I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. The Europeans believe that Microsoft is a bad actor that cannot be trusted. When a third-party application encounters compatibility problems with Microsoft software, the Europeans automatically attribute some nefarious monopolist motive to the Redmond behemoth.
But, what if Microsoft was just incompetent and not ill-mannered? How else can one explain the compatibility problems between the two latest versions of Microsoft Office? I downloaded a Microsoft Word file that was encoded in the new .docx format. I opened the Word document using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition
After some testing, this is what I discovered. When I saved an Office 2008 document in the .docx format, Office 2007 stripped out some of the spaces. By some, I mean a lot of spaces, including spaces between words as well as a series of leading spaces used to align text. If I saved the same document using Office 2008 in the .doc format (i.e., Word 97), I had no portability problems between the Mac/Windows versions of Office.
So, you tell me. Are incompatibility between Office 2008 and Office 2007 due to evilness or incompetence?
5 responses to “Office 2008 and Office 2007 Compatibility Headache”
It is pure evil. This is the perfect way for MS to get people against using Mac, keeping everyone in a windows environment. But, what can we do? We keep buying OfficeMac and they keep making money….
Why on earth they didn’t make office 2007 (win) and office 2008 (mac) handle their brand new file formats the same way and support the same features is beyond me.
Feels like they don’t want us to share documents between Windows and OSX. Personally I think this is just plain incompetence. How else can you explain them using a whole extra year to roll out version 2008 – and then roll out a version vastly inferior to the windows version interface-wise (and apparently lacking in function as well).
Example:
If i make an xlsx-document at home in Excel 2007 – not even using very advanced features – some of the functionality is missing when i open it in Excel 2008 (in this example i lost conditional formatting that used the default built-in icons).
Some notes from another site (that appearts to be citing microsoft). I find it reeeeeally annoying that Microsoft invents a new file format and then fails to implement it consistently themselves!
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Some objects created in Office 2008 for Mac cannot be edited in Office for Windows
Due to an issue in Windows XP and Windows Vista, the following object types cannot be edited in Microsoft Office for Windows: Microsoft Equation, Microsoft Excel 97-2004 Sheet, Microsoft Excel Chart, Microsoft Graph Chart, Microsoft Organization Chart, Microsoft Word 97-2004 Document. If you are prompted to “reinstall the server application” when you attempt to edit one of these object types, disregard the alert.
Some objects created in Office 2008 for Mac might not display correctly when opened in Office for Windows
Due to an issue in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the following object types might display as a blank box when opened in Word 2007, Excel 2007, or PowerPoint 2007 for Windows: Microsoft Equation, Microsoft Excel 97-2004 Sheet, Microsoft Excel Chart, Microsoft Graph Chart, Microsoft Organization Chart, Microsoft Word 97-2004 Document. To work around this issue, save the object as a picture, and then replace the object with the saved picture. To save an object as a picture, in Office 2008, hold down CONTROL and click the object, and then click Save as Picture.
And the following notes about Word 2008:
Equations saved in Word 2007 for Windows are not supported in Word 2008 for Mac. The equations will be preserved so that they display correctly in Word 2007, but will appear as placeholders in Word 2008.
Office 2008 for Mac is total crap, it crashes while comparing documents, it crashes for no reason at all and it crashes for fun. I mean constantly. When it doesn’t crash, it has compatibility issues with Windows versions of Office, among them are exactly the same as described above (spaces in documents). I cannot believe, that I was such an idiot and actually BOUGHT the crap. When I called M$ support, all help they offered were some obscure links with some obscure tricks (that don’t work, of course).
It’s not incompetence, it’s a fucking crime, I say let’s burn fucking M$ down.
Honestly, practically all software is crap. I don’t know when it entered this crappy useless state, but it seems that this is a general trend, not only confined to M$. So one must really be an idiot to pay for it. Users should get paid for putting up with this crap. I would advocate piracy, but it really isn’t moral to spread even more crap among users, because pirated versions are as crappy as genuine ones.
But, if one REALLY REALLY has to have this Mac 2k8 crap, PLEASE, DON’T BUY IT – the pirated version will crash for you as faithfully as the original. No reason to buy, really.