Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
at Open Office 2013!
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....
"Also - Outlook's three-vertical-pane interface is now the default."
Well that is all good and swell but am I still going to get a virus everytime I use it?
I've already seen all the comments about clone wars blah blah blah
on a more serious note is cloning the way to win? doubtful - how about innovating making it better rather than just cloning
Can someone kindly explain why I should pay more money to upgrade from 2000 to 2003 when 2000 does more that i need and i can get Open office which also does more than i need for free.
Ctrl-Z
Personally, i like the office interface, but perhaps that's just because i'm so familiar with it.
--
fight global cooling
...when it starts popping up online casino ads at you.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
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.
HERE!
god I'm such a karma whore.'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Because, in contrary to popular belief, Slashdot is actually a pro-Windows site. A poll from a while ago proved that the majority of the Slashdotters are using Windows, *not* Linux/Unix/Mac. More and more moderators are modding critism against Linux up and anti-MS posts down. Slashdotters are slowly converting to pro-Windows; in fact, 65% has already been converted.
Another $600 word processor from Microsoft. Even when I'm at a job where they use Office, nobody ever uses anything but Word to type some useless bullet points, or Excel to make a pointless chart. Tasks? Never used. I had a PHB who tried to assign me tasks once. He couldn't hotsync for a week after that.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
that points out a very specific problem with the open/free source movements... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
moo
The only thing that needs cloning out of Office is simply the compatibility aspect of it's documents.
No need to clone the rest of the package: the bloat, the security holes, etc. ;-)
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Since this site seems /.'ed already, here are another ones that have some screenshots too -
3 069.
http://www.wininsider.com/news/comments.aspx?mid=
http://users.pandora.be/AMDtje/Office11_2.htm
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol11.htm
Suhit
This will likewise fail it.
So is it "\." now, not "/."?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Part of innovation is taking what works from past technology and then improving it. And both sides do this--and ought to. If one person came up with a very nice way of doing interfaces, it's really dumb to reinvent the wheel when you could, in fact, be refining the wheel and making it work *better*.
Obviously, nothing should be 'taken' to the point of intellectual property violation, but I think if *more* of this so-called 'theft' happened in software development, it'd result in much better software in general. Take what the other people did, fix the problems in it, make it better. Then maybe they'll take what you did, fix it even more, make it better.
And in the end you've got products on all sides that're more useable, more stable, and so on and so forth. I don't know how anyone can say there's something wrong with that. Building a better mousetrap doesn't necessarily mean you have to build it completely unlike every mousetrap ever made in the past.
The replacement for System Policy in Windows 2000 Active Directory implementations. HTH :p
You like MS Office, you say? Who's going to buy this for you? Are you going to buck up for your own copy at home? Or, like most people, are you expecting your company to buy it for you? That way, it's kind of like it doesn't really cost anything, right? Except it does cost something. It's money your company could have paid you directly. It's money your company could have used to improve their market penetration. It's money your company could have used to improve their facilities. It's money that could have been used to increase the R&D budget. It's money that could have been used to hire additional staff. And on and on.
But a new version of Office with pretty new buttons and a three panel view like Outlook? A new version that's intentionally incompatible with everything else in the world, including Microsoft's own products? That's precious.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Here's all the screenshots I could find, barring reading the article as it's slashdotted. maybe the article's important, maybe not.
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 1
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 2
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 3
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 4
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 5
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 6
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 7
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 8
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 9
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 10
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 11
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 12
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 13
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 14
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 15
Screenshot Of Office 2003 Pic 16
These screenshots aren't in any particular order, and there's a few shots of what appears to be the next version of Visual Studio, although, I could be mistaken.
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
Here is a shot straight for the UI testing lab for Office 12
Or at least it could be considering how pre-schoolish UI's are getting these days.
English: The Clone Wars have begun.
Yodish: Begun, the Clone Wars have.
Soviet Russia: In Soviet Russia, Clone Wars begin you!
Yodish Soviet Russia: You, in Soviet Russia the Clone Wars begin... Umm, no wait... Arrgh!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Do you actually read what you link to, or do you just hope it's right and nobody actually goes to take a look.
Microsoft Works Suite comes with Word.
Microsoft Works does not.
And I also know from experience that the Works wordprocessor default format is not readable by Word.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
It's very sad, but now whenever I see a post that's quite long, on-topic, raising valid questions or points etc. I automatically think "Karma whore!".
Sad, isn't it?
graspee
I'm thinking about a picture of Joe Average Computer User in shackles and menacles, with the caption, "Palladium Inside".
With assinine comments link this "Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)", as the footnote to this news posting. It now becomes clear to me why the computer GUI will never truely evolve beyond what it is today. Thanks Taco for the insight!
No matter what other faults they may or may not have (fence sitter ahoy \o/) MS spend millions on research into human/computer interaction and user interface design.
And what has it led to?
