Hands-On Preview of Microsoft Office 2010 291
Barence writes "Microsoft has announced full details of Office 2010 and its plans for an accompanying suite of online applications, and PC Pro has been given special access to a technical preview. Contributing Editor Simon Jones gives his initial verdict on the new suite, concluding that there's 'still a long way to go in terms of fit and finish ... but overall Microsoft has made good strides in increasing usability, cohesiveness and collaboration.' This is followed by detailed first looks at Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010, with Outlook certainly looking to be the greatest beneficiary. And finally, a gallery of screenshots shows off all the new interface touches in Office 2010, including Outlook's conversation view, Word's picture-editing function and the new cut-and-paste preview option."
Re:Office on Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
wine already supports office. Winedoors is free and makes installing office dead easy.
Crossover office costs money but makes it even more brain-dead easy.
Re:Not again! (Score:1, Informative)
No.
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:3, Informative)
So just stop upgrading. Files from recent versions go back and forth about as well as files from the same version, so compatibility isn't a huge problem.
Re:ODF (Score:4, Informative)
The Save-As-PDF works quite well for us, particularly since it's a compromise somewhere between the crappy third-party app option and the thousands of dollars that Adobe's products cost us in years past.
Outlook 2007's rendering, OTOH, makes me want to kill people and break things.
Re:ribbons (Score:4, Informative)
here (douzens of thousands of heavy Office users), we're not quite done testing all our stuff with 2007 (our documents are fine, but some plugins have to be upgraded, and integration with in house apps have to be tested, etc), but we have to hold users back with chains from upgrading to 2007 (well, its a metaphore obviously, they can't upgrade on their own). -EVERYONE- wants it. Bad. The UI is a lot better for people who don't know Office by heart, and there's a lot of new features, mainly in the business intelligence integration and collaboration that make people drool over it.
Re:ribbons (Score:5, Informative)
You want statistical evidence? Look here [exceluser.com], from a survey of Excel users from May, 2009:
They found that 36% of advanced and 29% of intermediate users "hate or dislike" the ribbons, which vastly outweighs the people who "love or like" the ribbons at 20 and 24%, respectively.
How 'about them apples?
Re:'Conversation View' == Threaded mail? (Score:3, Informative)
Outlook has supported threaded mail for a long time. The feature they were trying to highlight was the ability to condense the content of the thread to a single (or small number of) message when much of the content in the replies is the same (ie the previous sender's message quoted back in a reply). Therefore you could look at the top-level of the thread and possibly read the whole thread without having to go through several messages, most of which contain the previous messages quoted over and over again.
How much value this has to most users and whether or not it actually works very well I don't know, but the idea that Outlook didn't have a threaded view before this is at best laughable, especially since a quick search would tell you how to do it in the last 4 or so versions of the program.
Re:Not so surprising (Score:3, Informative)
Unlikely. Microsoft partners have bigger customers already have had access to the Office 2010 preview for months now. I'm amazed it took that long for it to be seen in public (though there were already some previews and screenshots, including official ones by microsoft bloggers, for a while now)
Re:Not so surprising (Score:2, Informative)
Except for the fact that this preview was announced in May [http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/05/12/microsoft-office-2010-technical-preview.aspx] and Microsoft has had sharepoint and other things. And ChromeOS being a little netbook OS to just browse the internets when people do so much more with Windows.
Re:WordPerfect 5.1 (Score:3, Informative)
Word has had a style inspector since Office 2003 (or possibly Office XP). It'll tell you exactly what formatting has been applied to the text, and it's pretty easy to reset it. Screenshot: http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/9540/o2007.png [imageshack.us]
2001 called (Score:4, Informative)
I find OpenOffice quirky and unreliable. It often crashes for me.
2001 called and wants that review back. I've used OO on Linux, Windows XP, and Vista. On old machines, brand new ones and everything in between. And the number of times it's crashed on me or here at the office where we also use it....
0
Quirky you can argue, especially if you're used to something else. But if it crashes your computer, then your computer has much bigger problems.
Re:What makes MS's version of ODF worse (Score:3, Informative)
You are conflating "more compatible" with "more conformant".
There is no standard sepcification for formulas to be "conformant" to. Yes, the CleverAge plug-in was more interoperable with OOo impelementation than SP2 is, but because the impelemantion of such things is not defined by the standaard, both are equally "conformant".
If you were a programmer, you'd understand. Spend some time on the C++ std newsgroups, and when someone mentions some "undefined" behavior, you get blasted that "undefined can do anything, including delete all your files or blow up the computer".
No, SP2 is not interoperable with OOo, but you don't have to be to be ODF 1.1 compliant. Is MS being a dick about it? Probably, but they're more making a point, I think. A point that ODF propoents know is true, and embarassing to them, so they react with name calling and vitriol.
The point was that ODF was not the better standard. It might, eventually, be... but the lack of interoperability guaranteed by the standard is ridiculous.
Yes, as Rob Weir points out, anyone can weasel word a standard, but MS isn't weasel wording. There are literally giant mac-truck sized holes in the standard.