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Under the Hood of Office 12
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has posted an FAQ on Office 12, plus a quick preview of Office 12 pre-Beta 1. From the review: Microsoft Office 12.0 pre-Beta 1 drastically revamps the interface layouts of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. More than a year before the final product will hit the shelves, a pre-beta version of Microsoft Office 12.0 is revealing radical interface changes and user paradigm shifts that recall the overly ambitious Microsoft Office 97 update of the past."
Clippy? What have they done to you, Clippy? Clippy? Clippy? CLIPPY! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Interesting tightrope Microsoft is being forced to walk here...if they don't change things enough, they still have OpenOffice and StarOffice nipping at their heels, but if they change too much, they risk alienating their established user base.
The real question is: Just how much can you improve an office suite, before it's 'good enough'? Many Office users (my employers included) feel Office 2003 is just fine, and have no plans whatsoever for Office 12. Other offices I've seen have standardized on Offive XP, or even Office 2000, and steadfastly refuse to upgrade. When these holdouts finally do upgrade, it's only because they are having issues with using documents from other facilities that are in the new format (non-backward-compatible by design...thank you so much, Bill), and when they do, they commonly skip at least one release.
The bottom line is that the strategy of staying out ahead of competitors like OpenOffice and StarOffice is becoming increasing untenable as the office suite becomes more and more complex and capable, and closer and closer to the ideal of 'good enough' for the average user.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The dorky paper-clip cartoon is really dead; Office Assistant suggestions will no longer glibly interrupt your tasks.
RIP Clippy
Evolution or ID?
super
"paradigm shift"
Personally, I want less and less to do with MS products every day, http://www.openoffice.org/
I like the brushed metal look. Very OSX-ish, but I like it. Mikerowsawft seems to like borrowing things from OSX as of late.
and everyone will complain.
Aren't 'heavy revamps' of the front end what users of Microsoft products have been complaining about for god knows how long? Microsoft get it to a stage where everyone is used to it then completely redo it!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
More than a year before the final product
Why do I get the feeling that we won't actually see this product until after I have my masters degree.....in 2008?
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Nothing will ever top Office 97 for what it brought the table when it came out. They made it too good - several versions later and most people probably can't tell the difference, except for Outlook, which has changed more than the other apps in the suite. Is it possible that we don't need new versions of Office coming out every couple years anymore?
This has got to be the most innovative thing to come out of Microsoft in years.
Read both articles but couldn't find it...
As long as the new version of Office allows you to use that cool "Whoooshing" noise between slides in Powerpoint I'll be happy.
Not that I ever use Powerpoint, honest...
Love that song. And it doesn't matter no more cause I'm Microsoft free (at least at home). Yeah, baby!
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
The trouble here is that more of technology pundits will not see this requirement as an additional cost burden at all! So when it comes to comparing Office 12 to StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, assumptions will be made that those using M$ products already have the training.
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org programmers could capitalize on this, save companies the trouble or burden of training. This is not to mention licensing costs not forgetting closed and changing formats.
I remember seeing an Office 10 somewhere on a Mac or something - but I've never run into an Office 11. Maybe they just thought that since they are already too late, they'll just skip a release ? :)
...
.doc files.
There's good news but, Clippy is dead !!. But a ghost of the demon remains
What's new in Office 12
* Tabbed browsing
* Missing menus
* Clippy replaced with a Ghost
* Shortcuts change for no reason
* Task oriented design
Translated as :
* Ripoff off Firefox
* Bye bye familiarity
* Transparency showoffs
* Alt keys are teh suck
* All users are idiots
Some people might switch to OO.org just to keep the old macros alive but still read the new
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I've seen the videos, I've seen the screen shots, I've read the hype. I'm not impressed. Word and Word Perfect were always crap and they have gotten worse. Someone need to start OVER and rethink what a word processor needs to do. Basics like multi level numbering are impossible to teach users how to do. These apps are truly dinosaurs and we need a new killer app word processor suitable for writing books, html and pdf documentation including table of contents, indexes, appendices and normal stuff you find in documents.
the OO friendly light bulb irritates me just as much as clippy with its "'scuse me sir, but may I make a polite suggestion?" look.
