Grammar check impossible on any document

[sthan]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Office has ALL updates until 12.2

Grammar check is impossible (only Spell check works).
Message : "Word encountered a problem. Sesion will now be closed."
Phone support is totally incompetent on the issue.
Every Office 2008 forum has numerous threads on this.
???

 

[John McGhie]

Sadly, I suspect that you have already got the bad news.

This is a bug: they haven't fixed it, and we just have to wait.

You did not mention which language you are using. This bug is highly
language-dependent. In some languages (e.g. American...) it won't happen.

The bug is also fixed for some folks with the latest updates (12.1.2). But
you already have that.

Sorry: You, and we, will just have to wait.

Cheers

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

Office has ALL updates until 12.2

Grammar check is impossible (only Spell check works).
Message : "Word encountered a problem. Sesion will now be closed."
Phone support is totally incompetent on the issue.
Every Office 2008 forum has numerous threads on this.
???

--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[sthan]

Thank you, John,
I use french (but do work in english too).
Bug is reported also in german, italian and spanish.
Quite a few…
Phone support should be informed of that.
The other bas news is that one :
why on earth Office developers did cancel from 2008
the line and columns counter that existed in every version of Word until 2004 ?
How they figure we can, in publishing business, calculate numbers of signs per line and lines per page for a any given document ?
Manually ?
Reply of support was : decision made by design.
By design ? This must be a joke…
The only turnaround I use is to re-open the doc back in 2004.
This is beyond me.
Carelessness at its peak.

 

[CyberTaz]

Your dismay caused by the removal of Status info from the Status Bar is
shared by many Please take a moment to use Help> Send Feedback to add
your comments on the matter to the data bank ‹ MS does track & review that
information. If there is enough demand we may well see the features return.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[sthan]

Your dismay caused by the removal of Status info from the Status Bar is

shared by many Please take a moment to use Help> Send Feedback to add
your comments on the matter to the data bank � MS does track & review that
information. If there is enough demand we may well see the features return.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones

________________
Bob,
I did (but I'm not using 2008 for professional purpose), only 2004.
My wife, which uses it as a student, did also send feedbacks to MS.
But my main concern is that MS developers should not delete this status bar function at all ! In a word processor app, it's pure nonsense. And first of all why delete lines of code which are already here and very useful.
Primum non nuocere should be the principle here.
Please also note that status bar is now prone to bugs too — with page numbers disappearing mysteriously, etc.
With 2004, it's not.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Thank you, John,
I use french (but do work in english too).

And you can't check the grammar in French?? That's really weird. I use
French as well all the time (in the US version of Office) and I sure can
check the grammar in my documents.

Out of curiosity, do you have Offie in French or English?

Corentin

 

[sthan]

Corentin,
This is Office in french.
I mainly work in english, so I have many apps in English.
But my wife is less fluent than me, and she works in french.
Being the main user of Office 2008, she uses it in a french version on a french language Leopard iMac.
I know some users have no problem with grammarcheck, but it seems they are, like you, using Office in english.
I found several french users having the same bug as we do.
Spellcheck only; and no grammar.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin, This is Office in french. I mainly work in english, so I have
many apps in English. But my wife is less fluent than me, and she works
in french. Being the main user of Office 2008, she uses it in a french
version on a french language Leopard iMac.

The language you use for the System doesn't make much of a difference
here. The fact that you have Office in French and have problems (and I
have it in English and I don't) makes me wonder whether it could be an
issue specific to the French version of Office.
I wasn't aware that there were still some language-specific issues. I
thought they had all been corrected in the pas few updates.
Are you indeed up to date and running version 12.1.2??

I know some users have no
problem with grammarcheck, but it seems they are, like you, using Office
in english. I found several french users having the same bug as we do.
Spellcheck only; and no grammar.

Yeah, but on the other had, I haven't read any report like yours in the
group for Office in French: microsoft.public.fr.mac and that's the kind
of issue people would be pretty vocal about.
It could be that you're not up to date (in this case, it's easy: update
and that's it ;-) ), it could be a bug no one complained about (not very
likely), or it could be some sort of corruption (preferences, etc).

Did you also try trashing some of your Office preferences?? Do you still
have the same problem from another user account on the same Mac??

Corentin

 

[sthan]

Corentin,
As said before, my Office is absolutely up to date.
And regarding other forums mentioning this problem,
there are indeed numerous threads about it —
Mac Generation, for one.

Besides, there are numerous other bugs I mentioned
on this site.

 

[sthan]

Corentin,

Two more precisions :
- I obviously trashed word.plist and preferences, with no avail
- I won't go that way (trying another account, etc.) : one of the machines I tested is a brand new iMac running smoothly on all accounts. The only bugs we have are with Office 2008.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin,
As said before, my Office is absolutely up to date.

Sorry. It's hard to keep up because you are posting through the MS
forums instead of a newsgroup client application. Your messages are
therefore not threaded and I have a hard time figuring what's a reply to
what. Not your fault, but the new forum makes it a little tricky for
people who try to answer here.

And regarding other forums mentioning this problem,
there are indeed numerous threads about it
Mac Generation, for one.

Can you give me a link??
The ones I found were referring to Word 12.0.1.

Now there is another possibility. The updater could have failed to
update some parts of Office. It's a real pain to uninstall it all to
reupdate it all just to check that though :-(

Besides, there are numerous other bugs I mentioned
on this site.

By "this site" you mean the forum here?? This is simply a front-end to
the MS newsgroups (on nntp). People check the discussions here through
multiple interfaces (the MS webpages, Google newsgroups, Entourage,
MacSoup, MT-Newswatcher...).


Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin,

Hi again,

Two more precisions :
- I obviously trashed word.plist and preferences, with no avail
- I won't go that way (trying another account, etc.) : one of the
machines I tested is a brand new iMac running smoothly on all accounts.
The only bugs we have are with Office 2008.

So you tested it on multiple machines... That's not a good sign at all.
The French MS Mac is pretty quiet these days (people not over their
vacations yet??), but it could be worth re-posting there
(microsoft.public.fr.mac ) to see if others are seeing this too. Some of
the other MVPs there might have the French version of Office which could
help troubleshooting.

Corentin

PS: could you send me a document with some bogus text where you fail to
check the grammar in French to korventeenATmvpsDOTorg?? I'd like to
double-check a couple of things.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Sadly, I suspect that you have already got the bad news.

This is a bug: they haven't fixed it, and we just have to wait.

John, are you sure you are not referring to the bug that was affecting
12.0.0 and 12.0.1 and was fixed (with the many other grammar bugs) in
12.1.0???

I really really don't remember reading anything about this specific
issue in any of the groups I read after 12.1.0 was released.


Corentin

 

[John McGhie]

Yep! That's what we have here too: most "European" languages other than
English are bad.

Sorry, there is no way to get your position counters back. As you have been
told, they took out the function that calculated them.

You are not the only one annoyed by this.

As Bob says, use Help>Send Feedback to tell MICROSOFT about your
displeasure. They won't read your post in here.

Cheers

Thank you, John,
I use french (but do work in english too).
Bug is reported also in german, italian and spanish.
Quite a few…
Phone support should be informed of that.
The other bas news is that one :
why on earth Office developers did cancel from 2008
the line and columns counter that existed in every version of Word until 2004
?
How they figure we can, in publishing business, calculate numbers of signs per
line and lines per page for a any given document ?
Manually ?
Reply of support was : decision made by design.
By design ? This must be a joke…
The only turnaround I use is to re-open the doc back in 2004.
This is beyond me.
Carelessness at its peak.

--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Corentin:

I am not sure at all.

Like you, I am having some issues of precedence caused by the lack of proper
threading in Entourage.

But I have seen sporadic reports of Spelling/Grammar problems in Romance
languages other than English recently. I had thought they were referring to
fully-patched non-English versions of Office.

But your memory will be better than mine: I tend to leave the non-English
problems to YOU

Cheers

John, are you sure you are not referring to the bug that was affecting
12.0.0 and 12.0.1 and was fixed (with the many other grammar bugs) in
12.1.0???

I really really don't remember reading anything about this specific
issue in any of the groups I read after 12.1.0 was released.


Corentin

--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Sthan]

Thx John,

I sent several feedback messages about this to Msoft.
The mere suppression of such a function is beyond me.
What do they smoke, in these labs ?

 

[John McGhie]

Naaahhh... You don't want any of that... I tried it. Doesn't get you off


Seriously: They didn't "suppress" it or "remove" it, they did not
"re-create" it.

They ran out of time and people to produce Office 2008, so they shed
features to meet their marketing commitments. Apple flat-footed them twice,
once with the switch to Intel, and again with the switch to OS 10.5.

At the same time, Microsoft produced a completely new file format that they
had to develop to. So Office 2008 was coded almost entirely from a clean
sheet, and they ran out of time.

They have data (from the Customer Experience Improvement Program) that shows
them exactly which features customers are "using". When they had to make
decisions on which ones to cut, they cut the ones that would take too much
resource to make, then they cut the ones the user data shows are rarely
used. Then they cut a few they simply didn't have time to do

Office 2010 will be made by a MUCH larger team. All sorts of features will
come back, and new ones will be added. They are at the "Feature Cut" stage
of their design right now.

Cheers

Thx John,

I sent several feedback messages about this to Msoft.
The mere suppression of such a function is beyond me.
What do they smoke, in these labs ?

--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Sthan]

50 billion dollars and counting and they're short of people.
Rich people are sometimes skinflint.
Bureaucracy, anyone ?

 

[John McGhie]

That's a bit of a silly thing to say.

Microsoft corporation is a public company, owned by your pension fund. If
the board of directors spent more money making Mac Office than they are
likely to get back in profits, the shareholders would send them all to jail.

Yes, the corporation is rich. But neither the board of directors or the
employees are much interested in sitting in a jail cell making all sorts of
new friends with uncertain personal hygiene and a record that includes
violence.

So get real! Right after you figure out how to get your bank to give you
free samples, you can expect Microsoft to start selling you software at a
loss. Of course, I know that you will then be working without a salary,
just for the common good of humanity, right?

Don't expect others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself. Not even
Microsoft

50 billion dollars and counting and they're short of people.
Rich people are sometimes skinflint.
Bureaucracy, anyone ?

--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Hellstan]

John,
This is all good and true.

I still have some personal and sound reasons to say that Msoft (or HP, mind you) is skinflint and Apple is not. Different ways with their customer base. ;-))
___________________________________________________
Microsoft has never made public the revenues obtained from selling Office for Mac, but it's obvious that they are excellent, since Bill Gates was recently saying in an interview for LA Times

"We're ecumenical people," spune Bill Gates. "We have to run everything. Our first graphics interface was on the Macintosh. We've always done well on Macs."

Since the standard version of Microsoft Office For Mac costs $399.95, and the Professional one costs an extra $100, and since the Macs own 5% of the US computing market, it's obvious that the recorded profits are very good.