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The Word 98 for Macintosh Bugs Page

Last update: 1999.06.17

Contents

Notes | Background | Structure & page design | Bug reports: New & Old | How to contribute | Links

Notes

News
A volunteer and I have produced a first draft of a database-driven version of this document. Sometime in the next month, when we stamp out all our bugs, it will probably go live. For now, all-new bug reports are posted separately (65 K), while all the old bug reports are over at another site (180 K).

Not-very-new news
I've finally been E-mailing with someone from the Microsoft Mac Word team. He gripes that his team wastes time searching the Internet for bug reports when Microsoft already hosts a Web page for that purpose. Well, you need cookies activated to reach that site, and the URL is more than 80 characters long. My source agrees that it's too hard to find the Macintosh Office 98 support section on the vast Microsoft Web presence. Maybe someday we'll just be able to zip to http://www.microsoft.com/support/macoffice.

(John Kays writes in to say that "I posted a request for help here and Microsoft contacted me directly regarding my problem with mail merge and getting an "empty data file" dialogue. I would never have been able to solve the problem without their help. So Microsoft is following this page.")

In the meantime, this service will continue unchanged.

Background

Though I am a longtime adherent of the WordPerfect religion, having been, among other things, a beta-tester for Macintosh version 3.0 and a user on DOS and VMS platforms since version 3.0 in 1983, I decided to take the plunge and install Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh. Pretty much the only component of this gargantuan package I give a damn about is Word, a program I long ago abandoned. Word 98 does have a great many features I'm finding useful, like quick speed in dealing with very large documents. Despite my curmudgeonliness, the Office Assistant animations strike me as charming, and they don't seem to affect performance one whit.

Still, in true Microsoft fashion, it's virtually impossible to report a bug to the empire of Bill without triggering a support plan that you might have to pay for. Since those of us living with these bugs are, in effect, subsidizing Microsoft's research, development, and debugging operations through our own frustration, lost time, and ire at functions that do not work as advertised, I decided to start a page, to which anyone can contribute, listing bugs of any sort in Word 98 for Macintosh. (And only Word. Someone else will have to post a page for Excel, PowerPoint, and so on.)

How to contribute

Mail submissions to joeclark@fawny.org;
make absolutely sure to mention your Macintosh system, clock speed, OS version, and RAM quantity, or else I can't post your item. I used to go chasing people down for this information, but life is too short.

Links

Have a look at: