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Office 2004 #8: General Issues; Entourage: Symantec AVF conflict; Word: Phonetic alphabet issues; PowerPoint: panoramas; more

Office 2004 #8: General Issues; Entourage: Symantec AVF conflict; Word: Phonetic alphabet issues; PowerPoint: panoramas; more

CNET staff
6 min read

General Issues

Office notifications Victor Ortiz reports an issue where Office 2004 requires two dismissals for notifications:

"After installing Microsoft Office 2004 I noticed an unusual behavior with the office notification application. As notifications appear and I either check the checkbox for complete (if it?s a task), or dismiss it, or set a snooze on the reminder, I have to respond to the same reminder twice before it accepts my response. At first I thought it was just a glitch, but it appears as though it is occurring with every reminder I receive now."

More problems with removal We previously noted that the 'Remove Office' application included with the Office 2004 test drive and retail version not only removes Office from the startup disk, but from all disks connected to the Mac.

Now another MacFixIt reader reports that some of his old Office v.X Excel files will not open via the double-click method after performing the removal process, requiring him to instead re-open and re-save the files from within Excel - via the "FIle>Open" menu command:

"I downloaded and installed Office 2004 30 day trial. (I am currently using Office X). I didn?t like the trial because every time I opened or closed an application or saved a document I got the -BUY IT!- dialog box. So I used the Remove Office to uninstall it. Now none of my Office X excel files will open. Workaround: open them with Office X and resave them with a new name."

Entourage:

Confirmation for Symantec AVF conflict We previously reported an issue where Entourage 2004 appears to be causing the anti-virus on the Exchange Server (not the Mac running Entourage 2004) to "quarantine" message attachments.

We've since received confirmation for this issue, with several readers receiving the message: "Symantec AVF detected that you sent a message with an unscannable attachment."

Hotmail Joel Nelson is having problems getting his Hotmail account to work with Entourage 2004, and received an interesting response regarding the issue from Microsoft support:

"I have not been successful in getting Hotmail to work with Entourage 2004. It keeps giving me a (-3210) error. I called Microsoft and MSN and the response, even from the Entourage support team, is that they're not aware of the issue. MSN says that Entourage 2004 isn't compatible with Hotmail; users must use Outlook Express 5.0.6 or Entourage v.X."

Word:

Improvements Gabriel Dorado notes that Word 2004 can now save files to locations whose pathname plus filename contains more than 263 characters (no spaces) or 284 (with spaces). Previous versions of Word either saved the file with a truncated name on even backwards on an enclosing folder.

Also, Word 2004 can now save file names with more than 26 (no spaces) or 29 (which spaces) characters, including the ".dot" extension in such calculation.

Phonetic alphabet problems David Pesetsky reports problems using some phonetic symbol fonts with Word 2004:

"I am in linguistics, and have occasion to use phonetic symbols (symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet) quite often. I am very happy that Word 2004 allows me to use Unicode characters for these characters, which will simplify things a lot in the future. But I am less than happy that Word 2004, for some reason, refuses to recognize my older phonetic fonts. I get rectangles, instead of characters, in documents. On the "insert symbol" menu, they show up as Roman alphabet characters, evidently from some other font. It's not just a problem with the screen display. The characters print as rectangles as well."

Character spacing Another apparent type issue in Office 2004 involves proper character spacing for non-proportional (each character uses the same amount of space) fonts:

John McDonnell writes "This is an old problem that used to have a fix. May go back to Office 98 Mac. I prepare large number of docs in straight courier 12 (old style typeface) which is a non-proportional type. The line spacing and letter spacing for 'normal' would come out correctly for page formats I submit to courts. However, in a prior Word upgrade, the line and character spacing got slightly expanded. So, text that once fit in 6 inch margin now has last word spill to next line. Also, line spacing is a bit larger, so instead of 56 lines per standard page, it comes out to about 53. All is off the standard courier 12 pt, 6 inches per line.

"The old fix was to go to compatibility and check "use printer metrics.' That would realign everything back to proper spacing. Now, in word 2004, that fix is not working."

Notebook View Nate Goldshlag reports a problem with the formatting in the "Notebook View" offered by Word 2004: "Converting existing Word documents to notebook layout view will completely screw up your fonts and formatting. Beware. Perhaps somebody can figure out how to deal with this, but for me it makes notebook layout a useless feature."

PowerPoint:

Improvements We previously noted that a problem where some Excel document elements would display a red X instead of the actual content for Windows-created files was fixed in Office 2004. Several readers have noted that PowerPoint 2004 likewise now correctly displays the contents of the slides inside files created with old versions of PowerPoint for Windows. With previous versions of PowerPoint for Mac OS X some elements like decoration, images and mathematical formulas were not showed at all or displayed as a red cross.

Printing large documents MacFixIt reader Pedro reports that printing certain long presentations has become problematic in PowerPoint 2004:

"I have had issues with PowerPoint 2004. Long presentations with many graphics fail to print in PowerPoint 2004. For instance, I only get the first 18 slides to print using PowerPoint 2004. They whole 100 slide presentation prints on PowerPoint v.X. This presentation was developed on PC using Office 2002. Moreover, of the slides that print, some of the text in the graphics are all garbled. I believe the graphics were developed using Vision 2002. PowerPoint v.X prints the graphics fine."

Record Narration David Grieve reports an issue with the "Record Narration" functionality in PowerPoint 2004:

"I have been unable to make the Power Point 'Record Narration' work. This option is under the slide show menu (I can record, insert, and playback sounds under the 'Insert movies and sound' menu.) Following the Help menu instructions, I get as far as 'click the record button.' The main menu disappears and nothing appears to be happening. The Sound Preferences shows recording activity but there is no other indication other than that an AIFF file is created on the HD. The control- click option brings up a contextual menu with no reference to Record Narration as expected. The AIFF file will not open in QT. I have to force quit to get the Power Point menu back. When I try to insert the AIFF file created using the "Insert movies and sound" menu item, The sound button is placed on the slide. When I try to play that sound, Power Point crashes and I am offered an option to forward the crash log to MS--Which I did."

QuickTime panoramas We've received a few reports that QuickTime panoramic movies are not playing properly in PowerPoint 2004 presentations. One MacFixIt reader writes "I just downloaded the test drive and i have found that PowerPoint 2004 does not play quicktime VR panoramas which are embedded in slides. The initial view of the panorama is displayed but the user is unable to pan around using the mouse. The same PowerPoint file works fine in PowerPoint v.X"

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