A filesystem browser squashed together with a web browser (done for political reasons).
The Start menu (this has been torn to pieces on the Interface Hall of Shame).
WMP 9.
Outlook's custom widget (with the mailbox name).
Each version of Office using completely different widgets than all other apps in Windows.
All with poor UIs.
Most of the rest of what Microsoft's done has been heavily based on Apple's ideas, or HCI driven by technical flaws. There was the dual filename system because they made the poor choice to use 8.3 filenames. Then the Start Menu, because Windows developers used masses of completely unidentifiable data file names slapped in the same directory as the executable. MDI, which was produced for Windows 3.1 because the VM system sucked and MDI reduced load on it.
Occasionally they take ideas from OSS (did I read elsewhere in this thread about virtual desktops and taskbar applets?)
I *wish* they'd take the idea of virtual desktops. One of the biggest things Windows needs.
are more than happy to build interfaces based on the results of their millions of dollars worth of research and linux is all the better for it.
Is a combined web browser/file browser really that crucial or useful, or just included to help out ex-Windows users?
May we never see th
Let's try to work this out.
English usally has a sentence structure in the form SVO, or Subject Verb Object. In this sentence, "The Clone Wars" is the subject, "have" is the verb, and "begun" is the object. Notice that the verb cluster "to begin" has been seperated into verb and object, in the passive voice sentence.
Now, Yodish uses the OSV (Object Subject Verb) construction. So the literal translation from English to Yodish would be "Begun" "The Clone Wars" "Have". This parses nicely into "Begun, the Clone Wars have." quite nicely, as the parent has done.
Soviet Russian uses the OVS (Object Verb Subject) construction. So the transliteration would be "Begun" "Have" "The Clone Wars". Now we take into account some of the unique features of Soviet Russian. First, the definite article "the" is dropped, yielding "Begun have Clone Wars". Also, Soviet Russian only has one tense, the present, giving us "Begin have Clone Wars". Now is the confusing part. Soviet Russian treats the phrase "begin have" as just the verb, dropping the object, yielding "___ begin Clone Wars". However, an implied object is forbidden. When an implied object is present, the subject becomes the object, and the implied subject "you" is added. So we get "Clone Wars begin ___", which leads to "Clone Wars begin you", as shown in the parent.
Now onward to Yodish Soviet Russian. As English becomes Soviet Russian by reversing the sentence order, SVO to OVS, then likewise, Yodish becomes Yodish Soviet Russian by reversing the OSV construction to VSO. So we get a transliteration to "have the Clone Wars begun". We drop the definite article and switch tense to get "have Clone Wars begin". We make the object "begin" into the verb, with the result "begin Clone Wars ___". We then make the subject into the object and add the implied subject "you", getting "Begin you Clone Wars". Now it's just a minor clean-up, with the final result:
In Yodish Soviet Russia, begin YOU, the clone wars do!
Open source could do just as well as Microsoft by employing graphic artists -- expert UI designeers need not apply. Apple seems to at least be trying, but sometimes I wonder if Microsoft's even employing user interface experts at all. If they do have them then they're not taking any serious notice of them. It seems more like they're aiming to make the interface look pretty and attractive, but no more useful than before.
A lot of what's being shown off in the screenshots are feature enhancements, but the basic problems of the UI with Windows and Office haven't changed at all. It's as if Microsoft is just throwing in any idea the programmers or feature-developers come up with, without properly testing it or verifying that it's actually useful and not going to create more problems for the user than it solves. For example:
Assuming that these screenshots are genuine, then Microsoft might have made minor presentation tweaks here and there, but it still hasn't fixed any of the real UI problems. Every one of these issues has been documented for years by experts who've spent a lot of effort researching them. Most of the issues have suggested solutions, but Microsoft's done absolutely nothing about it that's reached the consumer.
If open source developers want to mimic windows to attract users that way then I guess they can. But this doesn't mean it's a good interface. It's the opposite. Personally I'm hoping that the various independent-from-Microsoft open source UI projects come through and win the race with some good UI's, but I don't know what the chance of that is.
What on earth has "security problems" got to do with "word processor"? I realize the macro facility in Word & friends has some potential for abuse, but that is a very unique feature of those products. Remember when we told everyone that virus warnings about word processor files or e-mail were scams and to just ignore them? It wasn't very long ago.
If the Claris Works 3 that came with my 7-year-old Mac does what I need, I don't need to upgrade. No security issues, nothing. Legacy systems don't _have_ modern security issues because they don't have the "integration" with "duh internet". Heck, if it isn't on the net, what security issues are there? (Besides, Macs didn't used to have listening ports by default.)
Still like PaperClip on the old 8-bit micros? What possible security issues could there be? You're not going to get 0wn3d through a 300 bps originate-only modem.
I know Office is a whole other problem security-wise, but I take offense at the blanket statement that ALL old software should just die.