;p
I guess now that clippy has been dropped from Microsoft Office, we can expect OO to do the exact same
May the users stay out of the new paradigm...
:)
But MS can change the whole interface, it won't change the minds of the lusers. They are too proud of having "the latest version" of this "professional office shit^W suite" (for suits
And even if they don't want to switch, some PHB will force them to. You can always rely on PHB to enforce stupid decision and approve bad design. Time to start some really bad designed (and overpriced) linux distribution to conquer the desktop !
What does it mean, "appended to the end of comments you post"
And while you're at it, bring back DOS! I miss my batch files.
--
Today's Anger Level: Orange/Red - Major production push underway. Don't tell me you screwed up.
It'll be that much easier to introduce a non-MSO product in 2006, since the old "it's just like what we used to use" argument won't hold up anymore.
Office 12 might contain a ton of features, but the crucial one is this:
An open, documented format - and I mean 100% open, not like the 65% shared source initiative from MS that means zilch to devleopers.
MS has to realise that the data in the document which I put in is much more valuable than the format in which it's stored. If I'm forced to use only MS tools to manipulate data in Office docs, it's not too exciting.
Recently, I searched for ways to update a VSS store from a remote location using a web interface. I learnt that the small 3rd party app needed to achieve this was ridiculously expensive, and crucially MS didn't have this component for it's own software. I'm now looking to change from VSS rather than getting a plug-in. More enterprise users would move away from Office if it sticks to proprietary patented stuff in the new version.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Definitely, check out these screenshots, I mean I haven't tried it but this ribbon thingy doesn't strike me as intuitive as the menu paradigm we're used to.
Microsoft's Screenshot
Zdnet series of screenshots
Plus it takes loads of screen real-estate.
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
Old versions of Office have entire books devoted to their bugs. When we moved from Office 98 to Office 2004, we noticed that most of the bugs were still in the program even though it was 3 versions later.
Is Office 12 just a UI rearrangement of the same defective code?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In other news, more than a year before the final peak and subsequent crash will hit the markets, an article on Slashdot is revealing radically retro buzzwords and use of tell-tale phrases such as "user paradigm shifts" that recall the overly ambitious marketing departments in the Dotcom Heyday of the past.
http://instantbadger.blogspot.com
Link to Channel9 coverage http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1147 20
5 191-a526-44bc-80e5-3f5399aeb162/new_julie_larson_g reen_office12_ui_2005.wmv
Link directly to video http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/5/b/65b0
My Tech Posts on Twitter
Beta software is for testing. That being the case, isn't "pre-beta" vaporware? What exactly are they testing???
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I miss batch files too. I discovered AutoIt a few years back, though, and it's proven to be quite good at more than a few things. It's come a long way now, but even 5 years ago it was quite usable for just about everything I had wanted to batch up in Windows.
Check it out.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
can you tell me where I can buy copies of Office 98 and 2004? I seem to have missed those ones.
Except someone to change OpenOffice.org's new suite to look like MS Office's new suite as what happened with GimpShop.
Office really is way past good enough for most users. My office uses Office 2000 and really doesn't see a big need to jump to Office XP or 2003. Office 12? Big harry deal. I wonder if Microsoft will have to start droping the price.
What I really wonder is why no big PC companies like Dell, IBM, or Gateway are including OpenOffice with their PCs?
Seems like a brain dead way to give your customers a free office suit. I guess the answer is they are all hoping to sell you MS Office.
Maybe Gateway/Emachine should think about it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The chief reason why Office is no longer attractive to enterprises is bcos of it's closed formats. It's not possible to manipulate an Office document without using the application, and that's pricey, bloated and proprietary - besides being locked down to the platform.
