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Office 2010 Technical Preview Leaked
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun May 17, 2009 11:13 AM
from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft was planning on giving out the Office 2010 Technical Preview to select testers in July on an invite-only basis. Office 2010 will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and both flavors have been leaked to torrent sites and the like. Multiple screenshots of each application are available. '... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'"
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Submission: Office 2010 Technical Preview leaked by Anonymous Coward
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MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX 674 comments
alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"
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Not the biggest fan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually agree with them on the Page Setup thing. You're changing how the document looks and it affects the layout - it should belong near the canvas like everything else that has to do with formatting.
The Ribbon is a good fit for document-based, layout-heavy applications with many commands. It's barely a good fit for all Office applications. It should have stayed in Office, or at least never leaked to applications with much smaller footprints. I'd also like for them to upgrade it with a command search th
Agree with things being counter intuitive. (Score:3, Interesting)
Need to insert a column or row in Excel? Go to the tab labeled Insert and...
Re:Not the biggest fan (Score:5, Interesting)
Right-click on the ribbon|Minimize the Ribbon
That doesn't give you the old menus back. It gives you the ribbon tabs which expand back to the full ribbon when you click on them.
My theory is that MS implemented the ribbon because they seem to have a mistaken belief that their UI should be consistent across platforms (desktop PC/server, table, tablet, handheld). In the end, they have a UI that doesn't work well for any of them. The Start Menu is a terrible paradigm for a handheld device, and the ribbon is a terrible one for desktop PCs.
This is even infecting their design of server-side applications. All of the MMCs for e.g. IIS 7 are more like navigating through Windows Explorer in icon mode than previous versions.
Different device types should have different interfaces that take advantage of the strengths of that platform. Keeping them consistent is less important than making them as user-friendly as possible.
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Re:Not the biggest fan (Score:5, Informative)
It's an interesting presentation if you work on UI design and have some time, or are curious as to why the hell they went to the ribbon.
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Re:Not the biggest fan (Score:5, Insightful)
The ribbon takes less space vertically than the default toolbars in Office 2003. Plus it can be minimized, in which case it takes the same space as Office 2003 with zero toolbars.
I keep seeing this complaint, and it just goes to show that when people don't like something, they'll pull reasons for it out of thin air. Did it ever occur to you to actually *measure* whether the ribbon was bigger or smaller than the last version? Or did you just need a knee-jerk reason to hate it, and this is the first one that popped into your mind?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the default tool bars in 2k3 can be pulled off and moved to the side. You cannot do that with the ribbon. You also don't need to display the tool bars at all they can be turned off leaving only the menu.
One of the early lessons of GUIs (Score:5, Insightful)
was for developers to stop creating their own interfaces for things like printing or saving files. Our applications would be more usable if we just used the underlying platform's routines and conventions.
I wonder whether Office turning its back on Windows UI conventions isn't a long term hedge against the desktop OS monopoly collapsing. Without a monopoly, is Windows worth the effort and cost for Microsoft?
Imagine that Windows fails. Office remains an economically important platform. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a return to the days of dedicated word processing hardware, with devices that "run office".
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're the reason Microsoft is making this the only UI. Too many people refuse to change. It's been almost 10 years that Microsoft has had a new start menu, for instance, and how many people simply don't use it?
Why should they have to maintain multiple interfaces for decades? Isn't 10 years long enough? The idea of having a way to go back to the old method is to provide a segue, so that people can slowly learn the new version, but people don't do that. They just stay on the old one and never bo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a good point, but I think Office has these special UI elements for psychological, not technical reasons - they differentiate Office from the rest of the OS (and horizontal competitors like OO.org) in your mind & make you think Office is somehow special/unique/valuable. The earliest example I can think of is Office 2000 (iirc), which had gradients in the title bars before the rest of the OS supported it.
Then why Wordpad and Paint in Windows 7 have ribbons, too?
In practice, Microsoft has been pushing for Ribbon [microsoft.com] as the new standard of Windows UI for some time now. There's a long-winded document describing all the dos and dont's of Ribbon (it's patented, and the license to use it only allows you to do so if you comply strictly with the UI design). Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes Ribbon support for MFC applications. And there is a WPF Ribbon control developed by Microsoft and available for free via CodePlex.
