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June 30, 2008 2:36 PM PDT

Why does PDF support in Office for Mac 2008 stink so much?

by Matt Asay
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Sometimes an "upgrade" is anything but. Take Mac for Office 2008. While it did introduce a number of improvements over its Office 2004 cousin, it has broken one of the most important functions that I regularly use on my Mac:

The ability to save a document/spreadsheet/etc. into a PDF.

This has long been a staple of the Mac experience. Whatever you are writing can easily be converted into a PDF. Office for Mac 2008 breaks this compact, however, by mindlessly crashing most times that I try to convert a document into PDF.

A colleague tells me it's because Office for Mac 2008 introduces "PDF creation [that] is non-native to the application." Maybe he's right. I don't really care why it happens, I'm just annoyed that it happens so frequently. It has made the "Save as PDF" feature nearly unusable for me.

Is anyone else having this problem? A quick Google search doesn't turn up much, but I know my Mac colleagues share my pain on this.

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.
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by penguiniator May 28, 2008 2:18 PM PDT
Maybe someone out there thinks Zenoss.com are a bunch of horse's a**es?
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by FrankCT May 29, 2008 11:44 AM PDT
Maybe the author of this article, Matt Asay, should learn proper grammar and spelling. It would make his article a lot easier to read.
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by crad13 May 29, 2008 2:27 PM PDT
Perhaps you should learn to back up your claims. It would actually make sense.
by Composer_1777 May 29, 2008 3:10 PM PDT
It's a blog not an english paper.
by ProzacJM May 29, 2008 12:26 PM PDT
Senos is Spanish for Breast :D
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by jrepenning June 30, 2008 2:55 PM PDT
I can't tell you *why* this sort of bug exists, but I can tell you "thanks, you just saved me the cost of an upgrade"!
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by Matt Asay June 30, 2008 3:12 PM PDT
Btw, sorry about the earlier comments. I accidentally wrote over a previous post and this is the outcome. New post, old comments. :-)
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About The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

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