So, I've got Microsoft Office 2008 loaded on my machine. I haven't tried it with Spaces yet.
In some ways the interface looks cleaner. All of the toolbars are attached to the document you have open. Once you start poking around the menus and clicking on buttons, the interface is pretty much the same as Word has been for years and years. The good news is that perhaps that means Mac users will be spared the difficulty of getting used to finding commands in what are often non-intuitive places. The bad news is: are there any new features, really?
I haven't done my due diligence of reading reviews. I'm just jumping in (on behalf of the Simmons community, I'm taking the bullet). But thus far, all I see are old things in slightly new places. I look forward to testing to see if Excel brings with it any of the xml features that Office 2003 brought to Windows (e.g. referring to external data files).
Sew these mismatched images together and you get the toolbar. Note how the toolbar is part and parcel of the document itself. There's also a separate set of toolbars that act like the formatting palette used to. That means what I'm calling a toolbar probably isn't called a toolbar anymore.
Posted: February 5, 2008 8:37 am | 0 comments
Tags: Macintosh, Microsoft Office 2008
Word, at least, opens more quickly than Word 2004 had, on my Intel Mac.
Word. Had trouble finding the "reviewing" bar. The interface made me think it should be located somewhere other than where it had been. But it's right where it was before: View -> Toolbars -> Reviewing. It seems to work the same way that Word 2003 did, with so much coming through the comments instead of showing the direct markup (like lines through what's been deleted). But I think that may be a preference setting I'll be able to find when I spend more time looking.
Excel. The page break preview is gone. I've always hated page layout. But, whether it's new in this version or not, I found that I could very easily add headers to my spreadsheet in page layout. I always used page break preview to make it so that my documents printed the way I wanted them too--moving page breaks around to use less paper. We'll see what happens when I need to use that function--hopefully there's another way to do it.
I'm just going to keep adding to this post as I go.
Posted: February 5, 2008 11:29 am | 0 comments
Tags: Macintosh, Microsoft Office 2008
As I watch people more courageous than I am riding down the streets of the Boston area in the cold, I keep thinking about Simmons and how love it would be if there were more numerous higher quality bike racks, and perhaps even a bicycle commuting support program.
Bowdoin College apparently had some sort of design competition, or a class project, about shelters for bike racks. The racks themselves shown aren't good ones, but the shelters are all interesting. Brunswick is a very bike friendly place.
I think that having bike racks in front of the MCB would be really cool. It could take advantage of some unused space, and give the clear impression that this is a school, to which many people commute.
And the same goes for the front of Lefavour, where people clearly also want to park their bikes.
Please note: none of these bikes are mine! I make a huge effort to always use a bike rack, if a space at one is available to which my fendered bike can be appropriately locked. On the traditional toothpick sort of rack, that means I have to park on one of the ends.
Posted: February 5, 2008 12:13 pm | 0 comments
Tags: Bicycles, bike racks
Note: I've embedded updated information I've received from PocketMac.
I should have waited, but I got a message about PocketMac's new GoBetween for Meeting Maker, and took the plunge. It doesn't work. At least not in the Simmons environment. To be fair, I haven't given their Tech Support a chance to address my complaints, but I thought I'd share my concerns for others investigating the product (since I wasn't able to find any reviews, because the product is brand new (again, what was I thinking?)).
Someone from the Help Desk is going to continue to test and talk to their tech support. PocketMac is a reputable company, so I suspect that they'll respond. But the product is called version 4, and claims to have been through years of testing, even though it's only just now been released. Wouldn't that be a version 1?
- Requires an IP address for the server, instead of the more commonly used modern system of DNS (e.g. blogs.simmons.edu instead of 104.201.123.4).
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No support for SSL, a secure method of connecting to the MM server, which we at Simmons require.
2/14/08: PocketMac confirmed.
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No product documentation available on the web site pre-purchase.
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I appreciate being able to ignore appointments older than a certain number of days, but I'd prefer to be able to sync a specific set of dates so that, for example, I don't have to go more than 2 years in the future and risk all the ills of repeating appointments that go forever into the future. And, according to the documentation, if I choose to ignore past appointments, it's going to delete all the past appointments on my iPhone?
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No options for which iCal calendar(s) I want to sync with. It's the whole kit and kaboodle or nothing. Not very iCal like.
2/14/08: PocketMac says this feature is under Advanced Preferences. However, I still can't find it.
- Why would I want to edit Meeting Maker labels using GoBetween? I would prefer that GoBetween see the MM labels, and carry them over to iCal and my phone.
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Where's the file that's keeping track of the changes? Is there a secondary database? This makes me nervous.
2/14/08: PocketMac says "There is a PocketMac folder at ~/Library/Application Support with temporary sync data." At least it's temporary--I guess that makes it a true sync.
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What happens when a sync goes wrong? Does it realize that a sync connection has already been made and that appointments in both places do actually know about one another? Or will it result in plenty of duplicates?
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Given that Meeting Maker doesn't support banners in its iCal export, is PocketMac able to? I see no mention of this issue in the documentation.
2/14/08: PocketMac says: "It should sync as an iCal event." Since they're connecting directly to the MM server, that's plausible.
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I've learned from my technical folks that even using a non-SSL connection, the product doesn't work. Perhaps it doesn't support MM 8.6?
2/14/08: PocketMac is investigating issues with 8.6.
- And, it'd still require doing a double sync. It just wouldn't be as much of a manual process as the one I'm using.
Bummer. Still doing this to sync my iPhone with Meeting Maker instead.
Posted: February 13, 2008 7:49 pm | 4 comments
Tags: Calendar synchronization, iPhone, Meeting Maker, PocketMac GoBetween for Meeting Maker review
I finally took the plunge back into Spaces today. I assigned each of the Office 2008 apps to my Space 1, and double clicked on a Word document. Word opened up. . . in the space I was in (Space 2).
Undaunted, I checked my Spaces preferences again, reselected Word to make sure it was assigned to Space 1, and then "manually" moved my open Word document over to Space 1.
Good to go, I thought.
Nope. I clicked on Mail in the Dock, and sailed gracefully back into Space 2 so I could copy text from an email message. To switch back to Word, I clicked on Word in the Dock. And my Word document moved itself from Space 1 to Space 2.
I don't know if this is a Leopard thing, or an Office thing, but I'd really like to use Spaces to keep my Excel / Word / PowerPoint documents in a separate area where I might be able to concentrate free of the distractions of my email, etc.
Sigh.
It gets better. Or worse, that is. I moved Word back over to Space 1 again, so that I could concentrate on my report. I saved my document, and Word moved itself back over to Space 2 again.
Posted: February 14, 2008 12:48 pm | 0 comments
Tags: Apple Spaces, Mac Leopard OS, Microsoft Office 2008
