[Yesterday, we posted Part 1 of this review, which focused on the mostly positive aspects of Office v. X. Today, in Part 2 of our review, we will explore the new problems and issues introduced by Microsoft with Office v. X.]

The Disappointing Stuff

The main disappointment in Office v. X is performance. Of course, performance is a very subjective issue, and also depends on so many different factors that each user’s situation is likely to be different.

I tested Microsoft Office v. X on my 2-year-old PowerMac G4/450 AGP, however — which, even by the standards of today’s latest Macs, is nothing to sneeze at. I also have plenty of RAM, which means that memory is not an issue in my own experience with Office v. X.

Mac OS X v. 10.1 in itself is no speed demon. On my machine, going from 10.0.x to 10.1 mostly meant that Mac OS X became actually usable. With 10.0.x, I was very generous, and gave Apple a lot of my time. 10.1, however, is still not nearly as fast as Mac OS 9 on my machine for many very common tasks, including Finder window scrolling, application launch times, etc. Of course, Mac OS X has some other benefits that partially make up for it. But I still get the feeling that my machine running Mac OS X doesn’t perform anywhere near where a 450 MHz PowerPC G4 processor-based machine should be performing for most common computing activities.

Scot Hacker recently published a long report on OS News, including a chapter about OS X performance that pretty much sums up my feelings about the issue.

Mac OS X’s own performance notwithstanding, the performance of Office v. X is a significant step back from Office 2001 performance under Mac OS 9. In fact, even Office 2001 running under Classic in Mac OS X performs faster for several common tasks, including document scrolling in Word, than Office v. X running in the native Carbon environment.

Office v. X’s performance is acceptable under OS X 10.1 provided that you have little else going on elsewhere in the background. However, if you happen to be downloading a larger file from the Internet in the background through your modem connection, you will notice a significant slow-down that makes Office v. X applications less responsive. This, to me, indicates that Office v. X’s performance levels are borderline — and therefore too easily affected by background activity.

A typical example is the “Save As...” sheet mentioned earlier. Compared to a similar “Save As...” dialog box in an application like BBEdit 6.5 for OS X, Word’s “Save As...” sheet feels sluggish, unresponsive, to the point that you sometimes have to wait several seconds before the controls (scroll bars, pop-up menus, etc.) respond to clicking on them. I don’t know if it’s because I’m too impatient, but sometimes, when holding the mouse button down to get a contextual menu to pop-up or an up/down arrow to turn blue and start causing the document to scroll, it seems to me that the controls actually only respond when, out of frustration, I start moving the mouse again. (The very latest version of Internet Explorer for OS X displays a similar behavior: when you click-and-hold on a link in a web page to access the “Open in New Window” command, the contextual menu doesn’t pop up until, while still holding the mouse button down, youslightly move the mouse.) It actually seems that several aspects of the Office interface work better when you use the Windows way of pointing and clicking (i.e. one click without holding to select and pull down a menu, and then another click without holding on an item in the menu to select and trigger it) rather than the traditional Macintosh way (i.e. one click-and-hold to select and pull down menu, select menu item, then release mouse button to trigger menu item).

You will also get delays before the cursor changes its status to reflect the area of the screen above which it is hovering. And you’ll notice 1- or 2-second delays when clicking and dragging to select words or lines of text, which can be exasperating when you are trying to accurately select a specific section of your text.

Out of curiosity, I tried using the “sudo renice” command in Terminal to give temporarily higher priority to Word in OS X’s processing power allocating mechanism — but it only improved things somewhat (in Open/Save dialogs mostly).

Other disappointments include the fact that Office’s “Help” feature has only been marginally improved. The contents are still far too lacking in terms of HyperText features (i.e. non-linear links from section to section), and the scrolling speed when using the up/down arrows in the scroll bar is still ridiculously slow (something like 2 or 3 pixels up or down per second).

