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Spaces/Office 2008 Bug

Spaces/Office 2008 Bug

Postby gries818 » Sun Apr 19, 2009 10:14 pm

I don't know how many people around here use Office 2008 on their Macs, but if you do and use Spaces (which is built into OS X), then you surely have come across the dreaded Spaces/Office 2008 bug that only allows Word (or Excel) windows to be in one space. Moving one window to a different Space and then entering that space will cause any other open Office windows to join the desired window in the new Space.

Research into this problem reveals that Microsoft blames Apple for not fully supporting Carbon for Spaces and Apple counters that by saying that Office should upgrade to the Office code to Cocoa for full compatibility. Since it is Spaces that is causing the problem and since it would be almost downright impossible to move Office 2008 over to an entirely new graphic engine in an update, I'm going to have to place the blame on Apple. But none of this really matters - both companies are trying to find a way around the problem, though perhaps not hard enough since neither seems to want to fully support the other's software, but nothing has come from their labor (yet).

After a few minutes of experimenting, I discovered what apparently nobody (from my research) on the web has yet discovered for a workaround. It is still frustrating Spaces and Office don't work together as designed, but at least my workaround allows Word (and presumable Excel windows as well) to be in different spaces.

  1. Open a new window in the Space with the first Office window.
  2. Minimize the original office window.
  3. Open spaces and drag the new window into the new Space.
  4. Enter the new Space.
  5. Unminimize the original window and it should force you back up into the original Space leaving the old window behind.
  6. Go back to work.

I'm not sure if this will work for everybody (that would explain why I'm the first, apparently, to find the workaround), so reply to this thread if this doesn't work for you.

Hope this helps anybody else out there having the same problem as me.

NOTE: Before every time you move an Office window [to a different Space], you must minimize all the other windows if you expect them to remain in the proper Spaces. Good luck!
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