What the f*** is happening to Office? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What the f*** is happening to Office? (Score:5, Insightful)
Menus are an archaic throwback to a time where we had to press keyboard combinations to access anything. They aren't well organized for mouse users, but the fact that they're organized in an "up-down/left-right" fashion makes them perfect for people who use the keyboard to navigate. I find the ribbons make me much faster at formatting documents than the old system of menus. What's really nice is that I don't have to enter 4 sub menus just to insert a math equation or a symbol into my work. And the visual table insertion tool is really useful for those of us who don't want to think about how many, just how it should look.
Seriously, if you keep one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard, it's much faster to create equations and documents in Word than in OpenOffice. I used to be a staunch OpenOffice supporter, but it's nice to not have to memorize keywords and keypress combos just to be halfway efficient at writing documents.
$200.00 is $200 well spent for me.
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Re:What the f*** is happening to Office?Customize. (Score:3, Insightful)
Either you're a Microsoft shill, or you never took the couple minutes of effort to use the Customize... feature of many office versions to add your own commonly used feature to a toolbar. The first things I add to any pre-2007 Word tool bar, for example, are
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the same keyboard combindations work in the new Office versions with the ribbon.
This is a specious argument.
Re:What the f*** is happening to Office? (Score:5, Informative)
You can still assign custom commands to keyboard shortcuts, just like you could before. No, you can't create custom toolbar buttons.
Go to the office button, Word Options (for example, in word, excel options in excel, etc..), Go to the customize tab, click Customize Keyboard Shortcuts. Everything is there.
What are you talking about, exactly?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't seen or read anything about the new interface before this, so the screenshots weren't especially helpful in seeing what people are complaining about. So I found a video, while not the best walk through by a long shot, shows some of the new interface in action [youtube.com].
Generally, I like new ideas being tried out, even when part of the benefit of a product is everyone being familiar with the previous way it did things. In this specific case, I don't particularly have much of a stake in how it turns out. I ju
Re:What the f*** is happening to Office? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, and why the hell did they abandon the command line for all this mouse bullshit? Why has everything changed? They must be eating mushrooms and are crazy!
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Why does everyone hate Ribbon? It's great! (Score:5, Insightful)
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot. It all seems to be centered on "but they changed it".
Slashdot is an technology community: we're the people who're either instigating change, or are always putting ourselves on the bleeding edge. We accept the fact that we often have to relearn things, because we then gain the advantages of progress.
Ribbon's a really good example. Once you're used to it, you'll find it so much easier to use than the old system that you'll never want to go back.
For example, take Excel 2007. One of the most common functions in Excel is creation of pretty reports using tables and charts. With Ribbon it's so much easier to create and use tables. The interface is fantastic. Far superiour to the old menuing system. The way that they've build the seperation of symantics and style, an made is easy to use is just fantastic. I mean, you've got an cell in an spreadsheet which contains faulty data.
Like most slashdotters I was suspicious at first. You can't help but be after hearing such bad press. However within a day of actually using it, the benefits were clear.
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
Re:Why does everyone hate Ribbon? It's great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do we hate the ribbon? Because it's dynamic.
Microsoft sees that as a plus: customize the UI based on what Office thinks the user is trying to do. Nice, in theory. But it depends on a level of application telepathy that doens't exist. (Yet?)
Users see it as a minus: the commands they want aren't always where they expect to find them, so they end up wasting productive time trying to find them. More than a little frustrating when you have a deadline bearing down on you.
If Office did a better job of reading the user's mind, the Ribbon would rock. But since that's not likely to happen, Microsoft should go back to UI Design 101: a good UI is a consistent UI.
Don't suprise users by capriciously moving tools, or they'll hate you forever. Which is pretty much where 90% of Office '07 are right now.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them.
Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
Re:Why does everyone hate Ribbon? It's great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering I'm not really a heavy Excel user, but I do occasionally create tables and charts.
In my experience, it could not be 'much easier' with the Ribbon as it wasn't hard before the ribbon.
Having used both I can confirm that it really isn't 'Much Easier' to do it via the ribbon because it really wasn't hard and only took one more click in the old version. (2003)
If you think this new interface is 'far superiour' you have become a fanboy. Its not really a lot different, they mostly just jumbled up the toolbar by craming the menu and the toolbar together.
The reason most of slashdot's problem with it is 'because they changed it' is because thats really all they did. To anyone who knew how to use the products before hand its an annoying change that costs people time. For people who think they've made things easier, all thats happened is that you bothered to take the time to look around for a change and find features.
I've spent a couple years using 2007 now, I still hate it. From reading your post, I can say that your problem is that you never really knew how to use Office in the first place, so now that you've been hit in the face with a 2x4 of change you finally bothered to look into it more. This is not good if it happens to everyone.
People who go crazy with Office 'Features' make documents that are fucking shit to work with.
People who use many features in Word and Excel as a general rule are doing it wrong. Playing with all your fonts, sizes and such in Word is generally a sign you're doing it wrong. You use standard styles so the document can be restyled later as needed or converted to another format. Instead people like you who have suddenly found the ribbon start setting fonts, colors, sizes and other formatting options on the text itself trying to make it look like YOU think it should look, even though most of you couldn't pass highschool english if you're life depended on it.
And I'm really happy that people are finding Excel's features, thats all I needed. Documents that are basically CSV's being turned into something akin to a powerpoint with a bunch of retarded charts and effects that matter not to the data nor do they present it in a better way, they just detract from it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why does everyone hate Ribbon? It's great! (Score:5, Informative)
If you have to read the manual to get the Ribbon, you're beyond help. You'd be just as confused by any other computer UI, and probably most household appliances.
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Can only improve on great from here (Score:5, Insightful)
Excel 2007 added some much needed features that has truely turned it into a portable database program, whereby increasing the amount of rows from 64k to over 1 million, and from 256 columns to over 10k among other notable changes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx#Office2007excelPerf_BigGridIncreasedLimitsExcel [microsoft.com]
Like most people, I was apprehensive of the ribbon UI however after about 2 weeks of solid use I fell in love with it. Microsoft really nailed it, something had to be done given the shear amount of features available in a modern editor.
I hope to see some innovation from the OOo team to give their program a fresh face although I was impressed to see some improvements in their 3.1 release.
Re:Can only improve on great from here (Score:5, Interesting)
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Inconsequential (Score:5, Insightful)
'... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'
Meh. What we really want to know is: How's the ODF compatibility?
Performance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone care? (Score:3, Insightful)
So many people haven't even bothered moving to 2007 due to the lack of *useful* new features, why do we care 2010 is coming?
Same story with Vista, there was no real compelling reason to deal with it.
Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Funny)
No thanks.
Notepad has always been all I've needed. If I need something else, I code it.
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Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything I need is in OpenOffice, and at a WAY better price!
That may be the case for you, but the fact is there is nothing along the lines of Microsoft Vizio in OpenOffice, and the OpenOffice Calc is simply not up to par with Microsoft Excel. The word processing is great in OpenOffice, but for some things OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Go ahead, flame me, mod me down. But I'm sticking with Microsoft Office. I probably won't update to 2010 anytime soon (I just updated to 2007 when I had a chance to pay only $20 for it). Microsoft is pain, .docx is a dick move, but the fact remains that overall, for the advanced user, M$ Office is better. And yes, I do have an Ubuntu computer as well as a Windows computer and I have used OpenOffice and I am not a fanboy of Microsoft.
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Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:4, Informative)
Have you tried Dia as an alternative to Visio? I've used Visio myself in the past, but it seems that Dia does just as much as I ever did with Visio.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you tried Dia as an alternative to Visio?
Dia is off to a great start (I use it myself), but it's got a long way to go to catch up with Visio. The interface is not as intuitive (sort of the GIMP syndrome), and it needs a library of shapes designed by good artists.
Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree with you about Excel (I use Excel at work, Calc at home), the difference doesn't tend to be significant. I find life a little smoother with Excel, but there's nothing I fundamentally can't do in Calc relatively easily. Excel has handy features which make day to day jobs easier, but they're all features that exist in a lesser form in Calc. I could live with Calc no problem.
I've never used Vizio, and I prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word. Powerpoint and Impress are near as dammit for what I need, and I rarely have call to use the rest.
Bearing in mind that OpenOffice is free (beer, speech, etc.), I find the comparison very favourable.
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Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who seriously uses Excel, there is no comparison. I just gave Calc a serious try, and I gave up after a week.
Secondly, there is the issue of compatibility. I cannot go about importing every single dependent spreadsheet or presentation, hoping that all the features came through. I spent some time importing and exporting between the two applications and gave up. Sooner or later, you spend more time fixing the discrepancies rather than working on the real content.