As well, Office v. X doesn’t support another essential benefit of Mac OS X, which is long file names. Office applications still behave the way Office 2001 applications did in Classic, i.e. they will truncate the name of your file and add a unique identifier like “#4AD3” at the end of it if it’s longer than 31 characters, and they will prevent you from using file names that are longer than 31 characters when you try to save your documents from within the applications. I know that Apple was a long time coming with the proper API to help developers implement this feature, but, here again, other Carbon applications such as BBEdit already do support long file names.

The problem here is really that Microsoft doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to quickly releasing minor updates that fix those types of problems. If the past is any indication, Microsoft will probably release a “Service Release” for Office v. X in a few months — and this service release will not address most of the complaints raised in this review. I would love to be proven wrong on this, but, again, my comments are based on past and current experience.

Finally, this review should mention a little-known change that might have serious consequences for certain Office users. I personally find that Word is only really usable for me once I have made a number of changes to its interface through its (thankfully) generous customizing features. These changes include different keyboard shortcuts for oft-used commands, hand-written or recorded macro commands for repetitive actions, redefined styles for my various templates, reorganized tool bars with buttons for the commands and styles I use most often and for the macros I have created, etc.

As can be seen in the following snap shot taken of my customized Word 2001 environment before upgrading to Office v. X, my Word interface is significantly different from the default interface:

Custom interface in Word 2001

Given Microsoft’s track record when it comes to preserving settings during the upgrade process, I was a bit concerned. On the other hand, since Microsoft had insisted that little had been changed in the actual functionality of Office applications, I was reasonably hopeful that upgrading to Office v. X wouldn’t require too much tweaking and readjusting.

After installing Office v. X, I removed the default “Templates” folder installed with the applications and put an alias to a copy of my own folder of highly customized Office templates, as I had done when upgrading from Office 98 to Office 2001. When I first launched Word v. X, I had a rather unpleasant surprise awaiting me:

Same custom interface in Word v. X

As can be seen when comparing this last snap shot to the one immediately above, Word v. X didn’t exactly succeed in preserving my custom interface. It insisted on displaying the default “Standard” tool bar above everything else — and you can see from the differently sized “title bars” on the left-hand side in this snap shot that Office actually uses two types of tool bars (the default ones provided by Word have a smaller title bar and close button; the ones you create have a bigger title bar and close button).

Hiding the “Standard” tool bar again, however, was just a matter of a simple click. I then had to reposition my home-made tool bars, which obviously weren’t aligned properly. This took a bit of effort, as Word sometimes refuses to put a tool bar where you want to put it, but I eventually succeeded in restoring my previous layout.

The bigger issue, however, was all those buttons in the two vertical tool bars on the left-hand side, whose custom icons had been replaced by generic “organizational chart” icons. That’s when I discovered that Microsoft had actually entirely removed the option to draw custom icon pictures from Office v. X!

Indeed, if you compare the contextual pop-up menu for button images in Word 2001 from the one in Word v. X, you’ll see that the copy/paste/edit set of commands has disappeared:

Difference in custom icon pop-up menu between Word 2001 and Word v. X

I suppose that someone decided that providing a tool for editing high-quality Aqua icons for Office’s tool bar buttons was too much work. But, instead of leaving the existing, low-resolution icon drawing tools, they were removed altogether!

In other words, custom icons for tool bar commands are no longer supported in Office. And, if you have drawn any custom icons in previous versions of Office, they will be lost and replaced by a generic icon in Office v. X. The only options that you now have are either to use one of the icons provided by Office (and, as you can see from the snap shot above, the choice is severely limited) or to use plain text for your buttons. The problem with plain text buttons is that, as you can see in the snap shot below, in vertically-oriented tool bars, the text is oriented vertically as well — and there’s nothing that you can do to force the tool bar to display the text horizontally, no matter how short the text is.

Text button in vertical tool bar

What this meant for me is that I had to change all my existing tool bar icons for which no icon was available to plain text buttons and I had to reorganize everything so that my custom buttons were in horizontally-oriented tool bars in the top part of the screen rather than in vertical tool bars on the left-hand side of the screen, where they would be unreadable.

