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Office 2003 Beta 2 Screen Shots
frooyo writes "ActiveWin is displaying screenshots of Office 2003 Beta 2 including pictures of Outlook, Excel, Word etc. As seen by the screenshot - the task based interface is much more prominent. Also - Outlook's three-vertical-pane interface is now the default." Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
Although, as an active directory admin with a few Office 97 clients left in an office XP environment, Office 97 shoots right through my GPO lockdowns.... god knows why, it just bypasses all the security... so if this helps bring a unified base, then I'm all for it....
Personally, i like the office interface, but perhaps that's just because i'm so familiar with it.
--
fight global cooling
From Klez and other email based worms that defaulting to the preview pane in Outlook is potentially dangerous? Seems like a pretty simple thing to do, it would save a lot of IT support's time, and maybe even put a tick in the smart bin for Microsoft.
:)
But of course, that would make too much sense, right?
Macs as a fetish property
His ideas don't jive with the slashdot crowd. Sort of funny, in a way, how the people he attracted have taken his creation in an entirely different direction. Not totally different, but definitely more zealous than the creator.
That comment about what will be cloned next year, if in a comment, would be labeled as flamebait or a troll. I find it refreshing that at least the editors realize certain realities.
One of the main ones is that, yes the linux desktop borrows heavily from MS, and not the other way around, which a lot of people like to proclaim.
How could anyone work at this version of Office for any amount of time - All of the blue in the interface is way too depressing.
I might have to buy that bullet-proof vest for the office !
This article presupposes three things.
1. OpenSource programmers will stop making kernel mods and other fun hacks and come together to make a good office suite for Linux.
2. That after hell freezes over and #1 above happens that they should make it look and act like Microsoft Office.
3. That the programmers can even see the screenshots as if the server was not already slashdotted into oblivion.
But I don't remenbar any spelling errars. So. Good Article Slashdot !!
The only reason I've had to buy any MS Office products since maybe 95/97 is that I've got to be able to open the occasional document produced with the "latest and greatest" version. But I'm getting to the point where I'll just start telling people to send it in a different format - if it's really important that I see it, they can take a couple of minutes to convert it.
Funny how the only reason to upgrade is simply because everyone else has upgraded, not because of some new "must have" feature or big batch of bug fixes. Honestly, have there been so many innovations and advances in word processing, spreadsheets and presentations that I need to upgrade every 18 months? I don't like paying money for things I don't need.
I have been using Open Office for a while now, and I love it. There's even some areas where I think it kicks MS Office's ass, like the formula editor. I do all my math and engineering homework in Open Office whenever possible. :)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
The non-consecutive selection thing is probably the best thing about Word, and I'm not being sarcastic. It's basically Mother Teresa in software form.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Really ...
... )
What company, in this economy, is going to upgrade?
What home user, in this economy, is going to upgrade?
(Someone give me a patch to remove Clippy, and I'll be satisfied with 2000 forever
Yeah microsoft was touting this program... Its not bad.. Its visually better and looks like they are just adding more and more shit... Only people who use crap like franklin covey shit will enjoy all the features, becase now they wont need to buy that program.
Also they are releasing a new program with all of this... OneNote link here
This brings up my next rant... Why can't we have a unified interface for everything I need to do?! Its like.. All of these updates are nice and all.. but I don't see any real innovations. Word Excel Powerpoint Access Outlook all in different programs is still a clumsy way to operate. Alt Tabbing or dual monitors isn't cool enough anymore.. I need it all in one program. Is there any project that is actually working on something like this?
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
If the Linux herd is going to clone anything; it should be Apple Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Small, lightweight, and excellent utilities for their functions.
mbbac
Actually, when I look at these screenshots, I think "Phew, I'm glad that I have OpenOffice and other things to type with!"
... on a system that's been tweaked to look nice, this becomes not-a-problem.
:)
Now, Office has a lot of Big Complicated Features which may be interesting and useful to you if your office / job has evolved to rely on them. I don't use office-suite progams much, and when I do I don't usually have anything too exotic in the way of combining features. I do find that I can paste in sections of spreadsheet, graphics and such into OpenOffice pretty well though.