Companies around me have stuck with Office 97 for docs and use the Mozilla range for mail and internet. IE and OE are too buggy and bloated - and more easily replaced than Office. In a year's time, Open Office 2 should stabilise and remove the need for the OS itself.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The new Office is amazing, check out a 40 minute video of it here. The video is about 600mb, so I fully expect their servers to catch on fire once it gets slashdotted, but have at it.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Not all users are idiots but at least 95% are STUPID!
Ever talked to a tech-support guide?! Take a look at this
You will probably see more changes to how people collaborate on documents and how they are stored than any actual changes to the editing and formatting functionality.
What will it cost?
Microsoft hasn't yet specified.
Translation: prepared to be raked over the coals for failing to upgrade from Office 97 for all these years. You don't think those dinosaur ads pay for themselves do you?
Jeez! I just got Office 2003, and now this? A year before release? WHAT?! Office 12 is coming too soon.. for me anyways :(
And what were they thinking?! R.I.P. Clippy.. :'(
While the more visual and tabbed layout may reduce mouse clicks, it eats up more screen real estate than Office 2003 does. Visually, Office 12.0 will look dramatically different, though just marginally more attractive than its predecessor. Icons and charts appear less flat, but our jaws didn't drop at first sight.
I'm one of those guys with dual 19 inch moniters running at greater then 1280 by 720 resolution and I still don't have enough desktop area. It's a shame they are adding more onscreen buttons/tabs/menus to the interface, making the word processor more mouse dependant. They are also screwing with the shortcuts, messing up the Alt+ shortcuts. It is their software though, not mine, so they can do whatever they want, and I'll keep on with Open Office.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Isn't Microsoft's argument against switching to alternative office suites the alleged re-training costs to get workers up to speed on the new interface.
Well, if Office 12 has "radical interface changes" it appears to me that if it's going to require re-training, businesses might as well switch to an alternative now and save a fortune.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I personally will not install any Beta microsoft product so I cannot verify.
:[
:]
Does anybody know if they finally have undo past savepoints.
Because of my experience with MSO (been using since Excel 4.0) is that it is best to save the document ALL the time else the app will crash and you will loose hours of work. BUT when you save, you loose the undo history
MSO up to now has never had this feature (bad programmers BAD).
BTW - OOo has this feature in 2.0
God I love open source
JsD
Nothing will ever top edit.com from the old MS-DOS days! Billy G and the crew should give it up. Long live edit.com!
I am sure that you can do everything necessary with the current incarnation of style sheets in MS Word, but I certainly don't find using them straightforward. The last version where I thought style sheets worked the way they should was Word for Dos version 5.
Oh, dear, I'm dating myself again. And it is so much better to date someone else ...
I had forgotten how much cooler teenagers look when they are smoking. Oh, wait
For years, I have heard that the differences between MS Office and Open Office were so significant that the cost of retraining was not worth transitioning.
Where are those people today? The same ones that argued that it was not cost effective to retrain, will be arguing this is an incremental change or significant but worth the effort. I can hardly wait for Laura DiDio's "How Office 12 will make your company 12 times more productive" press release disguised as a "research paper."
As several prior posters have said, if you are going to take the upgrade hit, why not take it to open office? It will certainly be less expensive in both licensing and training. And it will support OpenDocument formats, something MS has said they will not do.
At least until the MS PR machine starts rolling.
Open Office Home page
The keystone of the new user interface is a "ribbon" of frequently used commands that offers different options, depending on the task a user is performing.
In other words, we get a UI that never stays the same, and I'll be forever searching for the damn option I want because it can't stay put. And they say microsoft doesn't innovate.
There have also been rumours of some new products, such as Excel server software
Whoa. That's brilliant. It can be more like a database, and store all sorts of worksheets and rows, keeping the relationship between the various worksheets intact, maybe even allowing you to search for specific sets of rows across multiple spreadsheets! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
Or maybe, it will allow a bunch of users to share the same documents. That's brilliant right there. A simple interface, and you can download excel documents *over the network*. No more trading floppies.
I cannot wait for the best Office ever!
The real question is, how many people said that about Office 97 then upgraded to Office 2000, or Office XP, or Office 2003?