Needless to say, I wasn’t particularly pleased with this. For example, instead of the custom icon consisting of a “12” with a red arrow pointing upwards that I had drawn in Office 2001 and put in a vertical tool bar for a button designed to add 12 points of space above the current paragraph, I was obliged to use a worse approximation consisting of a “12” with a minus sign and I was forced to put it in a horizontal tool bar.

Custom icon in Word 2001 and text icon in Word v. X

Similarly, instead of the appropriately small icon for the “Keep With Next” command (which prevents two paragraphs from being separated from each other by an automatic page break) that I had designed in Word 2001 and included in a tool bar on the left-hand side, I was now obliged to use a much bigger text-based icon located in a horizontally-oriented tool bar, much farther from where my cursor usually is when working with paragraphs of text.

Custom icon in Word 2001 and text icon in Word v. X

Worse still, if you take a look at the full list of commands that you can, in theory, add to your tool bars through Word’s customization features, you will notice that most of them do not have an icon designed for them by Microsoft developers. They don’t have an icon, and you can’t draw one yourself. In other words, if you want to add commands to your tool bars, in most cases you have no choice but to use big, bulky text-based button icons in horizontal tool bars.

Commands without icons

Luckily for me, I have a fairly big screen, which gives me enough screen real estate for my documents even with several tool bars visible. But this change in Office v. X is definitely a big step back in terms of customization capabilities in Microsoft Office. (Of course, there’s no mention of this anywhere in Office v. X’s documentation.)

Now, I realize that most Office users probably never bother to customize their environment. It’s a shame, because it can really make the applications more efficient and more usable. But for the small minority of users who do customize their environment, surely it wouldn’t have been too hard for Office developers to simply leave the functionality as it was in Office 2001. I, for one, would have gladly taken low-resolution button icons over no icons at all, if given the choice.

The Unacceptable Stuff

Every new version of a major application or suite of application such as Office v. X inevitably comes with bugs. One hopes that those bugs will be fixed very quickly by Microsoft through a “Service Release”, because they can be a major source of frustration. Here’s a list of some of the bugs I noticed during my first few weeks of using Office v. X

First of all, Word has always been annoying when it comes to handling file formats other than the standard “Microsoft Word Document” format (the one with the “.doc” suffix in the PC world). Since Office 2001, Word does offer the option to save in a different format by default:

Preferences in Word v. X for saving documents

However, if you choose anything other than “Word Document” in this preference setting, even though changing this setting is a clear indication that you want to save in a different format, Word will still interrupt you with the following warning each and every time you want to save any document you have created:

Warning when saving document in format other than Word Document

In other words, unless you don’t mind having to see and dismiss this dialog box 50 times per day, don’t even bother to use a setting other than “Word Document”.

This hasn’t changed one bit in Word v. X, which keeps the same annoying behavior. In addition, however, Word v. X introduces a bug that makes using a different file format even more annoying. For example, I have many documents saved in RTF (“Rich Text Format”, suffix “.rtf”), because it’s a format that is leaner than the “.doc” format, preserves all styles, tables, etc., and is less prone to document corruption than the native “.doc” format.

With Word v. X, however, whenever I want to open one of my existing RTF files, half of the time, I get a warning that “the document contains macros and customizations” and therefore might be infected with a virus:

Word warning when opening RTF files... sometimes

This is, of course, simply not the case, because those documents were created with Office 2001 on my machine and do not contain any kind of customization. In addition, the warning shows up at random, and not every time I open an RTF document. In other words, the same RTF document might cause the warning to appear today, and might open without any problems tomorrow.

Of course, I have the option to completely deactivate this warning — but I do not want to, because it is a useful feature that can protect me from infected documents coming from the outside world. So, for now, I simply have to live with that bug.

Then there is a major problem for international users of Word. With Mac OS X, Apple introduced a new behavior for those keys on your keyboard that are used to add diacritics (acute accent, grave accent, umlaut, circumflex accent, cedilla, etc.) to certain characters. In the traditional Mac OS (and still in the Classic environment in OS X), typing the key for the diacritic wouldn’t have any visible effects until you pressed the next key, i.e. the key for the letter to which you wanted to add the diacritic. When a key behaves this way, it’s called a “dead key” and is symbolized by a white frame around the key in the Key Caps application:

Dead keys in Key Caps

For example, in the “U.S.” keyboard layout in the snap shot above, option-e is a dead key for the acute accent, which means that typing “option-e” followed by “e” will produce an “e” with an acute accent (“é”).

