So amid the news coming of Macworld the new version of Office for the Mac was finally shipped by Microsoft. A few days ago a big box filled with all our upgrade versions was delivered to our CIO who, without me needing to ask for it, threw one to me the second I walked into his office.
Now my relationship with Office for the Mac is long and already detailed but I was very much looking forward to the upgrade for three reasons.

1. Entourage 2004 just never worked for me. I couldn’t schedule meetings correctly, it would barf all over itself all the time, the whole thing was a complete disaster. Even if it wouldn’t be feature complete when compared against Outlook I had nowhere to go but up.
2. Word 2004 had some screwy tool bars that for whatever reason just bugged me.
3. It was slow because of the Rosetta translation for the Intel chips.

I am very happy to report that all three of my main complaints have been addressed in this version. Entourage now does work for me, just like it used to for everyone else here in the office. The ability to schedule alone is worth the price of admission especially since Apple decided to let the meeting entry UI of the Leopard iCal marinate in a bowl of liquid mouse clicking stupid before they shipped it.

I know other folks in-house haven’t seen huge speed gains but given my nearly daily usage of Word on massive documents I can definitely tell a difference. The crazy Word toolbars are gone but I suspect that those got swept away in the more modern, and dare I say shiny look, that the entire Office suite got. And that’s really the punch line of the whole upgrade. Yes it is now Intel native, yes it is better looking, but that’s about it for compelling new features. I realize that there are only so many things you can do an office productivity suite at this point but I would have figured that in four years we would have had more than a whole bunch of new layout templates that no one uses anyhow.

Oh, and Entourage still uses the DAV interface to communicate with Exchange. Four years they’ve had to port over the communications code from Outlook. I’ve got the feeling that is a political problem though since all the MacBU people I’ve ever met are more than bright enough to handle that task.

One last thing, for you Mac Surround SCM users out there, the rather controversial move to ditch VBA in favor of AppleScript has yielded dividends. Jeff has written a couple AppleScripts that bring Word document differencing to Surround SCM.

Think of it as our little gift to you, even if the gift is one of those “Man that would really useful for me and if it happens to help out the rest of the world then that would be okey dokey too” types.

So from my last post I got a comment from Jonathan to basically do his homework for him. To make life easier for you the reader here’s the comment:

So can you give me a full analysis on Word vs. Pages? I’ve considered buying Pages, but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do.

Comment by Jonathan — October 19, 2007 @ 7:06 pm

Fear not poor Jonathan, I am here to light the way with my first ever Word vs. Pages totally subjective review. Oh and science has no place here, this will just be a lot of observations and screenshots. It’s best not to ask for things like say, evidence, just accepting on blind faith will make this all go a lot more smoothly.

Starting with my all-time favorite, the Blank Template, Pages looks like this in its default view:

Word? Looks pretty much the same save for the lack of a unified toolbar:

Even though the Word toolbars are annoying as all get out I’m not going to ding them for that. The Word 2008 release is coming in January and from the screenshots I’ve seen this has been fixed. I also feel bad for the Word team at Microsoft. They have this product that has always sold well for them and then Apple goes and changes their processors to Intel AND does so in a manner that anything written in CodeWarrior becomes a huge pain to port. I wonder if Apple poured sugar in their gas tanks too or if they thought that this was enough.

Now Word has this little view tab thingie in the lower left hand corner which changes how the main editing window is displayed:

Choosing the first one gives the default view and the third one shows the full page view. The second one gives this outline view:

I’ve never used the outline view and much to my surprise there was a fourth view, the notebook view. Clicking on it either creates a new document or it transmogrifies your current document into a notebook one.

Considering I had no idea what this was going to do I chose the new document option.

Look at that, it looks like lined paper from a notebook. I guess you’d use this for taking notes or something. Like if you were in class and you weren’t playing with IM/Facebook/MySpace.

Now Pages really only has two modes, normal and page layout. (i.e. The one to create things like newsletters that most people never choose.) You can’t flip back and forth between these two though. The only time you get to choose is when you create the document:

Now I’m a man with a newsletter writer tool in need of a newsletter:

One of the features of Word that I do use a great deal is the change tracking and commenting. You get to it by clicking these icons in the toolbar.