Damien
DRM is there in Office 12, MS had been bragging about it. It's more than before and requires ties to MS Passport or MS Server. Why all the secrecy if it's such a good thing?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
We can't look under the hood because the hood is sealed shut. Right?
Not to mention that you can't open two files of the same name, at least in the Mac version. They should be ashamed.
Office 12's innovations paves the way for Office 13's "return to the Office design that users have to love."
Two years from now, whoever is in charge in Office will stand up at some flashy Microsoft presentation and explain how they "ignored users" and "goofed" by changing too much in Office 12. He'll talk about "lessons learned" and how "grateful Microsoft is to the user community for their active support of Microsoft Office."
And then he'll push a couple buttons, curtains will raise, and some huge screen will blast "Office 13" and show videos about how all these new innovations have been replaced by the stuff that users wanted -- namely, a return to the regular menu.
I don't know -- after ten, fifteen years of Microsoft, I'm extremely, extremely weary of all this technological hullabaloo. It's a lot of noise about nothing except money -- big money -- and users -- myself included -- fall for it time and time again.
And yes, I've gradually moved over to Linux solutions. They're fine -- sometimes more complesxs than I'd like -- but I've come to understand that Microsoft -- and perhaps Google, too, but I don't know yet -- really don't understand technology. They understand technology, yeah, but they don't understand the fundamental fact that more and more people have an antagonistic response to technology. We like technology, sure, but goddammit make technology that makes things easier -- not complex in a different way.
I wish someone at these companies would begin to acknowledge the odd technological antagonism that more technology breeds. Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should* -- create a new version of Word, implement X or Y, etc. etc.
I dunno. Whatever. It doesn't matter.
Balmer: Bill, please tell me Clippy didn't applayed for a job at Google!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
It is one of those That is *so* obvious features that ends up in every product because it is just so *DUHHH* after someone popularises the concept. :-)
Contrary to what you may think, developers in the past weren't too stupid to come up with such obvious ideas, they simply made a reasonable tradeoff between features, hardware requirements, and development effort.
Furthermore, after Microsoft has killed off all the commercial competition (through proprietary formats, bundling, and other anti-competitive tricks), which products exactly are you talking about when you say "every product"? Microsoft currently has no commercial competitors, and they can leisurely pull one obvious feature after another out of a hat and bask in the glory of being "innovative". Adding injury to insult, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to patent this.
Now, you may say that OpenOffice is a competitor. You are right. But Microsoft's dirty tricks make the work of OpenOffice developers much harder than the Microsoft Office team. Furthermore, Microsoft Office compatibility (both in terms of UI and in terms of features and formats) is the primary driver of OpenOffice development, so the degree to which OpenOffice can innovate are very limited. In the long run, you can bet, though, that an open source office suite, not Microsoft Office, will become the driver for innovation in this space.
like I'd watch some crap video made by some boring geeks at a 2 bit software company about the crap they are working on that is so damn boring it's not funny.
Seriously. If I want to be in a coma, I'll go bang my head repeatedly against something (it'll be more fun).
Yeah.. let's waste 600MB of my download quota on this trash.
I still install Office 97 on every Windows computer I own. There are no license key or registration "phone home" issues to deal with and it's a pretty lean word processor compared to the others out there today. Honestly, I can't tell you what features have been added to Office in the last 8 years that would be of any use to me.
Let's charge them lots of money for the latest software and make sure we change it enough so that we can charge for the training too. more M$ money grab.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I use LyX to do my word processing. I like not having to fuss (too much) with layout.
But it's still a bit too technical for the average user. If somebody took the concept and turned it into a polished, commercial, end-user product, it might be a good alternative even for non-techies.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
There are two interesting things about Clippy. One is that it's a shockingly obnoxious bit of UI code. The other is that the underlying engine is one of the most practically successful bits of Artificial Intelligence research ever devised, the Bayesian network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network). Bayes nets, aka belief nets, describe the interrelations among a set of facts about the world, and the causal (or at least correlational) relations among those facts. Given a partial set of information about the state of the world (or your Excel document), the net can induce the most likely causes for those facts. Like, what you're trying to do with your Excel document, and why it's not working. Too bad M$ chose to make it completely annoying...
