Microsoft Office 2008: The Best?

So. Since I had to call “no joy” with Numbers, where at the same time Excel — from Microsoft, I remind you — actually lived up to its name, and Excelled, I decided to see if maybe I had jumped on the Apple/iWork bandwagon with a little too much haste; maybe the latest & greatest MS office was indeed the all-around champ. To the bat cave!

The, uh, bat cave is where I do all my side-by-side testing. Bat cave.I stole the term. From Batman.

I downloaded the trial version and installed. Strike one. I don’t know why Microsoft cannot create a more streamlined, intuitive process for installing their apps. I will say to their credit, that this was better than the Office 2004 install that loaded so many items that rhymed with “crap” to bother recalling, but still: near the end, they throw a dialog box at you telling you that the installer will now search for and destroy older versions of office you have installed.

But, I don’ wanna trash my actual, fully-functional version of Office for this trial.

Your options? “Continue.” Yes. Now when you get the the next screen, in small print buried at the bottom of like the 3^rd paragraph, they mention that just don’t check the ones you want to keep and then hit continue and it won’t delete anything. But, uh, how about — for the sakes of logic and customer stress relief — we just put an option to “Skip” on the first window? Yeah! Let’s try that, maybe? That might work! Might make sense!? Unless you’re Microsoft!?

OK we’re installed. Whew! What a journey. But now we have to test out Word & Excel. So let’s open up some old documents and let’s see what we can’t do with these bad boys, eh?

I open up word, and drop in an image. Quite immediately, and of course wrongly, it puts the image inline with the text. Which honestly I just about always hate, but OK some people like to do it that way (because they were born without a left hemisphere where it counts, but that’s neither here nor there), let’s just fix it. Hey, uh, where do I fix this? Is it in the formatting menu? Can’t find it. In the image elements at the top? No. In the clip art/photos toolbox (editor’s note: Freudian slip I should probably left in: I typed “Foolbox” first time out)? Doesn’t seem to be. OK fine, I remember that I can just right-click it and change it to not be inline… wait, where’s that option gone to? What the f*ck? They? What? How the hell?

Strike three. Geezus, Microsoft. Didn’t you used to do this for a living? The only thing worse, is the cluttered interface. There’s a toolbox, there’s a toolbar, there’s a ribbon (?) that takes up like 500,000 pixels of your screen real estate… it’s pretty gaudy all considered. I thought that the concept sounded kinda cool, but in practice, it’s annoying; you end up with but a corner of the window dedicated to your actual content. You know, that most important part? It gets kicked to the side rather fast. Take a closer look, click the picture at the title of this post.

Peace.