Hands-On Preview of Microsoft Office 2010 291
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ScuttleMonkey
from the fighting-for-relevance dept.
from the fighting-for-relevance dept.
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."
ribbons (Score:5, Interesting)
I find that hard to believe. 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. The majority of people have Office 2003 put on instead, only those who are reluctant to change software on their computers leave it on.
Good Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has long been promoting "good enough" approach to things. It isn't the most secure ... it is good enough. It isn't the most robust ... it is good enough. It isn't the most productive ... it is good enough.
This is the Achilles heal of Microsoft. With Windows XP and Office since 2000 or even 2003, has been "good enough". I can't think of ANYTHING Microsoft can offer in Win 7 or Office 2010 that I would actually use. And changing how things work, just for the sake of changing how they work, is counter productive.
In early 2003 I made the statement that 2008 was going to be the first sign of Microsoft's demise as tech leader. The Storm has hit, and is now ravaging Microsoft. Google is building Chrome OS (which I would assume is tied to Android ... somewhere), Open Office is very usable, Wine is getting to the point of being solid, Linux is appearing on desktops, Webservices, mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) etc.
You can see the panic at Microsoft in their web services division, from the search engines changes to Live and now to Bing. You can see the panic in the OS and Office with the huge changes in the UI to cover up that really nothing has changed since 2000.
Microsoft is suffering from the "good enough" syndrome. Everything they have made for the last 6 or 8 years is "good enough" and when Vista comes along and changes things just to change things, people buck against it. You'll see more of the same with Office.
I honestly think one of the reasons Gates left, was because he saw the writing on the wall, and got out while the getting was good.
The Ribbon... (Score:3, Interesting)
...is the new Clippy. If you want people to use Office, you need to get rid of it.
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:4, Interesting)
> What I can't see is how they intend to compete with free (Openoffice)
Simple. By giving away Office Web Edition for free on the web, via live.com. (This was mentioned quite widely in the tech press but the /. summary doesn't mention in specifically.) Frankly, given that I prefer Google Docs over OpenOffice, if Office Web is any good it'll be the 800lb gorilla in the market.
Not so surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:'Conversation View' == Threaded mail? (Score:2, Interesting)
Outlook has supported threaded discussion views for email and post folders since the 2000 version. Here's a walk through [microsoft.com] for 2003. First hit on Google searching for 'outlook threaded view'
While threaded mode is useful for some things, there are other nice ways to visualize your stuff on Outlook that I like.
View -> Arrange By -> Conversation on OLK2003 is essentially the same as GMail mode, for example.
A quick switch to Message Timeline view is also extremely useful in those situations where someone says "it's an email from 03/12/70" or something like that and you want to look quickly at the entire sequence sorted by message rather than simply by date.
The "Show in groups" thing is priceless as a visual aide to stuff that's happened in the last few weeks.
I think Outlook is an example of Microsoft's better software efforts. It has its quirks and limitations of course, but overall it's far better than most other mail clients I've used in the past 15 years. And I'm not even considering Exchange integration here.
Congratulations on getting modded up though. My theory that mod points are being increasingly farmed out to rhesus monkeys and squirrels on steroids continues to pan out.
Re:But...still not fixed (Score:3, Interesting)
or how about Excel's cut & paste functionality working in even remotely the same fashion as everywhere else in Windows (or Office)?
Re:ribbons (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait, a survey that uses percentages estimated by the surveyed? Wow, that's not only inaccurate, it's inaccurately inaccurate. Everyone with a bone to pick will more than likely grossly over-estimate their inconvenience.
Still, the numbers say that 64% of advanced and 71% of intermediate users either have no opinion or like the ribbon. That seems like an overall win to me. I note you don't include novices, which given the trend sould be as high as 85 or 90% who like or have no opinion of it.
Since you can't please all of the people, an average of 75% seems like a homerun to me.
Re:ribbons (Score:3, Interesting)
I should have read your link first, so my figures are wrong.
However, having read the link, I'm baffled by such claims as "On average, all users who responded estimated that the Ribbon has reduced their productivity."
"on average" and "all users" do not belong in the same sentence. WTF?
That sounds like someone trying to use statistics and weasel words to say something the statistics don't actually say.
Still the survey's numbers look good, but don't really make a lot of sense because of the way they're presented. What's more, users with negative opinions are far more likely to take such a survey than those who simply have no strong opinion one way or the other. So that market is largely unknown.
Re:ribbons (Score:4, Interesting)
What makes MS's version of ODF worse (Score:1, Interesting)
Is that they had a more conformant version in an add-on product.
Then when it came to their built-in, they nerfed it.
Worse, the bit they nerfed was, effectively, "until we have something, do what Microsoft Excel does".
Yes, Microsoft couldn't even manage their own product implementation in their own product...
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I do expect Word 2003 to work on Windows 8 and 9.
Microsoft's support for binary backwards compatibility is generally better than Linux support for source backwards compatibility (the source has the advantage that you can fix it after it has been broken, but in practical terms, a Windows binary from 1995 is more likely to work on Vista than an unedited open source program from 1995 is to directly compile on Ubuntu 8.04).
And really, I don't have any trouble upgrading software (I tend to believe that the hundreds of thousands of dollars Microsoft spends on usability testing is probably productive) or keeping track of install media for expensive software (To test this, I just eyeballed my Windows 95 CD that came with the computer I purchased in 1997).
Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone (Score:3, Interesting)
I fit that statement too, and I bought Office 2007 after using it on school computers. Why? Because the difference in productivity between 2003 (which I already owned, so I had no reason to use OpenOffice) and 2007 is huge. It's just a hell of a lot nicer to actually work with, and I dig it. The cost, as high as it was (like $60 or something), was worth it because the improvements are that good.
Re:ODF (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. I've read it before. Other than one part that is false, the rest is hand waving.
It basically says "Yeah, we know the standard doesn't specify so much stuff that the only way to be compatible is to get people to agree on how to do things.."
That's not "interoperability", that's "praying" everyone manages to make it work.
The part about section 8.3.1 is completely bogus. Read the specification yourself. 8.3.1 says nothing about requiring brackets.
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html#8.3.1.Referencing%20Table%20Cells [oasis-open.org]|outline
It says:
"To reference table cells so called cell addresses are used. The structure of a cell address is as follows:
1.The name of the table.
2.A dot (.).
3.An alphabetic value representing the column. The letter A represents column 1, B represents column 2, and so on. AA represents column 27, AB represents column 28, and so on.
4.A numeric value representing the row. The number 1 represents the first row, the number 2 represents the second row, and so on."
Nothing there about brackets.
Re:ribbons (Score:2, Interesting)