When you meet up with an an old friend after a decade, you are all the more aware of the changes they have gone through. Similarly, my switchover from Office 2000 to Office 2008 gives me an excellent “delta” comparison.  In this case, Office 2008 is like that high school 2nd string athlete who is now balding, fat, divorced and addicted to some substance or another.

So, without further ado, let’s look at Office 2008 for the Mac (under 10.6) with an eye towards its former self, Office 2000.

Suite-wide Performance

Compared to the current release of Office 2008, the apps of Office 2000 launched faster (with Rosetta) on 10.5 and 10.6 than Office 2008 does “natively”.   I wish I had hard numbers for you, but I’m simply not going to be that thorough here.

POINT:  Office 2000

Look & Feel & Tools

In Office 2008, Microsoft’s attempt at tool palettes is a miserable failure.  Not only do they manage to clutter the screen with a massive amount of junk (like clip art and shapes and a pre-formatted document style pane) they also fail in several other key ways:

1. The tool palettes fail to have the same information and capabilities as the menu system.   This simply makes it a nightmare to find a given feature (could be in the menu, could be buried in a tool palette).
2. The clutter of palettes is completely unwarranted mainly because it is features that nobody but a 3rd grader (book report with clip art) or a CEO (powerpoint with motion and sounds) would think of using.  It’s almost like they dragged users into the feature meeting, pointed out a palette and said “wouldn’t it be cool to have clip art and styles and sound palettes”.  The users said “yeah, I guess”, and the design team took this as a free ticket to put everything in your face.    Sure, one could go through the mess of turning stuff off, but “intelligent defaults” are nowhere to be found here.
3. “Tearing off” a palette is something Photoshop and Illustrator have done “forever”.  Pinning palettes to the top is also a key feature.  Reorganizing palettes to fit your workflow.  Easily adding or removing palettes.   Give it up…..not supported in Office 2008

For simplicity and less clutter,
POINT:  Office 2000

Excel 2008:  Misery

Nothing in the Office 2008 Suite has gotten as drug-addicted as Excel.   We’re talking crack-head functionality here.

First point — I couldn’t give a hoot about VBA support.  This seems to be all that people whine about in the new Excel versions (“No VBA support on the Mac!”).  Whatever, as there are even more mundane problems with this turd of an upgrade.

No text labels in charts, but you can add pictures of ducks instead

Excel 2008 now fails to properly handle and graph large amounts of data.  If you have more than 1000 datapoints, be prepared for long waits as it tries to build your graph.  Be prepared for the beachball.  Be prepared for a crash.   Most of all, be prepared to deal with Excel’s inability to graph things it could crank through in Excel 2000.

POINT:  Office 2000

Oh, and while we are on graphs, you can no longer have a graph on the sheet with data and print just the graph!  Selecting a graph and hitting print may just send 400 pages of data to your printer.  Turns out this is a “known” issue according to Microsoft from 2 years ago! You have to move the graph to another sheet to print it out by itself.   Awesome, eh?

POINT:  Office 2000

You can no longer add arbitrary text boxes to a graph (See example picture).  This was something that was easy to do in Office 2000 (and even in Office 1997). In some graphs in a workbook,  you can add clip art of a dog or a duck or a cute little doggie (who wants their Busy Bee?) but you cannot add additional information other than a title and axis labels.  For some reason, in other graphs I’m unable to even add the same pictures.   So there goes my hopes of encoding additional chart information based on the animal’s species.  WTF???   This loss of text boxes in charts is a backbreaker.    It turns out that Open Office 3.x appears to suffer the same difficulties.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT:  iWork for Mac, ’cause it is even more functional for graphing!

And finally, formatting a graph is painful at best.   In Office 2008 it is even more difficult to modify the data series data (No, Microsoft, I don’t really want to drag select my data columns when I have more than 1000 rows of data….I’d like to manually enter the series range).  Don’t even bother trying to re-arrange or re-center, as graphs tend to move around on their own.   Seriously, check out how far iWork has surpassed Office 2008 in terms of charting capabilities.  8 years ago there was no “iWork”.   Even the free Open Office matches the features and then some.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT: iWork for Mac, Open Office 3

Powerpoint 2008: Ho Hum

Powerpoint 2008 is in stasis.   Really, it improved at all in the last 8 years.   For many users, Powerpoint is their primary “draw” package, yet it is no easier to draw pictures and edit photos than it was in Office 2000.