OpenOffice does have a big problem to me, though, which is that fonts are usually ugly, reminds me or the way Word (3? 4? whatver version is was) looked on my old toaster Mac. This is not, strictly speaking , OO.org's fault, since ugly fonts are the result of complicated interactions among a lot of things in the system
It has some other problems too (annoying default behavior wrt to autocompletion of words, lists, etc), but these are in Word and most other Word Processors, too. On the whole, I'd much rather write a letter in OpenOffice, and have
Upshot: these screenshots don't inspire envy the way I thought they might when I opened them.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Simple: Microsoft shareholders.
Microsoft doesn't make money for them if people use "old" versions of their software. They have to make a newer version, with incompatible formats, to ensure as many people upgrade as possible. It's software extortion.
Trolling is a art,
I have to know, is it skinnable? or does every one who uses it have to put up with the ugle blue and green title bars and panel ? - not even mentioning the rest of the widgets.
.Net they would throw Sun a bone by actually making a UI that was uglier that Metal ?
I must say I thought the grey '3d' widgets of Win9x were pretty blah, but at least they weren't as annoying as those screenshots look.
Maybe Microsoft figured that while they were crushing Java with
... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
I can't debate how accurate that point is, but I have noticed, having recently read through the gnome interface guidelines, that most of the "not like this" examples are the myriads of various gnome apps. It'd probably go a long way if the developers that *do* write UI code (regardless of how "good" they are at "designing" said UI) actually follow UI guidelines.
Also, I wonder how well respected someone who mainly does "UI" design/layout things would be respected by the core development team of some project that actually has to code up the critical working guts.
Does Excell handle CSV in any kind of reasonable way?
when I input 01234 does excell still want to format it as 1234, and when I change it to text (or whatever) does it keep my original entry?
Do dates work properly in excell yet?
Can I turn of HTML mail in Outlook?
Can I uninstall stuff without the CD.
Every time I goto search in windows (F3) does the Microsoft Installer dialogue pop-up and anoy the hell out of me?
Does fastfind sit in the background and hammer my pc from time to time?
How easy is it to install shit head the paper clip?
Can I tell Office that I'm english and have A4 paper, english dictionaries, the correct date format, paper size in inches etc..... without going through all the dialogues.
What about that horrible auto-crap, is that still on by default?
And finally, Can I use non-mdi, does ctrl+tab work, and can I copy using ye-oldie ctrl+instert instead of having to use ctrl+c (which sfaik is a break signal)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
And you know what? I'm happy with that. I think it's good if Linux beats Microsoft because Microsoft sucks. But if Microsoft changes so they don't suck anymore, then what does it matter if they win, to me, the average user? (well, more than 'average' user, but you get the idea). What I mean is, as Linux gets better, so does Windows. So the proportion of people on /. using windows will probably stay the same.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I agree with you. I don't use another operating system because it's the same as the old one.
If I'm not using (or forced to use) Windoze, I'm all for the GNUstep UI: very clean and well thought; great environment (drag'n'drop, services, etc)...
And of course, there is Apple's OS X, which gladly still kept some of the nice NeXT stuff.
-- I love the smell of Blue Screens in the morning.
I'd like to see MSFT fix *that.*
You mean like this (it prevents Outlook users from being able to access executable content)? To circumvent this the executables must be sent as compressed files which have to be then uncompressed and then execute: It's no different than chmod +x. The attributes on the file are hardly that different from the extension of the file, and indeed many compression utilities store the attributes of the file.
In any case it's interesting that what you're talking about is something that Microsoft is making great strides in "fixing", to the consternation of many Slashdotters. A heavily debated feature of Paladium is the fact that executable files have to be signed by a trusted authority (configurable by domain. For instance your corporate IT department) to be executable. There have been third party utilities that only allow configured executables to run as well via an executable database.
I hate to say it but Outlook is the only reason that we're sticking with Office in my company. We've done evaluations of StarOffice & OpenOffice and other packages like these. However, none of them interact with our Exchange system the way that our customers demand. They want seamless calendaring and the other features that Outlook & Exchange provides.
