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."
ODF (Score:5, Insightful)
Any traction on solving or at least improving Microsoft's ODF implementation? The last time I checked, there were serious issues [odfalliance.org] with the implementation.
By the way, how does Office 2007's "Save-As-PDF" feature compare to the real thing?
Re:who uses it anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
me neither.
office 97 had enough features already. the bloat continues ever forward.
Not again! (Score:2, Insightful)
Good Lord, the business hardly deployed Office 2007 with big troubles, we just got used to the new interface absolute madness and yet again more changes :(
Will this crazy running for "the new" ever end?
Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:4, Insightful)
Word's been around, what, 20 years? Guys, if you want to provide maximum usability to use users, leave it alone. We've all figured out how the app works, what the keyboard shortcuts are, where in each menu our most-used commands are, and how to use mail merge. STOP CHANGING IT. Every time you change how Word works, all you're doing is decreasing my usability and needlessly taking away time I could otherwise spend doing actual productive work.
Full disclosure: I've been trying to avoid Office for the past year or so, relying on Apple's Pages instead - in part simply because Word is a bloated beast, and in part because Microsoft just keeps pointlessly adding useless crap and changing things to give the illusion of "innovation".
Re:ODF (Score:3, Insightful)
But...still not fixed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes,
But you are getting old and are going to die and you probably have no intention of buying a new version of Word since you are happy with the current one.
New users will see a wierdly arcane program or an easy to use (for a novice) program.
Think of these versions of word as targeted to naive users.
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What I can't see is how they intend to compete with free (Openoffice) when we have 25% real unemployment and no growth in sales for the rest- with the corrupted financial industry pillaging and looting heavily from the 75% that are still producing.
Re:ribbons (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that hard to believe.
Well it's a good thing that your incredulity doesn't override statistical evidence.
How many of those people they asked actually used office as a mission critical application in their day to day use? In my admittedly small sample, nobody that I work with at all enjoys using the ribbons, which is about 5 that I have spoken to about it.
In my larger sample of about 30-50 people almost all of them enjoy the new GUI and once they start using Office 2007 for a few weeks they never want to go back to 2003. I guess this is why anecdotes aren't good evidence of something.
Re:A lot of effort and money (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you set foot in a typical large business lately? These people live and die by these things, on -TOP- of using wikis and such. A big part of it is that you can't really link a customer waiting to sign a 15 million dollar contract a link to a wiki, and the accounting department can't do their "one shot deal" calculations on their blog.
WordPerfect 5.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WordPerfect 5.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember a WordPerfect demo for the Atari ST. Everyone in attendance agreed then that WP was gross overkill for just about everyone.
For most people that have to put up with msword for no other reason to "be compatable", that's still true.
Re:A lot of effort and money (Score:2, Insightful)
Mod parent -1 incredibly naive
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because "View / Header and Footer" is the way you're used to doing it, doesn't mean it's the best way. Word has been evolving and expanding all this time. You can only shoehorn new features into the old UI for so long before it becomes convoluted.
To learn the new ribbon all you have to do is think about what you are trying to accomplish and then navigate where you think it ought to belong. The new layout means you will find related functions that will improve your productivity and quality of communication. It's nothing but a good thing.
FYI, old hotkeys from previous versions of Office still work (e.g., Alt-F, S, will still save your document even though there's no "File" pulldown with a "Save" command.
Re:Not again! (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that when a company makes changes to something it is bad, but when it refuses to change things it is bad. I thought that Microsoft wasn't making enough changes to its software to keep up with other innovations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody has ever attempted to create an interface like the Ribbon before in an office suite. So when Microsoft comes up with something new, suddenly it's not okay to be running for the new.
This community constantly rails against how Microsoft has aped other OS vendors to try to make their products better, and then rails against Microsoft trying to innovate in their own software. It's like every post is a new punch bowl filled with red kool-aid stupid. Could we please get past the 1990's Microsoft vs. Linux attitude and admit that it's possible for one arm of a company to do bad things while another arm of the company does good things? Not everything boils down to a "good vs. evil" essential conflict.
Re:ODF (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm kind of curious. What makes Microsoft's version of ODF any worse than anyone elses? Or for that matter, what makes OOo's any better? Just because OOo's non-standard spreadsheet formula is used more commonly doesn't make it better.
Until ODF 1.2 is out, it's just a bunch of he-said-she-said.
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ribbons (Score:5, Insightful)
In my very humble opinion, and as an additional (possibly worthless) data point, people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything (like me).
