I’ve been using Office ever since Word 4 at the beginning of the ’90s, but Microsoft has not made an intuitive, stable, Mac-like application since the wonderful Word 5.1a.

The Mac Business Unit keeps churning out updates to Office 2008 but still hasn’t made Word 12 stable, yet. It either hangs (with reports automatically sent to Apple) or crashes (with reports sometimes sent to Microsoft) at least once a day with the most basic usage. I don’t do anything out of the ordinary, so I can’t imagine the same thing not happening to everyone else who uses Word for editing at least eight hours a day.

Here is a simple test to show the lack of basic functionality. Place your cursor in the middle of a document, and then try to find a word appearing anywhere above the document with the default Current Document All selected in the Find and Replace dialog box. Word will find anything below the cursor and will pretend to loop from the top of the document back down to the cursor but will not actually find or especially replace any words appearing above the cursor. That is something that should have been worked out in the beta releases before the commercial launch but still has not been addressed even after multiple updates now reaching version 12.1.5, and I remember another user pointing it out a year ago with the 12.0 release.

As for stability, try the following test. Use the Replace All button in the Find and Replace dialog box to replace any word or phrase, no matter how long or short, regardless of whether there are no incidences of that word in the document or there are thousands of incidences, and regardless of whether the document is only 6 pages or 600 pages, and in doc, rtf, or docx format, with or without images and/or text boxes. The search and replace should have worked correctly (except of course for any instances above the cursor and any instances in text boxes). Then, perform another Replace All with a different word or phrase, without saving the document after the first Find and Replace operation. I guarantee any Word 2008 user that the application will crash, or sometimes just hang, as I’ve verified a consistent occurrence on multiple machines.

As for the stability of every version of Word from 6 to 12, if you save the document between each thought while writing or between each editing change while reading someone else’s document, as I do automatically for safety reasons, Word creates dozens or even hundreds of tmp files per session and then eventually crashes as a result (probably memory related). Similarly, if you have Save AutoRecover enabled in the Preferences and happen to do a manual save at the same time that Word is attempting its automatic backup save (or vice versa), Word will hang indefinitely or will simply crash. My only workaround is to ensure that Save AutoRecover is not enabled and to make sure I save the document after every Replace All operation. Of course, I also have to move the cursor to the top of the document before every Replace All operation so that every instance is changed, after first highlighting the last edited spot in order to easily find it again after the Replace All has completed. I then have to quit and restart Word every hour for safety reasons to cause the tmp files to be cleared out and prevent unexpected crashes.

What’s even more frustrating with regard to the Save AutoRecover feature is that, if Word hangs (requiring a force quit) or crashes, it will only find the AutoRecover backup version of the document instead of the more recent one or several versions that you manually saved after an AutoRecover backup. That often means that you lose as much as 10 minutes of editing, which involves a lot of changes when you are in the translation industry, struggling to meet deadlines every half hour to an hour throughout the day.

I have a lot more to write but will only mention this most basic lack of functionality and stability regarding the Replace All feature.