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Microsoft Office 2003 - Reviews, Overviews, Issues
securitas writes "The first users of Microsoft's Office 2003 are weighing in and the response is mixed. The new Outlook has received a favorable response, but the mantra seems to be there's little reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features. Meanwhile, Bill Gates dismissed the open source competition. One of the new features - self-destructing documents - seems to have caused some confusion, because 'Microsoft says the new feature is not designed to remove all traces of a file' and MS spokesman Mike Pryke-Smith says, 'The message will still be in various places', so emails will not cleanly self-destruct. A related issue is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management, which may shut out Mac users. PC World has a detailed review of Office 2003 which sums things up well."
``The distance between what we have and what the free software has is greater today than it's ever been,'' he said. The new Office product's biggest competitors, he said, were its predecessors, most recently Office XP, released two years ago
that's correct, the distance is greater because it's lagging further and further behind than opensource free software.
my blog
A spell checker?
yes I think VI is crap. and emacs.
I can imagine they might have been great back when GUI's didn't even exist and you were prepared to learn a shedload of stuff.
but now they're just shit. if I can't "guess" how to do something, then it's poorly designed. this doesn't make vi and emacs for 1337 h4x0rz only, it just makes them shit.
a basic text editor with search/replace is fine for 99% of things. a little perl script will take care of anything complicated. if I'm in the mood for something fancy then kate with a built in console is nice.
death to vi and emacs!
> Trolls can try to make hay with that if they like, but I say it's just the obviously right way to handle the problem, so it's no shock that MS did it the same way.
No, the shock is that MS did something the obviously right way.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
read a manual for Word!!!! aaaahahahhahahahhahahaha you've got to be freaking kidding me?!?!?!
anything that requires a manual to know how to exit IS poorly designed. it simply is. there are common computer themes, such as clicking on an 'x' in the corner to close, in programs ctrl-c is copy, ctrl-v is paste, ctrl-z undo etc. etc.. anything that doesn't follow these causes trouble.
even with your How-To above it took me several attempts to get it to work since the Z's have to be freaking capitals!!! i.e Esc, Shift-Z, Shift-Z. what sense does this make? how could anyone ever think of this as intuitive? should't a well-designed program be intuitive? shouldn't things happen how you would expect them to? did they run out of every combination of keys? what do Esc, Shift-Z, Z and Esc, Z, Shift-Z do? and are these commands more common than wanting to exit?
command line in program? kate
edit two files? ANY editor, using multiple windows, desktops allows effectively infinite documents
like I said, without a gui and multiple windows maybe vi is the best, but now it's old and shit.
just like cigarettes, if vi were invented today and not a relic of the past, they would be declared illegal for health reasons.
Ok for the users at home. Let me see if I get this right.
$229 for Word
$229 for Excel
$109 for Outlook (Checking email is expensive)
$229 for PowerPoint(For presentations at work and stuff)
--------------
$796 Total
Now if we look at say... OpenOffice.
$0 for Word Equivalent
$0 for Excel Equivalent
$0 for Outlook Equivalent (ie Evolution)
$0 for PowerPoint Equivalent
--------------------
TOTAL $0
Now considering that the start up cost for a home user is $796 (not including Windows XP), and then a linux user can type "emerge openoffice" (for gentoo users) and just download it for other users (ie Redhat), I know were I stand. Benifits of open source.
1. You don't have to call to activate your micro$hit.
2. It won't cost you an arm and leg
3. You don't have to walk to the store. (although you could and buy the nice prepackaged distro's with manuals and such)
4. If you need help, customer service is in the forums or on an IRC a few clicks away, as opposed to 200+ dollars in long distance trying to explain to some micro$hit service rep that you can start your computer anymore because outlook decided to somehow fry your CMOS because of a new vulnerability.
5. Did I mention it's FREE?
Nuff said.