Nadyne Richmond's dashboard

I'm very sorry. I understand your frustration. I use two monitors too when I'm in my office, so I experience this myself and understand how that little bit of annoyance can really weigh on you.

However, my goal here is to be honest with you. We have to prioritise what fixes we make. Our prioritisation is based on several factors, including the severity of the issue, the number of impacted users, and the difficulty of making the change.

In this case, this is an issue that doesn't impact many users. Most users only use a single monitor, and most users who do use two monitors don't use one monitor in portrait mode. Likewise, the impact of this issue isn't very large, it's a matter of resizing your window. I don't say this to minimise your frustration (as I said: I experience this issue myself!), but rather to say that an issue with window resizing isn't as impactful as an issue that causes a crash or that impacts application performance.

I'm sorry that I can't give you a better answer here, but I do want to give you an honest answer. – Nadyne Richmond, on October 05, 2009 17:19

I understand your frustration, but I'm sorry to say that I can't commit to a timeframe in which this will be addressed. – Nadyne Richmond, on October 01, 2009 17:39

Then please do call tech support. We're not aware of any issues like this, so tech support can much better help you troubleshoot what is happening.

Leopard only required 512 MB of RAM, whereas Snow Leopard's minimum requirement is 1 GB. If you only have the minimum amount of memory, it's possible that Snow Leopard is taking up memory that had previously been available for use by Entourage to display messages.

If you have more than the minimum amount of memory, then please call tech support. You get two free calls to tech support with your purchase of Office 2008.

Could you verify that order number? That number is too short. Alternately, I can look it up by email address. If you don't want to post it here, you can email it to me at nmielke (at) microsoft (dot) com.

Is there any way that you could send me your order number so that I can see what happened and try to improve the process?

What problem are you having? Are you having trouble downloading it, activating it, or upgrading it?

It seems like SuperOffice is writing out the calendar invites in a way that Entourage can't read them. We're less likely to show malformed calendar invites than the other clients. You might want to contact their tech support and see if they have a fix in the works.

Are those calendar items showing up in Outlook Web Access?

Go to your calendar, control-click on the Exchange calendar (not the one labelled "On My Computer"), select "Folder Properties", then click on the "Empty" button. This will force Entourage to re-download everything from Exchange.

Have you tried rebooting your Mac?

After you have downloaded it, do you see the Installer in your Finder (most likely in the Downloads folder, but possibly on your desktop)?

If you find the download in your Finder and double-click on it, what happens? – Nadyne Mielke, on July 07, 2009 16:08

Let's start with the basics. :)

1. What kind of Mac are you installing this on? That is, is it a PowerPC Mac or an Intel Mac? You can tell this by opening up the Apple menu and selecting "About This Mac". The resulting window tells you what processor you have.

2. Where are you downloading Silverlight from? The best place to do so is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/...

3. After you have fully downloaded the DMG and double-clicked on it, what happens? Does the Installer icon ever show up in your dock?

It looks like you're using Spaces. In your top menu bar, see the little square icon with a number inside it? In the screenshot with Word, the number is 2; in the screenshot with Excel, the number is 3. That tells me that Word is opening in one Space and Excel is opening in another Space. Click on that square icon with the number inside it, then select "Open Spaces Preferences" from the menu. In the list of "Application Assignments", do you have Word and Excel set so that they're in a specific Space?

If you do, then what's happening is that when you launch Word, Excel, or Firefox, Leopard is switching your view to that Space. There are a couple of things that you can do:
1. If you don't like this behaviour at all, you could completely disable Spaces. Then everything will just open up all together at the same time. To disable Spaces, in the Spaces preferences, uncheck the box next to "Enable Spaces".
2. If you do like Spaces, but don't want to have Word always open in a specific Space, then you can remove it from the list of applications which have assigned Spaces. If you do this, then when you launch Word, it will just open in the Space that you're viewing at the time. To do this, in the Spaces preferences, select Word in the list of Application Assignments, then click the minus button below the list. Repeat this for any other applications that you don't want to open in a specific Space.
3. If you do like Spaces and mostly want Word to open in a specific Space, but sometimes want it to be in another Space, you can simply move Word to the Space that you want. Click on the Word title bar and drag it to the Space that you want.

If you want to learn more about using Spaces with Leopard, here's a great article from Apple that has lots of details about the best ways to use it:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1624

If you're sharing this Mac with someone else, and they've set it up this way, the easiest thing for you to do (or for the person who set up Spaces, since they might be more comfortable using the Mac) is to set up another user account for you. This way, they can have their Spaces set up the way that they like it, and you can have your account set up the way that you like it. For more information about using multiple user accounts on your Mac, here's an article from Apple with more details about it:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.ht...

Also, since you're using Spaces with Office 2008, you should make sure that you've got Office 2008 updated to the latest version (which is currently 12.1.19) and Leopard updated to the latest version (which is currently 10.5.7). There were some issues in Leopard which made Office 2008 and other Carbon apps not behave very well with Spaces, which have been greatly addressed in the latest version of Leopard.

You can have both Word and Excel files open at the same time. I do it all the time. What happens when you try to open them simultaneously? If you can, post a screenshot of the error message.

I can't talk about future plans right now, although you'll see more from us about our future plans in the coming months. The blogs that I posted links to above will have details when we've got them to share.

For now, suffice it to say that it's our goal to be a good Mac citizen, which means supporting OS technologies that make sense for our applications and our users. Quicklook is obviously something that we're well aware of, as are the upcoming improvements and new technologies offered to us by Snow Leopard.

This is an issue that we already know about. Since it's an issue that only impacts a pretty small subset of users, it hasn't quite made the cut yet.

What version of Entourage are you using? What kind of server are you connecting to?

The reasons are twofold:

1. We don't know exactly what was deleted. We could find it, by checking every single thing that's installed as part of a Office and determine whether it's okay to go forward. This would impact the size of the update, as well as the time necessary to update.

2. The number of users who run applications like Xslimmer or Monolingual are very small. We have millions of users, and the vast majority of them have never heard of such an application, nor see a need for it. Most people aren't so strapped for hard-drive space that a single GB makes a difference. We're a small team with limited resources, and we have to decide what to budget our resources on.

In this case, when it's an issue that impacts a tiny percentage of users and has an easy (albeit time-consuming) fix, we have things that are much higher priority and that will have a positive impact on a much greater number of users.