Some Love for Microsoft

I got Office 2008 for my MacBook, and I have to say, I love it so far. Actually, I should say that I love PowerPoint and Entourage, as those are the two programs I have used a lot so far.

PowerPoint -- This is mostly a case of lowered expectations... A lot of the older bugs I used to experience with PowerPoint have been fixed. It works better (perfectly) with some of the templates I use from work, especially those that involve integration with Excel. This should have been the case with Excel 2004, but it was not (the templates were made with Excel 2003 on Windows of course.) This fact alone gives PowerPoint 2008 a huge edge (for me) over Keynote or NeoOffice. I might still use Keynote if I was making a presentation for a conference or the like, but when doing "work", PowerPoint wins easily.

Entourage -- This is the really big winner. This beast works flawlessly with Exchange. I put in my email address and said "use Exchange". It prompted me for my domain and password, and everything just worked. All of the features of Outlook that I use work fine. Many of the features are much better on Entourage. Case in point, auto-complete on addresses. Our Exchange server stores names like Galpin, Michael. So if you start to type "Michael" then "Galpin, Michael" will be a hit on the "M" but not on "Mi" etc. Entourage 2008 is definitely smarter than Outlook 2003 (haven't used Outlook 2007 enough to say about it.)

I generally use Word and Excel more than PowerPoint and Entourage/Outlook, so I will definitely be giving them a workout soon. Finally, as for the UI... I like the switch to the metal look that is the de facto on OSX now. I actually like the ribbon in Office 2007, so I was a little disappointed that it was not used. However, there is very nice consistency between Office 2008 and Office 2004.

So kudos to Microsoft for making a great product for the Mac.

iWork '08 Stupidity

I downloaded the trial of iWork '08 last week. I would really like to stop using MS Office on my MacBook. I had a new IBM article I needed to start working on, so I figured one good way to see if I could switch to iWork would be to use Pages to write the article. It's an easy test really, since I don't do anything too complex.

I was working on the article on the plane this morning. When we were about to land in Dallas, I saved my work and closed iWork. I'm going to be in Florida for the next week, so I decided to switch over my time to central, as Dallas is also in the central time zone. So I did that.

Now I'm sitting at my gate with a two hour layover. I decided to do so more week after I ate lunch. I put together a nice graphic in Pages, where I overlayed a screenshot and drew on it to highlight important parts of the screen. This is something I usually use a separate program for because it's awkward in Word. I was able to do it easily in Pages. The thought went through my head "Word, your days are done."

I was so happy with this accomplishment that I hit CMD-S to save my work. I got some cryptic message about not being able to save unless I either entered a serial or began a trial. I clicked trial, and it told me that my 30 day trial had ended. Thus I could not save my work.

WTF!?!?! The stupid program hasn't even been out for 30 days. I'm assuming that it did this because I had tinkered with my date (changing the time zone) earlier. This indicates several layers of stupidity. First, iWork is verifying the trial against the clock on the computer. I didn't think anybody was dumb enough to do that anymore because it's so easy to circumvent. Oh, but Apple is smart. They're also doing a check to see if you mess with the date/time. Only problem is that their cleverness isn't clever at all. Changing timezones caused a false positive.

At this point I did consider going ahead and buying iWork. I figured I'm probably going to do it anyways. I just couldn't do that though. It would be like I had been bait-n-switch'ed. Apple broke their part of the deal (letting me use their product for 30 days) and I was supposed to now pay them for this? There's no way I could do that. I might not even buy iWork at all now.

So instead I opened up Word, and copied the document over to it. Luckily I wasn't too far along, so it wasn't too hard to re-assemble or reproduce the non-text parts (like tables, code samples, and the infamous screenshot.)

Numbers

I had to try Apple's latest addition to iWork, Numbers. It's not just a pure Excel clone. It has a very nice UI. I really liked the templates it came with. I was most impressed with being able to copy HTML tables and past them into Numbers. That's a nice feature of Excel 2004 on the Mac. On Windows, you only get that if you use IE with Excel. It doesn't have pivot tables though. That is a deal breaker for power users. Still, it's pretty nice. I'm going to see if Pages has improved more. If it has, I could definitely seeing myself using Pages and Numbers instead of Office, especially since Office is still not a universal binary. Keynote was already superior to PowerPoint IMO.

Google Docs To The Rescue

I was reading this post by Jeremy Zawodny, and it reminded me of my recent Mac Office 2004 meltdown. I went down a similar path. I had an Important Doc(!) that I needed to make some edits on for work. I had planned on doing the edits that morning, before I went in to the office. So I had some serious time pressures. I didn't know how long it would take me to solve the riddle dropped on to me by Apple Software Update. I actually tried loading the document into Pages, but it barfed on it (maybe because the doc had a table of contents?)

So like Jeremy, I fired up Google Docs. I uploaded the Important Doc there (hope nobody from Security is reading this, though the doc was intended for folks outside of my company.) It came through just fine. I made the edits I needed to make and saved it on Google Docs.

Then I went back to fixing Office, which I eventually did. I went in to work, opened the Google Docs version of my document, and manually merged in changes to the original. I would've just exported it as a Word Doc, but I was afraid of how it would handle the table of contents. So I manually merged and then updated the table of contents.

The OSX Update from Hell

Thursday I installed an update on my MacBook that included QuickTime 7.2. I installed while I was watching a DVD during my lunch. I installed it using Software Update, of course. No big deal, I install updates like that all the time.

Friday morning I needed to do some edits to a document I had been working on for work. This was a Microsoft Word document, so naturally I've been using Office 2004 for things like that on my MacBook. I double clicked the document, and Word started. Then it stopped. Abruptly. I tried to open Word directly and the same thing. I tired launching Excel or PowerPoint -- same thing.

I noticed that there was an update for Office 2004 (11.3.6) available. So I downloaded it and tried to run it. It did the same thing.

At this point I knew that something in that update from Apple had crippled Rosetta. It was the only thing that made sense. I did some research. I found one thing that suggested reinstalling the most recent major update from Apple. So I did that. No luck.

I did some more research, and found that the problem stemmed from the presence of Java 6 Developer Preview on my MacBook. To uninstall that, here's what I did:

sudo lsbom -s -f /Library/Receipts/JavaSE6Release1.pkg/ContentsArchive.bom > /tmp/files

I edited /tmp/files and chagned all the spaces to "\ " (backslash and a space) and then changed ./ to rm /. This changed the bindings file to remove the Java 6 bindings to OSX. So I now I just needed to execute this magic file.

sudo bash /tmp/files

Now I could delete Java 6.

rm -r /Library/receipts/JavaSE6Release1.pkg

Now I could rebind Java to OSX.

sudo update_prebinding

I actually deleted Java 5 (rm /Library/Receipts/JavaForMacOSX10.4Release5.pkg) also, and then re-installed it, but I probably didn't have to do that last step. Rosetta and thus Office were now back!