Besides, you cannot very well go to a client executive and email them a presentation made in some open source application when all they have known about is MS Office. Yes, in the ideal, imaginary world that most Slashdotters seem to be a part of, it will happen -- but it is quite impossible in the real world.
MS Office is a thing of beauty - in terms of usability, support and features. OO is great for amateur users, but for those that use Office on a daily basis.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Expression Design is their equivalent program. I guess it targets Adobe Illustrator more than OpenOffice Draw.
However, their "Mac support" is a copy of Parallels. Sorry, that isn't going to work.
Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Informative)
Visio isn't part of any of the Office suites. It's effectively a completely separate package.
Did you even look at the screenshots in the article that clearly show Visio as part of Office 2010 in the Start Menu? There's a difference between "part of the Office suites" and "included in the Office suite that most people have." And the fact that only a few advanced users use Visio just goes to further my point.
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Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Informative)
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio is a type of vector-art program specifically designed for making diagrams. The textbook example would be a flowchart, but the most common usage seems to be things like network diagrams. (Of course I worked with network people...) It has dozens of "sets" of shapes for use with any kind of diagramming out there, and they all have the correct "connectors" and text labels and such in-place, so it's really easy to create a powerful diagram from scratch.
It has a lot of cool features, for example, you can point it at a SQL database and it'll automatically populate a diagram with all your tables and relations. I use that one all the time.
You can also script it, like you can most Office applications, to make horrible abominations unto God: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Customer-Friendly_System.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
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Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Funny)
Pehaps you could check your bells and wistels in Open Office spellchecker before posting ?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My browser (called "Firefox") has a spellchecker...
Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
He could have. But I don't know of many people who type into their Office application of choice rather than just their browser or a lightweight pad when posting.
Ugh. That just reminded me of all the times I'd open up a word document that was sent as an email attachment that just said something like "Project meeting today at 2:00."
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That's an easy thing to say. (Score:5, Insightful)
People just don't do it. The application should take human behavior into account.
I handle support calls for a large office. Things like this happen all the time. A user will work on a new document for hours and not save it at all. They close the application they are working in and when the application asks them if they want to save the document they inadvertently hit No. The user screwed up. However, it would be nice if their error were recoverable in some way. It would be great to grab the unsaved file from some temporary location C:\usererror\backup.
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Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Software is designed for actual human beings. Actual human beings, in generally, don't hit ctrl-s every 2 minutes by instinct, therefore your software should cope with that usage scenario. Posts like yours just demonstrate why open source applications usually have horrible usability. Sure it's a small point, but those small points add-up.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It looses my data upon the world like Godzilla?
The term "beta" is becoming more and more worthless. We live in the age of the perpetual beta, which is generally completely open, and treated by all like an actual release, with none of the hassle of actually finishing it, or closing the large obvious bugs, at worst it is treated like a general release with relaxed liability for your own bad coding.
When you have a large distribution, and have been in beta for more than three years or so, I don't think your so
Re:Let me be the first to say: (Score:5, Interesting)
The point isn't that we (people writing long documents) *need* it, the point is that having it saves *by far* enough time and effort to make up for the purchase of Microsoft Office.
The entire "it's not there but you don't *need* it" argument completely misses the point. There are a hundred things in my house I don't *need* (plumbing, wall sockets, lighting, cable TV hookup, phone hookup, insulation), but I'd never move into a house that didn't have them. Would you?
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Worse is trying to describe things over the phone. (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone isn't familiar with the terminology for these things it's a pain in the ass. Click the big multi colored button thing. Click the icon that looks like..., no the other one..., no to the left of that.
Menus were a lot easier to describe to people.
Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Interesting)
It bothers me when the open source community benefits so much from Apple and Microsoft's UI research. I mean OpenOffice's interface *is* Office 97-- the amount of work saved by the OpenOffice team because they had a model to work from is tremendous. Nobody's going to fault you for using other people's good ideas in your own products, but you could at least appreciate it, instead of just slamming Microsoft for it.
Microsoft may be no good at it, but who's better? Adobe's recent UI "innovations" have been criminally-bad. Apple's made some good progress with their iWork suite, but the unfortunate fact is that Pages has a simple UI because it's a simple product without a lot of features.
(And this next new idea you're slamming will undoubtedly make its way into open source products any day now, at which point it will become "innovative" and "brilliant." to the Slashdot hordes.)
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