Microsoft Releases Office 2008 12.2.5 and Office 2004 11.5.9 Updates

Great. But I care about 1 thing: fix the Spaces issues.

The Office applications (both 2004 and 2008) are the single WORST performing applications I have ever used on a Mac.

Seriously, for a company with the resources that Microsoft has, is it really too much to ask for spaces to work properly? Every other app works with spaces without a glitch, why doesn't office?

Switch to another application in spaces and go back to the previous office document: document moves to god knows which space. Same with the toolbox: have it open and who knows what might happen.

Will this ever get addressed?

Great. But I care about 1 thing: fix the Spaces issues.

The Office applications (both 2004 and 2008) are the single WORST performing applications I have ever used on a Mac.

Seriously, for a company with the resources that Microsoft has, is it really too much to ask for spaces to work properly? Every other app works with spaces without a glitch, why doesn't office?

Switch to another application in spaces and go back to the previous office document: document moves to god knows which space. Same with the toolbox: have it open and who knows what might happen.

Will this ever get addressed?

Sadly probably not. Have you been able to test the Office 2011 Beta? Supposedly MS is focussing on making Office 2011 more like a native OS X Cocoa app. I'll have to try my copy of the beta in VMWare workstation to see if spaces works any better.

Nice job M$ way to go. You haven't learned yet, it's all in the details. I'm sure they'll just rake us on the price too, just like in the Wintel world.

These "updates" have so far added up to more data than on the original Discs! Worst Office packages ever. Why don't they try realising a complete version for a change instead of selling half-assed ones

I wonder if this update has made Entourage any more stable. I will be very pleasantly surprised if it does. I know that the likely cause of the problem is that it falls over when asked to display certain images or fonts but one might hope that after 2 years, MS might have gotten to grips with this. Before anyone suggests it, yes I have removed all unsupported fonts. Roll on 2011 and Outlook. I hope they will get sync working more seamlessly including notes, than Entourage does at the moment. Sometimes my contacts update but sometimes they roll back. It is the inconsistent behaviour that gets me.

Wilson

I installed the updates and when asked me to restart the machine I couldn't restart it... :mad:
First time I have to turn off the machine with the power button.

Changes? at first I don't feel anything new (maybe under the hood) but when I fired up Entourage it asked me for my credentials in the keychain, if I wanted to give access to check the mail.

I installed the updates and when asked me to restart the machine I couldn't restart it... :mad:
First time I have to turn off the machine with the power button.

Changes? at first I don't feel anything new (maybe under the hood) but when I fired up Entourage it asked me for my credentials in the keychain, if I wanted to give access to check the mail.

Doesn't require a restart. The reason the package is so bad is if you look inside the package each App is a direct replacement of the ones on your machine.

These "updates" have so far added up to more data than on the original Discs! Worst Office packages ever.

It's because they patch the same files each time. However, Microsoft's Office for OS X patching isn't quite as good as Apple's as yet.

If you add up the amount of data you download in each OS X patch it will probably also add up to more than the OS X install DVD (excluding the gigabytes of drivers). Of course, you can always grab the combo update, which will give you the latest versions of the files and be much smaller.

If you reinstall Office from your discs, then install this patch, it will weigh in at 332 MB. Of course, you'll have to install the automatic update updates in 12.1.0 first, which is another 180 MB :D. I'm sure I've downloaded well over 1 GB of patches for 2008 (and many, many, more for 2004) since they came out.

Why don't they try realising a complete version for a change instead of selling half-assed ones

But if they did that, why on earth would you buy Office 2014?? :D You need to buy 2011 to get scripting compatibility with Windows Office. Of course, Office 2010 for Windows now comes with a 64-bit variant (for 65535+ line Excel spreadsheets! I think I'm one of the few people who's used them...). Which Office 2011 wont support. You'll want Office 2014 for that... :rolleyes:

I installed the updates and when asked me to restart the machine I couldn't restart it... :mad:
First time I have to turn off the machine with the power button.

Changes? at first I don't feel anything new (maybe under the hood) but when I fired up Entourage it asked me for my credentials in the keychain, if I wanted to give access to check the mail.

Are you fairly new to OS X? If so, did you know about cmd-option-esc (option might be labelled alt depending on your keyboard) to check for non-responsive (hung) apps before doing that? Usually you can take the
hung app out with that by using the force quit button. You shouldn't have to use the power button. If you aren't new to OS X, sorry if that sounded patronising, just trying to help :)

OS X is fairly resilient, I haven't had it do anything like that (except when I had a hardware fault) for a couple of years. Even MS can't take it down usually!

Microsoft yesterday released a set of updates for users of its Office for Mac productivity suite, bringing security and performance fixes to Office 2008 and 2004, as well as a pair of ancillary updates.

Note the number of security fixes listed in the originals. Security is why Microsoft should finish its 64-bit Cocoa version, and why apps that you run that process data from [other computers/off the internet] need to be robust [security-wise]. This has nothing to do with running million-cell spreadsheets.