Forget about styling your slides.  An eye Candy pre-formatted puke fest clutters the tool palette instead.   If you want to set up basic font styles based on bullet point depth you’ll have to search and work on it for quite some time.

Auto-layout and layout guides are barely implemented (see Keynote or OmniGraffle for a great example of how to do this).  At least Powerpoint 2008 can hand PNG images!

Regardless, Powerpoint is still the same boring old POS.  It has lots of clip art and other junk at the expense of a clean method for managing and creating professional looking presentations.

This one is a DRAW

Word 2008:  As nimble as a cow

Word continues to be a massively heavyweight cluster-f.  The floating palettes are equally cumbersome and still make changing fonts and adding styles a mess.   Even after 8 years, putting together a Table of Contents is something that befuddles all but the most dedicated users.   Forget about indexing!     Lost in the stone-age, Word fails to do lots of basic text editing tasks and make them easier.   As a document layout tool, it still remains painful.  Images have a habit of moving around and re-sizing themselves (or ignoring your attempt at re-sizing).   Establishing basic things like gutters and orphan control continues to be an option buried deep in the layers of menus.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT:  TextEdit, TextWrangler, iWork, OpenOffice

Conclusion

On Mac OS 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 and even 10.6, Office 2000 is a solid upgrade to Office 2008.   In Office 2000 you will find a bevy of useful features and a fairly clean interface and relatively simple-to-use set of tools.

If, like me, you had no reason to upgrade, I strongly recommend you stick with your old copy of Office 2000.  If you must upgrade, consider the free version of Open Office, as it not matches the functionality (and then some) of Office 2000 and even Office 2008.     If you don’t mind breaking out a little bit, I would suggest iWork, as surpasses Office 2000 in terms of functionality and ease of use.

Oh, and at no point is this review being sarcastic…..Office 2008 really is that much of a step backward!

Although I have tried to maintain links, I expect that some of the older posts might have broken links.   Worse, the main Reds Toyland site is definitely going to have some orphaned links that no longer can find the old reference.  Oh well — not that big a deal.

Favorites (at least what people tell me they like reading) are geting their own category.   These include the awesome My First Hospital Visit post and the Open Letter to the Diaper Changing Mom rant.

Enjoy the new site!

::Background::

While I have short hair, I’m currently sporting the (out-of-style) spiky look. To get said spiky look one has to use product. Not a lot, mind you, but some reasonably stiff hair gel of sorts.

Let me also add that I do not shower after work and *before* I put all the gear on and go play.

When you sweat in goalie gear, you really sweat. After a hard game, my underwear will be soaked through (like a dip in the pool). My scalp also perspires, soaking my hair and dripping down on the now-sopping wet sweat band in my mask. You see, the inside of ice hockey goalie gear is just another water sport.

::Back To The Subject At Hand::

That said, one of the little things I’ve noticed is that different hair products have different flavors. When the helmet sweat spigot engages, some hair products might sting your eyes and some won’t be a problem at all. But more pertinent to today’s topic is the fact that the sweat running down your face invariably gets into your mouth and comes with the added bonus of flavor.

::Tasty::

So, here are my reviews of various hair products and how they taste in the liquid environs of a goalie helmet.

(no particular order)

Redken Hardware – I rarely use this stuff, but it has a mild salty flavor. No sting on the eyes.

Redken Water Wax – This one has nearly no flavor, perhaps slightly salty, but it does manage to dry your throat out a bit and make you cough. In addition, the eye-sting is pretty bad. Because of its waxy nature, it kinda clouds up your eyes as well. So bring an extra eye-rinse water bottle.

Redken [6] Styling Paste – You kinda have to use a lot of this stuff to get it to work, and as a result you get quite a bit of lip-smacking goodness. It’s reminiscent of chewing on a rose petal – not exactly sweet, and it dries your mouth out a little bit. The good news is that it doesn’t completely destroy your vision like the water wax.

Crew Styling Pomade – This is by far the worst offender on the flavor and vision front. I simply had to stop using it for that very reason. Think of a bitter apple, so tannic that your mouth instantly puckers up. Now, add some weird chemical tartness to it that makes your cheeks tighten up. On top of that, throw some vaseline in your eyes. That’s what this stuff does inside a helmet!

