Betalogue

In Word 2004, I had a heavily customized user environment, with macro commands, personalized toolbars, etc. With the elimination of Visual Basic in Word 2008, I expected most of these customizations to disappear when upgrading to Word 2008.

What I didn’t expect was to observe that Word 2008 is not even able to preserve these user options that have not changed at all between Word 2004 and Word 2008.

For example, in Word 2004, I had deselected the option to check spelling and grammar as I type. (I use Spell Catcher X for this.) The automatic spell checking and grammar checking were back on by default when I started using Word 2008.

In Word 2004, I had unchecked the option “When selecting, automatically select entire word” in the “Edit” pane in the application’s preferences. In Word 2008, the option was back on by default.

In Word 2004, I had unchecked the option “Enable click and type” in the “Edit” pane in the application’s preferences. In Word 2008, the option was back on by default.

Need I go on? I don’t think so.

Word 2008 was also unable to preserve my very frequently used customized keyboard shortcuts. For example, I had command-shift-S assigned to the “Save As…” command, because that’s what the shortcut is in most other Mac OS X applications. In Word 2008, the command-shift-S shortcut was back to its default value, i.e. a shortcut for the “Style” field in the formatting toolbar.

Similarly, I had assigned command-shift-Z to the “Redo” command (i.e. the opposite of the “Undo” command, with the command-Z shortcut). Again, in Word 2008, my custom keyboard shortcut assignment was gone, and command-shift-Z was assigned to its default command, “ResetChar,” a command that I never use.

Need I go on? I don’t think so.

It seems to me that Microsoft’s developers really could have made more of an effort to try and preserve the user’s existing preferences. Apparently, they decided instead to force everyone to start with a blank slate again.

And since Microsoft’s blank slate is significantly different from the standard behaviours in most other Mac OS X applications, this means that you have to either live with the inconsistencies on a daily basis or painstakingly rebuild your heavily customized user environment manually after installing Office 2008.

Thanks, Microsoft.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.