Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Microsoft Office Mac 2011 too buggy on Lion

We mostly use Apple Macs here (except for a Windows XP netbook for some ham radio software). We love Apple's iWork suite but my wife is required to work on documents in Microsoft Word.

She runs Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 on Lion. We have the latest updates of both but her day to day experience is very poor.

The documents she works on are large, hundreds of pages, with track changes enabled and showing lots of history.

Every day, every few hours, Word hangs in some way. Sometimes it shows a black window or a blank dialog box. Mostly we can't quit the program nicely - we must force quit to get out of it.

Word does recover the file without losing too much but it can be distressing for her when deadlines are approaching.

Microsoft do acknowledge quite a few "known issues" but no crashes in Word (only Excel).

This morning, just before heading out the door, we were unable to copy a PowerPoint presentation to a USB key. I know from past experience that Office holds files open even though the window is closed for some reason (no idea if this is still the case but it used to be). We tried to quit all the Office apps, they did appear to exit but when we tried a restart it was prevented by Word.

This software has been around for a long time. People rely on it. I'm embarrassed on behalf of the industry that a user can have such a bad experience every day. LibreOffice is looking very tempting again.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:08 PM

    absolute recognise this .. Word keep on crashing with larger docs .. inserting a some symbols gives 100% crash. Unbelievable MS doesnt fix this.

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  2. Anonymous11:23 PM

    Me too and I have to use Word even though I prefer LaTex :p

    Do you think an upgrade to Mountain Lion can fix it?

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  3. Incredibly frustrating. This happens to me all the time and I thought it was my old macbook, but it's happening on my new MacBook Air as well... And you're the only link that I can find to the problem that I'm experiencing...

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  4. I feel the same way, it often crashes on my mac, i really can't take it, I have to install windows 7 on my Mac , then get the office 2010 to work

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  5. I couldn't agree more. I have only recently moved over to a Mac and the Office software is woeful! Every single time I use the suite, it crashes. Terrible.

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