Does anyone have any ideas on how to deal with Office Mac being so blurry on the new retina display? So frustrating! Want to take it back. Love the computer so far though!
MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), Office Mac
With some applications, the Retina display isn't optimized. You can be certain that updates will address the problem.
Right now the only apps available to take advantage of full Retina display are Apple apps. Try the 1440xwhatever resolution and see if you still have the same problem. If it doesn't work, zip over to http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac and see if other Retina Mac users are having the same problem and offering any solutions.
Clinton
The best short term fix is to set the display resolution to more space (1920x1200) and then set the zoom to 200% in Word. Having it at the nominally high resolution makes the blurriness less obvious. I was annoyed with it too till I looked back at my Mid-09 MBP Word screen and realized that the Word text on the old screen actually looked worse than the 'fuzzy' new one.
Unfortunately it simply isn't going to look as good as it did on the lower resolution displays, until Microsoft updates Office. I wouldn't hold my breath, though: I would be very surprised if this technological shift was simple.
[If it were, you'd see Apple's apps updated already, and very few have been]
Changing the resolution of the Mac isn't much help, at least for me: the UI and other text in Word and other apps is simply unreadable, and changing resolution 10x a day isn't a solution.
The text in apps (like Safari and TextEdit) that DO support Retina is fantastic, just like the iPad. So my plan, wonky as it is, is to use other apps to do my primary writing until there's a good word processor that supports the Retina display. That's harsh, because Word is perfect for me. But I can't spend hours writing while looking at text that blurry. Gives me a headache.
Also, if you don't have the most recent version of Office, I wouldn't expect an update from Microsoft ever. For example, I have Office 2008 and I doubt it will get updated for the retina display.
My way aound this is ti use Nisus Writer Pro. It has almost all of the power of Word and supports the retina display as it uses Apple's text engine, if necessary documents can be saved in MS Word format - problem solved for me.
Has anyone used anything like OpenOffice on the MBP-R?
Just wondering how that looks. Is it really too bad at 1680 x 1050?
Clinton
I have the same problem: Word, Excel and Powerpoint for Mac are blurry. But Outlook for Mac is not blurry. It seems that Outlook somehow supports the retina display?. Does anyone know how that is possible?
regards, Koos.
Any text that's not fuzzy on the Retina display is presumably using a standard Apple control for text (or else has already been updated). Given what Outlook is doing (rendering HTML text among other things) AND the fact that it's a newer app, it wouldn't surprise me that it's using Apple's HTML renderer.
Yes -- LibreOffice works very well on the Retina MacBook Pro. I switched to that and have been using it to write constantly for the past few days. Took a bunch of setup tweaking to get it to look and feel the way I want it to, but that wasn't so bad. It's really quite good, apart from minor bugs I've been able to work around.
The next version of LibreOffice should be coming out this month (they're iterating quickly, it seems) and has some nice visual improvements. Based on what I'm reading, I'd be surprised if OpenOffice retakes the lead any time soon.
I'd also be surprised if MS releases a Retina-compatible version of Word any time soon--though I'd be happy if they did. But if LibreOffice continues to make progress on the Mac, who knows? I may never go back.
I have stopped using Office for Mac 2011. It is way too slow for my liking. I am now happily using OpenOffice (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) and it works and looks great on my new Retina Macbook Pro 15. http://www.openoffice.org/
This actually does work. Follow the instructions precicely, including. the last one - minimize and open again to see the conversion to HD.
It works, but only one time?
If I close Word and open it again, the effect is gone, no matter if I minimize and maximize again.
The "Open in low res"-checkbox is still unticked.
I have not experienced that and I use word all the time, it also worked with excel. Make sure the new version of word is set as you default app for opening word docs. That may be the problem. You might be opening docs with the old version. Hope that fixes it, if not I don't think you did something correctly.
office mac blurry on retina display