"Gone are the familiar File, Edit, View and other drop-down menus."
Well, has the Windows Application Style Guide changed? Or is Microsoft giving up any pretense at Windows applications having a consistent UI?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I work at a shop that does a lot of transcription. We have been able to keep our VBA macros (which are quite extensive) working between all versions of Word from 97 on without too much difficulty.
Has anybody heard if the object model has changed significantly (i.e. Application / Document / Range / etc.)? If Microsoft revamps the back-end macros in Word the way they are revamping the front-end, it would certainly be an impetus for companies to look at other office solutions
Channel9 has an interview with Julie Larson-Green, who runs the Office User Experience Team. It's a 42 minute tour of the New UI and Office 12.
7 20
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=114
Check it out--it's got a lot more detail than the ZDNet articles.
OOo may end up being the more comfortable and familiar environment for current MS Office users than Office 12.
Microsoft changes some buttons, messes with menus forcing you to relearn previously simple procedures and charges you big bucks for the privilege. It's little wonder I still see guys using Office 97.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Tell me again how Microsoft is so much superior to OpenOffice because people switching to OpenOffice can't find the Office menus, and are too dumb to learn, blah, blah, blah.
Microsoft breaks anything it wants when it wants. Period.
Another Windows shill excuse down the drain. Thanks, Microsoft.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Corruption in these cases includes causing system crashes (OS X Panther or Tiger) and document corruption (unable to open at all).
While I have to own responsibility towards accepting the "compelling" reasons for the upgrade, my defense is simply in the high demand for quick turnaround in design production. A few features here or there can amount to major savings in time. Shame on me for being fooled twice in a row into believing that backward compatibility would work for us.
Adobe's slow enough on bug fixes (time between vX.0 and vX.01) on top of this, so my frustration level is pretty high. We're working around this, at the least simply downgrading installations, but jeez. If it's not going to work, don't offer the "feature" or FIX IT!
p.s. Second on my list is Microsoft with their limited benefit upgrade to Office 2004.
I bet there will be a setting provided in Office 12 to revert back to office2003/XP look and feel.
So there, I will take that $299, kick you in the nuts and call it even.
To all clerical staff:
We have hired a consulting firm to rearrange all corporate qwerty computer keyboards. The new keyboard layout has been shown in several independent studies to potentially increase productivity by up to 10 percent or more. Although it does require some training to learn the new key arrangements, this is a one-time cost, and we are confident that once the training is complete, employees will be glad that we made this change. In order to take full advantage of your training and increased productivity, it is strongly recommend that you upgrade your home keyboards as well. We also suggest you recommend this new innovation to your friends and business associates. Since we like to be known as a leading technology company, as soon as other improved keyboard arrangements are developed, rest assured that we will be the first to adopt them.
Sincerely,
the Management
Hopefully by the time Office 12 is released in the second half of 2006 Apple will have their rumored spreadsheet component ["Cells"?] available.
Microsoft is sure making things easy on the competition.
First of all, they plan to release a new OS that looks (and works) just like a recent update OS X, only years after and encumbered with some really annoying DRM support. Apple says "Thank you MS"!
Then they release a new version of Office just as Open Office 2.0 achieves stability in such a way that Open Office is actually cheaper to transition to that Office 12. OO says, "Thank you MS!".
Lastly they release a game system with multiple configurations, leaving out HD-DVD support until a yet later model. The confused customer base gives Sony some breathing room to release its new console on a relaxed schedule. Sony says, "Thank you MS!".
Then as if that were not enough they throw a huge re-org on top of the whole deal to give everyone else another six months lead over Microsoft.