In Mac OS X, however, typing a dead key immediately causes the display to change and indicate visually that you’ve just typed a dead key and are expected to type a letter that will combine with this dead key. Mac OS X indicates this visually by drawing the corresponding diacritic with an underscore, like so:

After typing dead key

After you’ve typed the letter for which you want to use a diacritic (a circumflex accent in this case), OS X then replaces this diacritic/underscore combination with the intended character:

After typing character

When you start typing text with diacritics in Word v. X, however, you will soon realize that, half of the time, Word simply “forgets” to add the diacritic! Here is an example of a sequence of characters I obtained through typing the sequence “circumflex accent + e” repeatedly in Word:

Sequence of circumflex e characters

Not particularly impressive! Other times, you will get duplicate diacritics and end up with a sequence such as “ê^”, even though you’ve only pressed the dead key for the diacritic once. Other times still, the accents shows up on the wrong letter. The other day, for example, I typed “rôle de” in French and Word wrote “role dê”.

To Microsoft’s credit, when I raised the issue with them after receiving my review copy of Office (the U.S. version), they immediately started investigating the issue for me. After a few phone calls, it was determined that this was a known bug, that it was detected too late in the development process and that it was fixed in the French version of Office v. X (and presumably in other international versions), but not in the English version of the software. Microsoft offered to send me a French copy of the software immediately, and I receivedit a few days later.

The problem is that the French version doesn’t entirely fix the problem. It occurs less frequently than in the English version of Word v. X, but it still happens. In addition, the circumflex accent happens to be a special character in Word’s Find/Replace dialog, where it is used in combination with various letters to indicate special characters (“^s” stands for non-breaking space, “^p” stands for paragraph break, etc.). In other words, even English users of Word will be affected by the problem — albeit in a less significant fashion.

I decided to investigate the issue further and, out of curiosity, I experimented with other Carbon applications, such as BBEdit and Eudora. Based on my investigation, it appears that the bug doesn’t affect Word v. X exclusively, but can affect any Carbon application. However, the fact remains that it happens far more often in Word v. X than it does in other applications during the course of a similar text typing session. That is why, even though I had been typing in French in both Eudora and BBEdit under OS X for several months, I still hadn’t noticed the problem.

The problem is actually mentioned on MacFixIt’s “Troubleshooting Microsoft Office v. X” forum. According to the Microsoft representative who responded on this forum, the bug is an OS X bug, not a Microsoft bug. This somewhat contradicts what I was told by the representative who said that the bug had been fixed in the French version of Word.

In actual fact, if you keep a close eye on your Word interface (U.S. version) while you are typing a dead key diacritic, such as the acute or circumflex accent, you will notice that Word v. X switches from your current paragraph font to “Times New Roman” — even though, when you type the following letter, it displays it correctly in your current character font, not in Times New Roman. I have a strong suspicion that this Word-specific behavior is part of the problem. Indeed, when I do the same thing in the French version of Word v. X, it no longer switches to Times New Roman after I’ve typed the dead key diacritic. In other words, Microsoft appears to have fixed part of the problem in the French version of Word. But, as I said, it doesn’t solve the problem. (If you are using the U.S. version of Word, you’ll also notice that, if you press the Delete key immediately after typing a dead key diacritic, Word will delete the diacritic/underscore combination, but it will refuse to move the cursor one step backwards, like it normally does after pressing the Delete key. Even if you press the Delete key repeatedly after this, the cursor won’t budge. This is probably related to the Times New Roman problem, as it doesn’t occur in the French version of Word.)

