Comments on: Design Your Next Microsoft Office

By: Alex Krenvalk

Alex Krenvalk — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:59:52 +0000

I know good tool - restore outlook, it may recover data from Microsoft Outlook pst files, program can be also used to recover information from Microsoft Exchange ost files and/or convert them into Microsoft Outlook pst files, also restore mail messages, tasks, contacts, meetings, notes and logs in files with the .pst extension, recover Outlook email and data from corrupted pst files larger than 2GB with the maximum size for *.pst files of 32TB.

By: Joey Livingston

Joey Livingston — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:36:42 +0000

Unless the make MS Access available for Mac, I’ll stick with iWork. I found out recently that you can paste back and forth pretty much seemlessly between MS Access in Parallels and iWork Numbers.

By: Nick Brogna

Nick Brogna — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:21:39 +0000

I would really, really hope that the stability of Entourage is greatly improved, especially with large Identity databases (pretty much anything over 2GB). I have a number of entertainment industry clients where email is their life and it’s hard to keep telling them that they have to repeatedly rebuild their database (a task that can take upwards of 2 hours for a ~2GB database on a G4 PowerBook) simply because Entourage is a piece of ass that chokes unless you continuously monitor the size of your identity database and prune it when it gets too large.

Better yet, we could jump into the 21st century and do away with the monolithic, proprietary single-point-of-failure monstrosity that is the Identity database all together. Something that actually makes disaster recovery not a chore and doesn’t completely lock you into using Entourage until you die or get around to tediously exporting everything by hand. Something that when a mailbox gets corrupted (which shouldn’t happen to begin with) doesn’t also take down your other mailboxes, calendar and contacts with it.

Words do no justice to the amount of hate I have for Entourage and the administration headaches it has caused me.

By: Gideon

Gideon — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:00:40 +0000

Well, nevermind..

Pages ’08 is doing a bang-up job doing most the things I need it to do, in a much more user friendly way than the last version.

I’ve only played with it a few minutes now, but I’m very enthusiasitic about it as a replacement for Office.

I don’t give a fig about exchange or vba myself (though I certainly understand the real need) so for me this works perfectly. Sure, I’d like a more sophisticated Mail/PIM but… eh, so it goes.

By: PSGInfinity

PSGInfinity — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 14:03:26 +0000

Thanks for the offer, Nadyne; I’ll likely cross-post. :)

1) Entourage needs to be able to fully sync w/Exchange (tasks, notes)
2) PowerPoint needs the “Package as CD” feature, with an extra twist: please include a optional WMP-compatible QT plugin.
3) Speed. Stability.

By: Billy Halsey

Billy Halsey — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 07:17:42 +0000

What I’d most like to see (besides Universal binaries) is a completely Cocoa implementation, no more Microsoft-specific font handling, etc. The Unicode support in Office 2004 is appalling, and I can’t even use Apple Symbol as a font. What gives?

As for other features, I think Office is rounding that point where anything else is mostly overkill. It’s mature, it’s (*laugh*) stable (*snort*), and any other “features” will just be unnecessary eyecandy and/or bloat that introduces new bugs. So, yeah, maybe a few software companies here and there are letting bugs slip by so they have something to do in a future release. Solve all the problems, and there’s no job for problem-solvers.

By: Math

Math — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:31:09 +0000

Hi, As I spend a lot of time in web developpment, i'd like that office 2008 comes with Internet Explorer 7.... It's not that I want to make it my browser (I prefer Firefox) but I'm tired of debugging what does work on Firefox and what doesn't work on IE. Moreover this debugging, I must do it at work in a WinSHIT OS.. Sorry for my english > I'm from France so.. Have all a nice dayMath

By: Gideon

Gideon — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:59:00 +0000

Unfortunately, Office is like the Mac of the document world. What do I mean? It just works, and it works well. It’s also more aesthetically pleasing..

But beyond that, having used Office 2007 most of last year and found it to be an incredibly pleasant experience (even in beta) and then coming to Mac and finding Office 2004 works like crap on my Intel mac and there are no serious contenders for ease of use and power (sorry, neither NeoOffice nor OpenOffice are nearly as sophisticated or easy to use when working on large, complex documents.)

Pages can do some wonderful work when you’re doing something very specific, but not so much when you’re doing something that complex. Nisus Writer can’t even create real doc format files (just try to use one on an iPhone).

So, I may change. But personally I’m not thrilled about waiting longer. Maybe the new OpenOffice Aqua will be nice, maybe not. But right now I’m not convinced that the Open guys have committed to any sort of strong UI.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:00:47 +0000

From what I’ve seen so far since January it looks like the basic layout of the software is going in the right direction (one window interfaces, less floating boxes), although I think My Day could probably be reduced to a menu bar app.

I’m highly anticipating an Entourage revamp. It’d be great to have tasks synced with Exchange, for instance.

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:28:28 +0000

The only thing I can think of to encourage an upgrade is the ability to export Powerpoint presentations to PC format that don not need tweaking. If they do that, OR if Keynote had a real PC player, I wouldn’t need to touch PC software of any kind.