Perhaps Microsoft is doing this to throw themselves far enouhg behind to create an artifical "crisis" that the employees will then rise to - Microsoft has always produced things at the most rapid clip when under threat. Seems like a dangerous strategy to me though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Initially, the press will fawn all over the flashy interface. Then after awhile users will note somethings just not quite right. As with the current version of office, they will have to continue adding features to keep making money. So eventually the new menus and such will become as difficult as before. Right now you have to play find the hidden option with their menus because there are too many options with the interface they have. While this interface seems to help, it doesn't address the core issue, feature bloat.
The key breakthrough that dropdown menus provided when they were introduced was simply that all the available functions (or function categories, at least) are visible, or at lease findable, you don't need to remember any text command (like a command line) or wierd control key combinations. It greatly simplifies things, but a GUI dropdown menu is no more effective in that way than the original Lotus 1-2-3 text interface - a '/' would bring up a top screen menu, which you could select in a similar fashion with keyboard only, no mouse. In fact, it had some advantages until Microsoft added the ALT-key method for accessing GUI menus.
The fundamental problem is that when menus get too complex, the options are no longer easily visible. You now have to remember where to activate a particular function - and you're back to memorizing things instead of having them in front of you, so you're back to the idea of commands. Only the command is a series of menu clicks, instead of keystrokes or words.
The problem isn't the use of menus, but the over use of them. The entire reason for the existance of GUIs is to allow direct manipulation of objects. The opportunity for ease of use from this is still only touched upon in many ways - especially by those who don't see any farther than stuffing menus full of functionality (similarly, if you've ever looked at the configuration options of a complex open-source project like NetBeans or KDE or Gnome, you'll see huge trees of incomprehensible options, often in a uniform structure that gives you no clue as to where to find the one you're looking for - you have to read, explore, read, explore until you stumble across the one you want). That functionality should go into direct manipulation of visible objects, not menus.
For example, in a word processor, mini icons representing paragraphs could be displayed in a margin. To change properties like interparagraph spacing, indent, style or following style, you'd click on the icon to open a control panel - instead of cursor somewhere into the text, then up to the menu bar and click on Format / Paragraph / Indents and Spacing. Another icon or option lets you select the paragraph style, or edit the style (some of this is already done, with a ruler control up top, with drag-and-drop tabs - good idea). The manipulation now takes place at the paragraph you're interested in itself, not far away in some abstraft menu tree.
Direct manipulation is the most overlooked, but by far the most powerful ease-of-use tool. The Macintosh and applications that run on it, go furthest by a wide margin in using direct manipulation, which is why users consider it so vastly easier to use, yet without loss of power. This is the real magic of GUIs and key to ease of use - it's not in "simplifying options", but providing those options in an absolutely direct and intuitive fashion.
I can see from my own experiences that Microsoft has a hard time convincing their userbase to upgrade. Most users use a small percentage of Office 97 and really dont have any reason to upgrade. Office 12 really needs a big bunch of benefits to be worth upgrading to. Retraining of the staff isnt one of them according to Microsofts own studies (read their comparisons of Linux vs. Windows on the Get The Facts site). A new interface is a bigger hurdle to climb than say a migration to open office wich mimics MS Office in many ways. The lack of support for an open document format seems like a minus compared to Open Office.
If they dont get the offices to upgrade their biggest cash cow is in jeopardy and that fat revenue is vital for them. Without Windows and Office revenues Microsoft is toast.
HTTP/1.1 400
Would everyone here take a deep breath? MSO12 won't be out for over a year, according to MS, which means it will be more like 2 years. And if there's one thing we all should have learned years ago about MS is that these early views of products almost never hold up.
Remember how they backed down over activation in XP and released the super duper special corporate edition? Expect to see the same rollback on O12 features and changes--corporate customers will howl when they see what MS in mind, and MS will back down.
As we get much closer to the actual release date, and betas leak out, then we can get our undies in a twist. Until then, calm down.
Now all those people who, in school, took MS Office (since schools don't teach general word processing anymore, just "MS Office") classes will have to relearn everything, be confused about new interfaces (since they were never taught how to use more than one), and generally bitch about how hard "computers" are.