The icons in Pages are so close to the Word ones that you’d think they were separated at birth:

Pages then highlights your edits in this gutter on the left hand side with arrows pointing back into the main text.

I think I generally like how this is done but I’ll admit that I am a little surprised that the changes and comment boxes are square. It seems like Apple generally likes to make things like this a little bubbly.

In contrast this feature in Word is my mortal enemy. No matter how many times I do it I get my inline comment view, which looks a great deal like Pages’ version, into a situation that looks like this:

with all the changes showing up at the bottom of the window:

Then I have to mess around looking for how to change it because I never bother to write it down or take notes or do anything reasonable like that. I’m pretty sure that you have change to full page view to get it to work like I want, only when I did it today:

Figures. I guess that kinda sums everything up though doesn’t it.

For some reason today I got to thinking about word processors. I think it was because during a meeting I started to wonder if Word had outlived its usefulness when it came to writing design documents. Perhaps all design from start to finish could be wiki based? That’s something to ponder but that’s as far as I got since, you know, I needed to actually be paying attention during the meeting.

Seriously, I even made a note on my paper that reads:

“Blog idea: Word templates”

I think that note is actually an accident since I meant to write “Word vs wiki?” but the conversation had moved on and someone had said something about templates. Reading my poorly transcribed note made me think of two things.

1. It is good that I didn’t choose court reporting as a career.

Judge: “Would read back the last statement please.”

Me: “The defendant claimed that the box had fallen off the back of a truck and a roast beef sandwich sounds like an excellent idea for lunch.”

I wonder if you can be held in contempt of court if you were a working officer of the court? Something else to ponder.

2. I don’t recall ever using templates from a word processor.

See look, here’s MS Word and Pages, check out all those templates.

I automatically look for the one named something like “Blank Document”. In fact, all my writing tends to be essay type stuff, I can’t recall the last time I wrote a formal letter. I don’t even know if I own stamps to send a letter. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know how much a stamp costs. That’s probably bad. *Shakes fist at online billpay*

Thinking historically I must have at least written a resume with a template although it’s been so long I don’t remember.

Let’s try it this way, let’s list out all the word processors or text editors I remember using and see what I did with them.

1. Bank Street Writer - I used this in junior high to write many a five paragraph theme. If memory serves it didn’t support word wrapping so I doubt it had much in the way of templates.
2. WordPerfect - This was the main high school guy in all its DOS glory. I also used it in college on some crash-happy Mac Quadras. I even started the VMS version once on the VAX because I simply couldn’t believe that it had been ported to that platform. (Does anyone wonder why they are niche player today?) Anyhow, college papers don’t require templates, they just need ghost writers. Ah, yeah, err, forget you just read that. A ghost writer must have written it.
3. LaTeX - It’s true, I’ve used LaTeX. But it was in college and it was very experimental time. I don’t remember much about it other than it had to do with very complicated and advanced math which I’ve barricaded into a dark and distant corner in the back of my brain. To inquire further would run the risk of letting all that junk out and quite honestly it’s not worth it.
4. vi - Templates? Ha ha ha. Um, no.
5. Emacs - Couldn’t tell you, I gave it up once I found vi. Although I’m sure I could use it to write a lisp macro that would generate templates for me. You know, if I hadn’t found vi.
6. TextMate - Excellent for Ruby on Rails programming but I’ve never used it for documents.
7. BBEdit - Mostly like TextMate with the exception I have a non-eval license key for this one. I’ve typed loads of plain text documents in it but I’ve never needed a template.
8. MS Word - Used it for more documents than I can count, no template recollection.
9. Pages - Ditto.

So there we have it, a walk down memory lane that proves beyond any worthwhile doubt that I don’t remember using word processor templates. This was a fun exercise and I’ll tell you what, this post’s format was spot on. I should probably save so I can use it again, maybe make a template or something. Hey wait…