Office 2004 (#11): Positive reports; Word Find and spell-check issues; Entourage images and certificates; more

We continue our coverage of Office 2004 with more reader reports.

Positive experiences and bug fixes Despite the reports of problems we've covered, many MacFixIt readers have noted welcome improvements in Office 2004 compared to earlier versions. Here are some of the more popular changes noted by readers:

• Word's "Track changes" no longer attributes edits to "unknown" -- it correctly identifies the person who made the edits.
• Word no longer changes editing attributions when it auto-corrects a word or auto-formats characters.
• Word no longer frequently quits "unexpectedly" when copying/cutting and pasting content.
• Office apps support OS X's long filenames, and can save documents when the file path plus the file name account for more than 263 characters.
• PowerPoint 2004 correctly displays PowerPoint files created using Office for Windows. (Many users reported issues with blank content or icons indicating "missing" content.)
• Entourage works much better with Microsoft Exchange servers.

DYMO Labelmaker incompatible? Reader Monty Lee reports that the DYMO Labelmaker software, which worked with Office v.X, doesn't function with Office 2004:

"I have been unable to get the interface between the DYMO Labelmaker software and Microsoft Office 2004 to work. It works fine in Office.X with the DYMO icon appearing in the Word toolbar, but it doesn't in Word 2004. There is nothing on DYMO's site other than a reference to Service Pack 1, but that only applies to Office.X."

Word

"Stuck" Find dialog MacFixIt reader Gabriel Dorado reports an issue with the Find dialog in Word 2004:

"Sometimes it is impossible to close the Find window (Find and Replace) in Office 2004. It gets stuck usually after working with it and performing find and replace actions. Clicking on the red button to close it does nothing. Workaround: close the open Word file(s) and then close the Find and Replace window. Alternatively quit Word and open it again."

Spell-checker changes views Gabriel also reports an issue with Word's spell-checker that affects page layout views:

"If you run the spell checker and a hit (a word not found in the dictionary) is found in the footer then the document is changed from its 'Page Layout' view to the 'Normal' view and remains in Normal view when the spell checking is complete. In other words, if the spell checking reaches the footer, then the document view goes from Page Layout to Normal and remains as Normal afterwards."

Entourage

Update on image downloading Yesterday we covered a reader report that Entourage was not downloading images automatically, despite enabling the setting to do so. We've since received a copy of Entourage and found that this is a security/privacy feature of Entourage 2004: The "automatic" setting only applies to images included in messages sent by people in your Entourage Address Book or sent by addresses included in the Mailing List Manager. The Entourage documentation states "To view all pictures in [messages not from such addresses], click 'Download pictures' at the top of the message."

Message linking/tracking issues Reader Matt Ross reports an issue with Entourage 2004's message "linking" functionality:

"I?ve noticed that Entourage isn?t keeping track of when I send email to individuals in my Address Book (like v.X did). It?s keeping track of when I receive email from the individuals, though. I have all three message linking checkmarks checked in my Address Book Preferences."

SSL/certificate problem Jeff Rogers describes an issue with SSL POP connections:

"I've recently been testing Entourage 2004 and have discovered a replicable problem when it comes to enabling SSL POP connections. Entourage doesn't seem to recognize site certificates for a secure POP connection even when those root/anchor certificates are imported into Keychain Access (X509 Anchors) according to the MSE help file instructions...Entourage attempts to connect to the server with a secure connection, but an error saying 'Unable to establish a secure connection, site certificate must be installed' keeps popping up. If you continue, it connects un-securely to the server.

"I contacted my mail server's admin and told him about the problem. He sent me the server's root/anchor certificate. MSE Help instructs, for OSX 10.3 , to 'drop' this certificate onto the Keychain Access application icon, then use the pulldown menu to select 'X509 Anchors' to install the certificate. You click OK, you authenticate, and it looks to work just fine. Reboot Entourage, the SSL error dialog box continues to pop up...My Admin DL'd the trial version of Entourage 2004 and tried the same thing. He got the same error."

Importing issues Art Boyle reports that Entourage 2004 loses email links when importing mail from Entourage v.X:

"Another importing issue for entourage 2004 from Entourage [v.X] is that it loses all email links; it just keeps links for the calendar and files. I imported a database of 18,00 contacts and 6,000 emails and all the links between the emails and the contacts are gone. I tried reinstalling and importing several times to no avail."

PowerPoint

Text boxes appear in Mac version Gabriel Dorado also reports that some Windows PowerPoint files show extra text boxes when opened in PowerPoint 2004

"PowerPoint slides viewed with PowerPoint 2004 but created with Windows XP and earlier versions show boxes with 'Click to add title' and 'Click to add subtitle' that are not displayed in the Windows machine. Workaround: check your presentation slide-by-slide with PowerPoint 2004 and delete such boxes (they show only on some screens). Then save it to keep changes."

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