Why is Microsoft Office inferior on the Mac?

Office works fine for me except for how it starts reporting corrupt fonts every once in a while. Totally gunks up my computer. But I found a free program called FontFinagler that finds and cleans up all the font caches in your computer, and that always fixes the problem.

Of course, it would be nice if Office didn't incorrectly report corrupt fonts to begin with (and why does it always start with the "V" fonts?) but this is the next best thing.

I so completely agree. I use Excel a lot and it has been my biggest frustration since switching from my Vaio to my Powerbook.

Great input, Peter. So, to digest what you just said - you find that the Windows version of the Office suite on Parrallels works better than the Mac version directly on a Mac, but it's a resource hog. And you're anticipating that the next version of Office for a Mac will have improved functionality. Is this accurate?

That's pretty much it, especially if you have an Intel Mac since Mac Office 2004 runs in emulation mode if it's not a PPC platform (on the "Rosetta" technology, which is actually licensed from Transitive). Parallels' emulation is "virtualization", using the VT support on the newer Intel chips, whereas the Transitive technology is runtime binary translation, which is slower (pardon the geek talk). The short version of the difference is that emulation (Rosetta) actually slows down the CPU, whereas virtualization (Parallels/VMWare) just requires more RAM and disk space.

I added sooo many fonts the other day, now Excel and Word won't even open.
This is crap.

J.O.D: Me too! HELP!

I'm done with MS. NeoOffice does everything that I need, not to mention that it's compatible with all the latest office file formats.

Muller, you must truely be a moron. I'm a teacher at a Jr. High and a High School. My students use MS Office on our Macs, their own Macs at home and I've used MS Office since OS 9 and no one complains like you do.

My answer to you and why you are failing is that it's not MS Office ... you're just to stupid to pass and you have to blame something else.

To answer @Thor Muller comment and I guess all the rest - Just because a FEW Mac users on this thread that have expressed that they can't handle Office 07 or 08 (compared to the thousands that buy Office 2008, or more than the Millions that bought the previous versions) proves nothing other than you are too lazy to read the support material to LEARN how to use it. This is definitely a platform (Mac) problem user wide I've observed.

Look, Apple invented Macs and OS X for the simple minded, that's pretty obvious. I've yet to meet a Mac owner who has ever read a manual other than flip through the pages, you people prove that point. MS Office is a real business application, maybe it doesn't belong on your Mac's; so if you want something for the adle-brained, go use iWorks, even our 5th graders can handle that .... maybe even Dylan O can too, though I doubt it. It has that cutesy little kid look you'll probably like too.

As for running "clunky" or starting slow - I have Office '08 on a old 2004 G4 1.78GHz PowerBook with 1GB of RAM and it launches just as fast as any other "professional" applications like Adobe CS3 or Keynote; it even launches as quickly as Office X did and runs with 100% reliability. Like I insinuated, it looks like real business software is just too tough for you people.

The "Mac Community" badgers MS every year to make available to them a serious updated business suite in Office, so that Mac's can have some semblance of acceptability in the Education and Enterprise sector. Sometimes I think that with all the snotty, rude and lies that Apple perpetrates in their childish TV and print ads, and ones clowns like you perpetuate, Microsoft should pull any support for OS X. Lets see how far OS X gets with their iSuck office application?

Ps. Kids have an excuse for being stupid, they are still learning and maturing into adults that don't make excuses for not learning to master life, let alone a proven application that Millions of others use every day. Adults have no excuses to complain about nothing but their mental laziness. Muller, you and the other complainers should be embarrassed that 13 to 17 year olds can master something you can't, apparently.

100% reliability is absolutely untrue. Only Jesus was 100% reliable... everyone knows that.

Also, have you ever asked your self "perhaps it is I that is clunky and slow?" My Father has a G4 and thinks its the best computer he has ever used, its perfect for him, he writes a few emails, surfs the web and word processes in Office 2004... he has never expressed any problems to me. I, on the other hand, cannot stand working on it. Although I am impressed by how long we've had the G4 it is ridiculously slow on my terms.

See Webster, "us kids" move at a much faster pace than most(i.e. baby-boomers who bought a computer in the late 90's and use it primarily for web, email, spreadsheets, slide shows and word processing.)

My work flow (on my lightning-fast 2.6ghz Macbook Pro) is near perfect and THE ONLY applications that stutter are those of Microsoft Office. I use these applications daily, and would not switch to any other suite of office applications BUT they just do not perform as well as other applications.

Peter S. Magnusson gave a good answer for a good question,

Please don't laugh at me it hurts my self esteem.

I can see that a lot of people have a lot of ire to share about Mac/PC alliances. That's fine, but it doesn't get us very far to argue at the periphery when we all know that there is surely a real reason Office has problems on the Mac. Why is that? It may be hard to say, but perhaps if we focus on it hard enough, and turn away from the easy pot-shots, we might be able to figure it out.

It's heartening to see that Microsoft tries to support Office for Mac, but perhaps Microsoft doesn't devote enough brainpower to doing it as well as they could. They cut back their staff on the Mac side quite a bit, and I bet those Microsoft folks that create Office for the Mac wish that wasn't the case.

But, I bet they're working as hard as they can to make Office for Mac as good as it can be. I'm sure they can do better (and want to). I'm also pretty sure that Apple can find a way to reach PC users who aren't wooed by design and functionality in the same way that many of us in this conversation are.

Let's try to remember that we all wish Microsoft Office for Mac worked better.

Don't we?

I find Office 2008 so aggravating, especially for power users. They hid all the features in 2007 and then rehid them with this iteration. Then they changed all the keystrokes, took out VBA and made it so I have to RTFM to change a label on the graph.