Seriously, kids in High School these days are being taught "MS Office, and IE" as their "computer" classes....to "prepare them for the workplace." Not too prepared now are they?
Good! Maybe if it sucks bad enough I can show on paper that "retraining" people to use a slightly different, more agnostic Office suite is cheaper than paying for Office 12 AND teaching them all of the sea changes. Perhaps we can finally escape the ever-spiralling budget leech that is Microsoft Office...
Who did what now?
Perhaps I should clarify - my copy of Office 97 is from an old purple-and-black MSDN developers CD I picked out the trash at work. The print on the CD says "for 60 days of evaluation" but the code neither asks for a license code nor expires after 60 days, so that CD (and some of its backup copies) remains valuable to me.
I need a version of Access for the 21st century! Robust and simple deployment of distributed databases. RAD gui development. .Net under the hood for scripting. Etc.
Why do they keep showing me screenshots of the frickin' word toolbar? Don't they know I have real business problems that I need to solve? What 87-step-paper-workflow-involving-sticky-notes am I going to be able to disappear with a stupid 'ribbon' in Word?
....with Gates playing the part of the Emperor, it's fine with me.
];)
Regards;
Hidden control characters were introduced when Word*Star came out, as a nifty trick to pack features into a Word Processor that had to share 32K of memory with CP/M, the common operating system of the time. This was no longer needed when IBM introduced the radical new PC, because it had an incredible 256K of memory, and even 512K for for those willing to splash out in dizzy extravaganza. I'm glad the Microsoft Word team appear to have finally noticed this exciting IBM innovation. I'm presuming, of course, their new file format means they'll have got rid of hidden control characters, and their insanely irritating consequences, such as if you accidentally delete a hidden character you can get random reformating of text somewhere far out of sight. Whilst I'm here, it'll be nice to be able to select some pages in Word, tell it to put page numbers of those pages, and actually see page numbers appear on the pages selected, and not some random alternative wrong range of pages.
I note the Open Office team have carefully copied these Microsoft mistakes. I do believe that if copyright existed on flaws, Microsoft could sue them for oodles of dosh.
I still rate Word Perfect, after all these years.
27:20 into the video she makes a foo bar chart. FUBAR rofl.
Don't give me that usual GUI revamping crap. Screw the looks.
What are "the new Microsoft hardware standards" now? 2 GB of Ram, 3 GB of HDD space & a dual processor?
Did they integrate the "save as XML" option? Did they follow the REAL XML standards?
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
They killed Clippy!
It's interesting -Microsoft has trouble convincing most people to upgrade because there's nothing in the new versions that people really want or care about - Office 97 does what most people need just fine. In order to convince people (rightly or by trickery) that they need to "upgrade", they need to make the new version sufficiently different to make people think it's got something that they don't have but that they might want.
At the same time, Microsoft has to convince people that switching to some other product is going to be really hard and require "retraining" because it's not exactly the same as their current Microsoft product.
So what can they do? I guess they decided to go ahead and screw up the interface severely enough to make it look new and shiny, in hopes that some of the "new, shiny" buzz they're making about Longhorn/"Microsoft Vista Miscellaneous Edition" will at least get a horde of enough early-adopters to jump on the bandwagon, start using the new non-backwards-compliant file format, and in so doing start "pestering" users of the older office programs to buy new "Office" licenses.
Wonder how quickly support for the "Special Microsoft" offshoot of the OASIS formats will be added to OpenOffice 2, or possibly as a BSD-licensed independent converter (since MS is attempting to forbid GPL-licensed projects from using the file format)?...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Step away from the computer! Move slowly and put that mouse down! What's that ticking noise I hear?
Paradigm...that's a good one. Can we make anymore generalizations?
We all know the standard advantages open source brings. But what if innovation becomes one of them?
Forcing Microsoft out by innovation. After all, the open source software will implement it first, Microsoft will eventually copy it, and probably in the process kludge it up a bit.
Now that could make for a very interesting 'end' to Microsoft.