The rest of the demographic that tends to use Office software - you know, the millions of corporate users that still have the default background, theme, sounds and everything else that originally came with their laptop or desktop - the ribbon tends to be a little baffling at first and eventually extremely useful to them, because it mirrors the way they work. That's the reason it was designed and why it was introduced with 2007.
Microsoft places much more importance on the latter group and tends to make design decisions based on their working habits and patterns. If you are part of the first group, it's best to get used to that fact.
And of course, there are millions of people still using Office 2003 and even 2000.
First Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Would be the first time that MS has tried to force an OS upgrade.
Re:Office productivity suites... (Score:2, Insightful)
Three Reasons to Hate the Ribbon (Score:5, Insightful)
2: It changes based on what it's Application Telepathy thinks you are doing.
3: You are not even offered the option of backwards compatibility to the old, customizable, fixed menuing system -- Microsoft dictates that they know what's best for you!
Can forced Dvorak keyboards with no QWERTY option be far behind?
Re:Good Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. Open Office resembles MS Office 2000 more than MS Office 2007(2010??). Therefore, people are willing to go to OO rather than have change.
And Linux can be configured to look and function just like XP, and Ubuntu, except for the "start bar" being at the top, functions almost like XP for most things.
Further, if people are being made (forced) to "learn" something new, they are more willing to look at alternatives, like OO and Linux or even Apple.
The point being, if people are having to "change" they are willing to REALLY change. My In-laws are a great example. They are an older couple, in the sixties and seventies, and they don't like VISTA. My Father in law asked me the other day to show him Linux, and he said, that it looks a lot like Windows.
He was able to open Firefox, OO, Email, everything he does, quickly without any fuss. Ubuntu is getting very close to getting mom n pop .
Re:Not again! (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, they do it for Windows (I've not gone past XP yet, dunno if they do it for Vista). I prefer the classic mode, I like to use and view the directory structure, that's how I'm used to working. I don't like when they try to abstract too much for my 'benefit'.
Re:Good Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
The interesting note to watch is what happens when the next generation of computer users comes forward. Teenagers these days know a lot more about computers than their parents do, on average. They understand the difference between Mac and Windows (and a heck of a lot know about Ubuntu - more than you might think), and can use their computers in fairly efficient ways. Will they be more willing to adapt and allow the market to morph? Considering that the market nowadays panders to the lowest common denominator (people who think "Windows" is a synonym with "computer") the fundamental shift in the next decade or two is when that lowest common denominator starts to rise. As computers become more integral to the average user's life, the more they'll bother to understand it.
Car analogy: while most people don't quite understand the entire workings of a car, they know enough to keep it running. This is not true for a hell of a lot of computer users, but when and how will this change?
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:3, Insightful)
I would argue that OpenOffice Writer is inferior. It's slower. It's ugly. It lacks a lot of the niceties of Word 2007 (unless they added stuff like the formatting-menu-on-hover gizmo that Word 2007 has in a recent release, I haven't installed it since 3.0 and didn't really play with it much).
It's a workable program, but it's not really as good as either 2003 or 2007. Frankly I think KOffice has a better chance of being a really good Office competitor than OpenOffice ever will.
Re:Good Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, but there's one other important thing about Microsoft you have to realize:
When they have no competition, they don't bother. When Microsoft's web browser competition dissolved away, we ended up with IE6 for years and years and years-- when the web browser competition picked-up again, thanks to Mozilla and Apple and later Google, suddenly, WHAM! IE7, IE8, back to a regular development schedule, tons of great features.
Office moves slow because it has very little serious competition. And, hell, even at Office's slow pace, it's out-pacing OpenOffice. So they must be doing something right. Now, if Apple ported Pages/Numbers to Windows, and Adobe released OfficeShop, then you'd see Microsoft moving-ass on getting Office up-to-snuff. As is, why should they bother?
Re:'Conversation View' == Threaded mail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Outlook's had Threaded View for decades. I don't exactly know what "conversation view" is, but it's something new.
But good job posting your ignorant bullshit for everybody to read. I guess it's easier to lie about what features Outlook has than to check your facts. Why do people mod up posts that *make shit up*?
Re:What makes MS's version of ODF worse (Score:4, Insightful)
You're still missing the point. No, standards don't force anyone to do anything, but you can at least say "You're not conforming to the standard".
And as I said, yes, you can weasel word your way around any standard, but that's not what Microsoft is doing.
The only reason that so many apps that use ODF are interoperable is because they all chose to reverse engineer the way OOo did it, or they used OOo's code. That's called a de-facto standard, which is what .doc and .xls are. de-facto standards are not good.