version of Office, 11.2.1. Daily, the Entourage database daemon seems to suck up ~600MB RAM. It shows up as inactive memory in Activity Monitor and so theoretically can be released but does not. I have to run /etc/weekly after quitting Entourage to free up the memory. If I don't quite Entourage first, it does not free up the memory. This did not happen before the "upgrade."

I only use Entourage and Excel heavily. Powerpoint just doesn't work with the Windows version if the presentation is too complicated, lots of formatting problems. Word is just to painful compared to the alternatives.

Read the latest I, Cringely column "Paper War", it states that "Microsoft doesn't have a culture of quality or reliability" and we all know that's true.

As for applications crashing, Office seems to be stable at least. OmniWeb is the worst culprit for me.

There's some technical reasons to be considered, as well
Did you try OpenOffice 2.0 ? It's nearer to MS Office than ever, although, there still some work to do on the rendering. For me, Pages and Keynote do what I want. And I use OpenOffice for MS Office compatibility. But I still use sometimes at work MS Office on Windows, especially for Excel spreedsheat. In my point of view, there's not yet a perfect office-kind software. And I would be important that an office software use an open doc format. So we are not trap like with MS Office. But you bring a good point : MS don't put enough effort to bring us a very good software, especially for not using the latest API/technology. Is it deliberately made ? Maybe.

There's some technical reasons to be considered, as well
CFM is going to be dropped in the first half of 2006 as it will not be supported in Mac OS X for x86 (except inside the Rosetta emulator). Native Intel binaries must be Mach-O.

There's some technical reasons to be considered, as well
For me, Office has been more or less stable, but nevertheless unusable. One of the absolute show stopppers occurred with PowerPoint, which I used to edit a presentation I made on Windows, which first replaced all graphics with very edgy replacements and finally rendered the document uneditable on Windows, so that I couldn't even reinsert my graphics and had to start all over.


What you have to consider here, that while Office/Mac is all shiny on the outside, it is very conservative in its build process. Especially, it still uses CFM for binding, which imho was only supported on Mac OS X by Apple to allow a fast transition for Carbon apps originally written for 9 and earlier. CFM also allows you to have a "uinversal" Carbon application launching on both 9 and X, but costs substantial penalty under X. I don't think Apple has been promoting CFM for X at any time, but considering Office X came so soon after Mac OS X's launch, they can be forgiven not to have changed to Mach-0, since they did some real work changing the interface to Aqua (even though Office X never ran on OS 9 systems, anyway).


IIRC, Microsoft have stated, that changing the build system is such an effort, that even with Office 2004 they kept using CFM. So, they kept their tradition, on the outside, you get a really shiny car, but under the hood there's still sort of really old technology. I think, for them it leds to better sales, but obviously, they are about the only ones actually relying on CFM support on X now, and part of the blame for their apps being less behaved citizens might go on Apple's behalf, since they certainly invest about no resources into this layer concering testing and maintenance.


Actually, right now, I'm in a dilemma. I swore not to use MS Office since it destroyed my work in a MS-only scenario. On the other hand, the same problems arrive on day when using OpenOffice, which still never renders MS Office documents the way they look on their Windows counterparts. I think it's really time for an open document format for office style applications, but i don't even dare to speculate if and when we will see use of it any time in the future

Unexplainable crash
I understand what you mean. I stress a lot my iBook. Sometimes applications crash. Even sometimes the O/S crash. But I can always explain why it crash. Except for MS Office applications. It crash all the times for no reason at all. You save your work maybe ten times in Word and, bang, it crash. After loosing several texts in Word, I decide to put MS Office in the right place : the trash can.

Word Crashes
I recently had to translate a paper for my girlfriend from German to English. Doing that in Word was a total hell, as it kept crashing every two sentences or so. The solution that I used was to translate in TextEdit and then copy the new text over. That worked, as long as I didn't change anything by manual editing in the original file. This was in Office2004, but I had exactly the same problems earlier in V.x. The original files came from her windows-machines.
Perhaps it is also a question of un-controllable bloat that MS-stuff is so unstable.

Nothing "Strange" Noted
I think there's a bit of creative misinterpretation going on here - I'd never interpret that statement as saying that 'software on the Mac doesn't crash' but that the machine doesn't.

Safari might crash, but that doesn't force you to reboot your machine, as a similar Firefox crash might (and I stress might) on Windows. (It happens regularly on one laptop I have, never with an expensive desktop).

Of course, Macs do still crash. Shove a damaged CD into iTunes on a Mac or PC, press import, and it is impossible to get iTunes to force quit.

But generally speaking, the O/S is more protected against bad code and drivers than the way Windows is currently designed.

Nothing "Strange" Noted
I've always been slightly annoyed with Apple for posting the following in the blurb for the Mac in their Switch section: "Want a crash course on the Mac? Lesson 1: It doesn’t crash. Built by the same folks who designed its rock-solid operating system and its award-winning applications, the Mac always starts up and never lets you down."

This passage is, by my experience, untruthful. While I find the Mac to be a very reliable platform, applications do, on occasion, crash and I've had a couple of kernel panics (only 2, I think). I think most applications that I use have managed at least one crash but it is relatively rare and certainly not restricted to Microsoft applications (Safari and iTunes have crashed a number of times, although I think changing networks is probably the cause). Word and Excel have crashed for me but they are usually very good at retrieving the data that I thought I'd lost. Certainly I've never had the feeling that the crashes were part of the design as they really are very infrequent.

You Can't be Serious
Yesterday morning, NetNewWire crashed on me five times in succession. I had to actually unsubscribe from one of my feeds in order to get through my news.

But that's not the worst offender. Big Bang Chess will crash on my rather regularly--right about the time when it figures out that it can't win...

Safari will crash on me about once a week.

Not really.
I'm using Office 2004 on my Mac, and I don't recall seeing Word, Excel or PowerPoint crash... ever. I use all three heavily, and exchange Windows files with others. Do you have a plug-in that's wreaking havoc, perhaps?

--janak

no crashing on mine...
I've never had Microsoft Office crash on me and I'm still using the older v.X, I found it quite stable, v2004 didn't seem like a really good reason to upgrade.

OmniWeb

Almost nothing crashes on my Macs except Microsoft products

Apparently you are not an OmniWeb user. :)

Not just Office...
Even Halo crashes quite reliably on both my iBook and my Power Mac. I've played the game three times through, and still have not seen the cutscene where the Flood is first revealed. Master Chief sticks the card in his helmet, and boom, Halo goes down.