I had a revelation last night about Microsoft's inovation. I've been as down on M$ as the next guy. At home I run Fedora and a few flavors of MacOS. My bedroom is Microsoft-free.
Last night, I was helping a friend make a flier for a class she's teaching. She kept wanting to do all this stuff with the text and the images that's *really easy* in word. We were using Apple's answer to Word, and the UI just wasn't there. Most of the features seemed like they were, but finding them was rediculous. I have to give M$ credit for intuitive UI design for a goodly number of the features in the Office suite.
Seriously I see one reason to use Office 2003 over older versions of Office...Outlook. By far the program that got the largest overhaul by in 2003. Using Office 2000 at work I nearly want to through my computer through a wall some days using an old outdated and quite frankly poor Outlook 2000.
I am sort of thinking though that since we have programs that specifically function as add-ons for Office, we might be on the verge of going open-source. I believe this solely because the add-on is actually of simple functionality and it would be infinitely cheaper to make a similar program for OOo and not have to pay the outrageous M$ licenses. But it probably just a dream...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
These screenshots should look very familiar to anyone who has used Apple's iWork (Keynote and Pages) - Microsoft's "radically new interface paradigm" is basically just copying the interface that Apple came up with for all of its new productivity applications in Mac OS X. This paradigm also shows up in OmniGraffle and other Omni tools, and in XCode.
The features I'd really like to see in Microsoft Office? Besides open, documented file formats, of course? How about looking the same when opened on any other computer, with any other (reasonably recent) version of Office for either PC or Mac? And no matter what locale they're in - right now someone with a German locale can open an (English) Word document and get totally different pagination. Or how about not trying to second-guess me when I want to delete a blank line before a page break? Or how about a way to make changes to a group of Sections all at once (for example, I have a bunch of section breaks through several pages, but I want continuous page numbering through the whole set)?
So office is that old? Great, now they can accuse puberty for every error and bug.
It's not really non-intuitive. Powerpoint on OSX has something similar, but on the right. This is definitely the best thing I've ever seen in an application like this. The most frustrating thing was moving back to Office 2000 at work.
If they took their OS X style and moved it back to Windows, that would be spectacular.
Disclaimer-I haven't used XP, maybe it's the same and this is what you mean by menus.
Starskita
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I think that Dell, IBM, etc. receive a commission whenever someone upgrades from the Office Trial (that is now bundled on most OEM PC's) to the full MS Office product. I know I read an article about this in regards to antivirus trials.
So, unless someone is willing to pay Dell to install OOo, it ain't gonna happen any time soon. Now your local mom and pop computer store on the other hand...
To this day I still carry around with me a copy of Word 95 on my USB. It's been trimmed down to the point where it only uses around 15MB, doesn't need any additional software on any PCs, and will run without installation.
Office 12? No thanks. Micrsoft Office, and specifically Word, has been more than complete and fully functional for years. How ironic it is that a certain piece of Microsoft software is just so good that nobody cares to upgrade unless forced to.
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People are always saying that there has been very little innovation in Office (or like) suites over the last 8 years or so. What I would like to see as a big step forward is the ability to collaborate on word processor documents (in particular) ala SubEthaEdit (the app formerly known as Hydra).
I think that would be a really neat feature that would make some tasks in the office where we have several people working on a document much easier.
It seems that Microsoft has, for once, decided to put their money where their mouth is and truly come up with something new. Yes, such words are anathema here on Slashdot. And may even get a few "astroturfer" (etc) catcalls from the audience... but damn. It seriously looks slick.
For anyone who finds GUI design even remotely interesting, I highly reccomend checking out that movie. (As the parent's sibling mentions though... it defintiely starts out with that pr0n-y edge. I blame it mostly on the tinny wma.)
...the BSD daemon was heard screaming in Clippy's ear (and to Netcraft employees nearby) "Who's dying now, you wiry little bitches!" as he tortured the paperclip. Fellow Office Assistant F1 had no comment, and only made noises with his joint motors as he nodded up and down watching the event unfold.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.