Betalogue

Either I am incredibly jinxed, or Word 2008 is a piece of crap of the highest order. You decide.

I open a blank document in Word, using the default template. It opens by default in “Print Layout” view mode (which is somehow different from “Publishing Layout”). I insert a manual page break in the document, in order to have two pages.

Then I use the “Header and Footer” command in the “View” menu in order to edit the headers and footers for this document.

Because my screen is big enough, when I am editing the footer of page 2, even with a zoom setting of 125%, I can actually see the footer of page 1 as well, higher up. Since I haven’t changed anything to the default page layout options, the footers are supposed to be the same, i.e. what I type in one will also appear in the other one.

But that’s already too much to ask, apparently. More often than not, when I try typing in the footer, Word 2008 fails to draw the characters on the screen. Sometimes it works initially, but then I insert a tab and all of a sudden the entire footer becomes invisible.

I then try to exit the footer by clicking on the “Close” button:

But this button fails to respond completely. There are no visual changes for “mouse over” or “mouse button down.” And it does not respond to a click.

I am finally able to exit the footer by double-clicking on the main area of the page, and then, miraculously, the text that I had typed in the footer and that had disappeared reappears as grey text in the background.

In other words, Word has registered my keystrokes, but it is just unable to draw the characters on the screen properly.

It really is scandalous that such a high profile products suffers from such obvious bugs. Of course, the headers and footers happen to be an area that Microsoft has worked on for Word 2008. We no longer get the floating “Header and Footer” toolbar that used to appear only when editing a header or footer in Word 2004. (Now instead we are forced to use the Formatting Palette, whose “Header and Footer” section is automatically expanded when editing a header or footer.) That floating “Header and Footer” toolbar was a complete idiocy, of course, because it used to be the location of the button to close the header/footer, so you could have the header/footer at one end of your screen and the close button for it at the other end of the screen. It was ridiculous.

So Microsoft decided to revamp this particular area of the UI, which was long overdue. But obviously Microsoft’s staff is utterly unable to revamp anything without introducing a whole slew of new bugs that affect even the simplest uses of the feature in question. Typing in the dark. A close button that does not respond to mouse clicks. It really is quite unbelievable. This is a team of developers that manages to screw up everything it touches.

I am not going to bother trying to identify a more accurately reproducible scenario. Why? Because I have better things to do with my time. If Microsoft’s staff is unable to discover these most obvious bugs by themselves without being provided by their long-suffering users with 100%-reproducible scenarios, then clearly they don’t care one bit about the quality of their product and if they don’t, why should we?

From now on, I am not going to hesitate one second in recommending to anyone who asks me to switch to Apple’s iWork. The level of incompetence and lack of care at the MacBU is simply staggering. We are way past the stage of making excuses for them. Microsoft Office 2008 is crap, and even at the reduced price, it is still a complete and utter waste of money—and I won’t hesitate to say so to all my clients. I am actually surprised by the number of them who spontaneously inquire about iWork without my having mentioned anything. Clearly I am not the only one who is more than tired of having to deal with Microsoft crap on the Mac.

I only bought Office 2008 because I know there are situations where I might absolutely need it in my work. But for all other situations, there is just no way that I am going to use this crap or spend any time trying to customize it to make it more usable (which is now much more difficult anyway, due to the removal of VBA support).

I had already changed the default application for “.rtf” documents on my machine from Word 2004 to Pages a while ago. Yesterday, I just changed the default application for “.doc” documents from Word 2008 to Pages as well. Enough is enough. This is not customer service. It’s customer abuse.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 5:05 pm 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.