Pantene Hair Gel - It might be the cheap stuff on this list, but it’s darn effective as a hair styling product. The flavor is perhaps nutty with a hint of salt — very mild and unoffensive. The eye-sting factor is non-existent. In fact, this is at the top of my “Best tasting hair product mixed with sweat and running into your eyes” category.

Nexxus Exxtra Gel - Another fairly reasonably priced ‘product’ with little flavor (perhaps a wee bit salty). This one also does not have any eye-stinging characteristics. However, it does have a curious effect of making my forehead feel “dry” or slightly chapped. Weird.

#2… I’m switching jobs. Yup….for those of you that know me, I will be changing employers after 7.5 years at Lightwave. Bittersweet indeed. I will miss everybody there that I worked with, but am happy to depart after 3 patents, half a dozen successful laser designs (e.g., models 110, 112, 142 as seen on the web site) and too many tools and fixtures to count. Viva la Barracuda!

#3… Lightwave has been acquired by JDSUniphase. The announcement came 21st. As I leave, the company is in the throws of acquisition and “figuring things out” in order to move on to the next step as part of a larger entity. Interesting times, for sure.

After breakfast, proceeded to spend hours and hours in my yard. I find that 3 weeks in springtime without mowing the lawn is enough to lose my dachshund. Beyond mowing, I had hedge trimming, weed whacking and various other yardly duties to perform. My stupid back makes these things take a long time, as all that bending over tends to cramp me up and make me walk funny. Regardless, I managed to get all those paving stones in place and the dirt shoveled (“planting season” is soon) and the wood on the wood pile. This busy boy even had time for a sunburn.

The reason behind all that yardwork really was procrastination. Procrastination from TAXES. Simply put, I am just one of millions of people who hate TAXES. The tax code for this f—ing country is downright stupid. Why are there thousands of possible deductions? What the hell is AMT anyway? Why do I have two different Capital Gains tax rates? Why do married couples with 2 wage-earners get dinged? How come a kid is a tax deduction? WHY IS TAX CODE USED TO ENFORCE THE SOCIAL AGENDA OF POLITICIANS IN WASHINGTON???

That aside, thank the powers for TurboTax. Sure….there may be better…but (1) it beats the pants off of manually doing it in Excel, (2) it is far cheaper than H&R block, and (3) I find that I can do my taxes with a beer to calm me down and still come out with the right answer.

Still not done with my day, it was off to MemChu (Stanford slang) to watch a buddy sing with the Stanford Early Music Singers. Great concert, beautiful music, excellent acoustics.

And then back to Steph’s for an evening of web-work. Steph was out playing a late hockey game (10:45) with ATeam2. Turns out, it was another messy-game-a-la-Logitech-Ice. In the first period, Steph’s 10 person team had a player kicked out for allegedly being “third man in”. I say “allegedly” because I know the person who was kicked out and there is not a fighting bone in her body.

But most importantly….Steph just got back from her game and told me SHE SCORED A GOAL. (Disclaimer from Steph: she keeps saying it’s a garbage goal and it ‘doesn’t count’ and she’s trying to be modest and all that stuff, but I don’t listen to her). Being a “hockey wife” I get all happy when Steph scores! Way to go Stepher!

Implication: Seeing Vinnie in San Jose for a tennis match confirms THAT THE NHL SEASON IS OVER! Vinnie is one of the high-ranking (aka “rich”) players in the NHLPA who should be in Toronto sitting in a locked room with the NHL owners trying to hammer out a deal.
Well, it was good to see Ricci. His hair looks like he just took it out of a helmet…stringy, greasy, in need of a hair cut and possibly a queer-eye intervention. Guess we can’t consider him (or Vinnie) NHL players anymore….they are essentially amateurs now. So, we left them alone.
The Roddick game was a little more entertaining. Against some swede from Monte Carlo, the game was about serving and errors and went to the final game of the third set.

The highlight of the game came somewhere in the second set. Looking over and watching Ricci spit his chew into a empty pepsi-can, I suddenly hear high-pitched cat calls and whistles. I look to the court and see the source of all the commotion. Roddick had taken his shirt off (to change into an identical shirt) and every single woman in the crowd emblazened the image into memory. Thunder-Down-Under gots nothings on dat..