"Shouldn't the code be more solid than requiring monthly patches."
Who says it's necessarily the quality of the code? The real problem here is that new features get added, and gee surprise surprise, people find creative ways of being annoying with them. Take the saran wrap on the toilet seat example. Toilet seats have a flawed design when it comes to recognizing a well placed piece of plastic intended to give you a pressed fruit bowl. Is the toilet badly designed? Are we accpeting horrible quality?
Lock down a computer to where all that stuff is 'safe', and where are you then? You've got a computer that is rather inflexible.
I'll go you one further.
I'm a UI designer. I have designed a new OS UI. It's quite radical, and new. I've solicited opinions on it from slashdot (here)as well as from a few friends.
Basically, I'm sitting on the thing right now, for two reasons: 1.) the core group of people its designed for - techies, early-adopters - are incredibly resistant to changes of this type and 2.) its nearly impossible to solicit useful feedback from said group, for the reasons you outlined in your post.
It can be summarized in one of the responses to the above-linked post; I asked if anyone was willing to undergo (possible) major learning pains to learn a more productive system. I got the only one-word response I've ever seen on /., "No."
Everyone, absolutely everyone has an almost unshakable opinion of what they like, visually, and behaviourally. Witness the near-revolt of Classic Mac OS users trying OS X, versus the newbies and Unix/Win coverts who think it's the cat's ass (er, that means 'great'). You cannot underestimate this. In 10 years of graphic design, it still boggles me. Graphic design and particularly UI design in general get 'no respect', because its simply something that people don't respect educated opinions on. Put another way, if your code works, only another programmer is going to criticise you for sloppy coding. A user doesn't care as long as it works. But if I show a UI design to a room with 15 people, you will have 15 angrily opinionated asshats barking off about how this and that should work, with no thought whatsoever to how one arrives at those conclusions.
And the kicker: you must listen to every asshat in that room, because in a way they are all right.
Anyways. My point is this: I'm the guy you're talking about, and I find it really hard to 'break in' to this group. I don't even know where to start, actually. Hell, I get dissed just because I built the UI demo in Flash.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
> "Doesn't everyone run anti-virus software?"
> In reality shouldn't we expect more from modern
> OSes?
For anyone who can remember back that far, there used to be a MS AntiVirus product back in the DOS 6 days - I think it was MSAV.COM or MSAV.EXE.
Of all the markets MS has ever been in, anti-virus is the only one I can think of where they didn't follow their normal practice:
- big announcement about their new product, which gets people wondering "should I buy the competitive product from another vendor, since the MS version is sure to be better/stronger/faster?"
- introduce a relatively dud product
- bring out a new release fairly quickly, "acquiring" technology from their competitors along the way. This is the release where MS tries to get as many functionality check boxes filled as possible, so corporates can believe the MS product is at least viable
- bring out a 3rd release some time later, which is pretty much on a par with the competition's products
- market the competition out of existence
- once they own the market in that area, stagnate their own product since no further development is required
The MSAV product (it may have still been around in Win95 days - can't be sure) never really got off the ground, and was quietly killed off. When you think about it, if there's one product area where MS should have had a competitive edge, it's anti-virus software - they've had the source code for Windows, Outlook, Exchange etc. all along and (if nothing else) could hire in the necessary experts to track down virus holes, highlight the vulnerabilities in the source and deal with them; they'd even have the power to *fix* holes exploited by viruses by making changes to the Windows or app source.
Norton, McAfee et al have it much harder; they have to reverse engineer things without the benefit of source code, to work out how a virus is doing its stuff, before patching it up. Furthermore, they don't have the option of fixing the vulnerabilities in the OS or application, so they're inevitably going to be hitting the same vulnerabilities over and over again with different viruses and probably have version control challenges as a result.
A sizeable percentage of PCs sold have anti-virus software deployed on them, and McAfee and Norton (and a bunch of others) have been in business for a while now; it seems there's money in the anti-virus business.
Wonder why MS hasn't devoted more attention in the past towards taking over the anti-virus market? Of course, Palladium will render all virii powerless, so the market will be going away soon anyway 8-P