In short, Apple and Microsoft seem to share the responsibility for this, and a fix will probably require updates from both companies. No matter who is responsible, however, the fact remains that, as of this writing (running Word v. X in Mac OS X 10.1.2), anyone who uses diacritics in Word is likely to experience annoying problems.

Word also suffers from other, less significant, but still annoying, bugs. I already mentioned the one about the “Save As...” sheet becoming invisible and impossible to dismiss. Another bug affects the “Standard” tool bar, in which some buttons, such as the buttons for Bold, Italics and Underline, might end up staying permanently grayed out, even though they are supposed to be active. This happened to me a few days after I first started using Word, and there was nothing that I could do to fix it short of trashing my “Normal” template, which I am not about to do, given the amount of customization it contains. I ended up having to hide the “Standard” tool bar and recreate my own “Standard” tool bar with the same buttons, which now works fine.

Office v. X also seems to have various problems with fonts. Depending on the mix of fonts that you have installed on your system, you might end up with Office applications that keep quitting unexpectedly on you when you try to launch them. The solution here is to remove all fonts from your system except for the basic Mac OS X set and test your additional fonts one by one in order to identify the offending one(s). I should note, however, that, when this happened to me, I removed all my fonts, which made Office happy. I then started adding them again, ten by ten or so, and Office never complained again. I am now using the exact same mix of fonts I had before, and it doesn’t make Office applications unexpectedly quit. Go figure.

Conclusion

Office v. X is a significant upgrade, not because of the new features it brings, but because Microsoft appears to have been forced by Mac OS X’s stringent compliance requirements to build a better-behaved, more Mac-like suite of applications. And this is good news for Mac users, regardless of their personal feelings toward Microsoft products.

What is not so good news, however, is that performance is not up to what should be expected of a suite of office applications (which are typically not too demanding in terms of processing power). Apple has its part of responsibility in this, but Microsoft is not guilt-free either. Compared to many other Carbon applications running in Mac OS X v. 10.1, Office v. X feels more sluggish and less responsive.

There is also some work still to be done to bring Office v. X to a higher level of compliance with Mac OS X — the most glaring omission here being the absence of support for long file names.

Finally, Office v. X suffers from bugs that don’t seem to jeopardize the integrity of your data (except for the “unexpected” quits mentioned earlier), but that can be a very big source of annoyance and really should have been caught during the testing process.

Is the upgrade worth the price? Objectively not, since the suite introduces so few new features. In purchasing Office v. X, you are effectively paying for Apple’s choices in terms of the evolution of its OS architecture, as well as for the fact that Microsoft’s long history of disregard for Macintosh standards and use of proprietary technologies had left them with an suite of applications that needed to undergo significant rewrites in order to be able to run properly in the more stringent Mac OS X environment. I personally don’t feel that Microsoft deserves to be paid that much for what is essentially a (reasonably successful) effort to make up for their past mistakes (no other software c0mpany is charging so much for so few new features), but the millions of users of Office for the Macintosh out there have little choice.

I also find it particularly offensive that Microsoft would choose this particular version of Office to introduce its new “copy protection” scheme that effectively prevents you from running Office on more than one machine in your home network. It seems to me that, at the very least, Microsoft should have a special offer for home users of Office v. X that enables them to purchase a second copy of the suite at a reduced price.

POST SCRIPTUM: In the coming months, I intend to follow Microsoft’s lead and totally revamp my old series of postings on Microsoft Word 2001 on MacFixIt’s “Troubleshooting Microsoft Office 2001” forum to reflect the changes introduced by Word v. X and identify those bugs and flaws that have been fixed and those bugs and flaws that remain intact. This work will be posted on Applelust.com as a series of web pages and, time permitting, PDF files, so as to make them easier to use. In the mean time, you may still access my Word 2001 postings (which are still relevant for the most part) by using MacFixIt’s forum search feature, searching the “Microsoft Office 2001” forum for the words “Pierre Igot” with search option “By Username” and date range “All posts”.

You might also want to take a look at my review of Office 2001 at Applelust.com, which covers a number of features unchanged in Office v. X.

Pierre Igot

We have a forum topic just for Office v.X. Talk here.

 

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