So I’ve been using Office 2008 for a while, and been cursing and screaming at it for taking more time to launch on my MacBook Pro C2D 2.3GH than it took Office 2004 running in Rosetta. As well as for having exactly the same bugs happening in exactly the same situations, mostly in Word (like when dealing with some large Office for Windows documents, or when doing search/replace all and you get some occurrences randomly replaced by random words… yeah, try to undo that after having saved! Oh, and I forgot: when you use two displays one above the other, as soon as you move Excel in the background, all the Excel windows in the secondary display are neatly moved back to the main display… handy… NOT!).
But yesterday, I stumbled on a show-stopping bug in Excel 2008.

You see, I live and work in Europe, so when I need to do a quote for one of my clients, I do it in Euros (€).
So in Excel I set my table cells to a currency format using the € symbol, like so:

Cool, works alright… Not so much actually: when I reopen my document, ALL the cells formatted as EURO currency have turned into US DOLLARS:

Which, when you have a look at today’s EURO/USD exchange rates is probably gonna please my clients, but not myself.

Ah, yes, I forgot: this bug affects the French version of Office (I can’t test any other languages, since M$ insists on NOT shipping multilingual apps) and ONLY the EURO currency (I tried with a number of other currencies and they are retained fine).

Conclusion: I CANNOT work anymore in Excel for my quotes and invoices, so I’m switching over to Numbers.
Way to go M$… I hope the first “Office 2008 Service Pack” will solve this problem, but I highly doubt it…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 14:27 CEST and is filed under Rants & Raves, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.