I was a diehard entourage user.

Very cool tour of Microsoft’s Mac lab in Redmond.

150 Mac minis!

Sorry to hear you’ve had such terrible issues with Entourage. The current incarnation of Entourage is actually built on the foundations of the old Claris Email Macintosh application from what I understand.

In that I don’t rely on Office that much, I can not claim the level of unhappiness with it that you have experienced. My wife certainly is more disgrunted about it after spending six years using it for scientific papers and her PhD thesis.

Overall I’ve found the Office suite for Mac to be a pretty decent application, but there are not a lot of alternatives. Having lived through Office 6 for Macintosh, the current version seems downright amazing by comparison (6 preceded Office 98 for PC and wow, what a stinker), but nearly anything would have.

I’m not necessarily trying to defend MS here, but in the long run I can’t really claim great happiness and satisfaction with -any- application I have used. They all have major issues simply due to the fact that, well, it’s software. It’s gonna crash. I spent a lot of unhappy time in the past thinking “What the HELL is wrong with these people? Why can’t this just WORK?” and now I spend more time thinking “Eh, it’s software. I’ll find one that crashes the least.” It’s definitely the case that the more simple the tasks, the less likely you’ll experience complications. Most of my major issues have always been with applications that were performing some very intensive and/or complicated tasks.

And now I do help desk for a living and I hear a lot of complaints about software. About Office for Windows. About nearly everything that anyone works with. I can’t think of ANYTHING that our clients used that I have’n't heard “[INSET NAME HERE] just sucks. Everytime I try to [PERFORM A TASK] it does something stupid or crashes.” And it’s a daily happening. Thing is… it’s a hits and misses issue. We always remember when it crashes more than the majority of time it runs. When it crashes, and it’s critical, double the chances we’ll remember. It’s really this sort of thing that has me looking for something else besides tech support to do. Things happen. I’m happy to spend time and effort researching the resolution to a problem, but in most cases, the person asking me to resolve it only wants an immediate solution because what they are doing is critical NOW and they wouldn’t be calling me if they didn’t want the issue resolved immediately, even when for me it’s going to often be a longer term solution where I have to be studious and patient and methodical in searching for a solution, determining if that is the problem. etc. Ad inifinitum.

I am certainly not trying to downplay your Office woes, because I know with a great deal of my own personal experience at work on both Windows and Macintosh, there are a LOT of Office woes out there. I think I’m just saying, well, you’ll probalby find something you like more, sure, but whatever you use will have some problems along the way no matter what. And you’re right to have a breaking point that leads you to looking for another solution.

I know that I’ve personally lost countless hours of my life to the various iLife releases completely fucking up my 17,000 photo collection and me having to rebuild it, But they are still the best apps for out there that I like to use.

Good luck with your search! I would also love to know if you come across a suitable alternative for Office.

Sorry I missed this part.

Although it is easy to do without all the features of Word and Entourage, Excel, unfortunately, is a whole different ballpart. You can’t tell someone that is used to using Excel to switch to anything lesser. So Open Office is not quite cutting it in that regard.

But there is one problem though with Excel, and that is it seems the Windows and Mac versions are different enough to cause users switching back and forth some grief.

The simplest solution would probably be if Microsoft could get it’s act together and finally come out with a version of Office that simply works. The pricing is steep enough for users to really deserve a working version. And no more hush hush monkey business when faults are discovered. Microsofts handling of last year problems was absurd and degrading to say the least.

Hans

Your first point is well taken allthough I solved this by creating a login for each family member since I’m scared silly of Entourage after using it since version 2001 at different clients installation. After removing it from all my clients installations loosing mail has not happened. Also I can not afford another family member to have an accident on my part of the machine.

And to be honest the multiple identity “thing” can be quite dangerous to say the least. I have had clients create a new identity and suddenly all their mail was gone…

I’m by now up to 7.5 GB of stored mail. Using Entourage has up to now spelled disaster with this amount of email. They’ve had the best part of 20 years to get out a decent installation of Office and IMHO they simply blew it. Unfortunately the problems with Office in the last 12 months do not indicate that they have arrived at a point where they have a stable distribution that does not need a patch each time we get a new version of the system.

Since June last year Office has cost me thousands of dollars in lost revenues. And I guess each person has a breaking point and I guess I just reached mine. As I have said before I suspect that Office does contain quite a bit of legacy code which is causing problems. I will take another look at office when we are about six months into Office 2007 but until then I would be greatfull if someone could provide me with Word and Excel functionality without a label that says Microsoft.

I used Eudora in the past but do to some problems at a certain point in time it became very hard to use so Apple mail became kind of last resourt and sofar it has not lost one email for me or my clients.

So for me it’s security over functionality.

Kind regards
Hans

My spouse also has a big collection of old email she likes to have access to, and it’s all in an Entourage archive. It’s a lot easier just to have it set up as an identity than to have her have to log in and have a separate account on the machine.

Why do you need multiple identities?

Count me back into the switched back to Entourage group. I thougth about it a while, and I gave Mail.app a year long try, but in the end, I found Entourage to be a much more cohesive application overall.

Not just Spotlight supported, now, btw, but also synching with Address Book and iCal.

The ability to have profiles (Entourage calls them “identities”) is a huge plus for Entourage as well. You can even disabled Entoruage searching per identity, which is very handy.

Anyway, I wrote up a big long series of posts on my LiveJournal about switching back last week. http://smallerdemon.livejournal.com if you want to read them.