Office X – I Wish I Had Another Choice

Having no other choice that met my needs I ended up having to buy Office X. I really wish I didn't have to.
Although Office X does 'look' OS Xish, somehow it doesn't really fit in. Even the keyboard commands are slightly different. It's installation is also really buggy, the updates are hard to understand, it doesn't actually support Excel files very well from Windows that contain VBA code, it has strange artifacts on the screen, etc. But I could live with all of this were it not for one huge problem – Excel's VBA support is a bad joke. In fact the VBA support is so bad that even MS tells its users to go use REALBasic. What isn't mentioned is that REALBasic costs a minimum of $100 dollars. In addition I couldn't figure out how to use REALBasic from within Excel. REALBasic likes to call out to Excel but not necessarily be called from inside of Excel. In addition I found the REALBasic editor unpleasant to use. So I am stuck with VBA (at least until I can figure out how to use Applescript from inside of Excel). Unfortunately Office X's VBA editor quite often doesn't work As explained here, I am constantly having to go in and delete a cache file to keep VBA from just stopping to function all together. I also get really nice 'out of memory' errors even though my system has tons of free memory. In addition the VBA editor is a throw back to the early 1990s. It has no object introspection support, no variable watches, no syntax completion, heck, even the scroll wheel on the mouse doesn't work in the VBA editor! After having used Office X for a week now my main take away is the contempt with which Microsoft holds Mac users. I'm not surprised, but it is annoying.

Please Apple, either invest a little money to get OpenOffice running right on the Mac or come out with a version of AppleWorks (yes, I too have heard the rumors about iWorks) that is as good as Keynote.

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