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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."
Internal numbering... major number goes up for each suite release.
From my blog dated a month ago:
"
Microsoft have been using internal numbers for their major Office release for some time:
Office 9 = Microsoft Office 2000
Office 10 = Microsoft Office XP
Office 11 = Microsoft Office 2003
And right now they are in pre-beta with Office 12... yet to be assigned a product name (or yet to be announced depending on whether you believe what you hear).
A curiosity though, I've just been conversing with a product manager in the globalisation team over a feature that the company I work for would dearly like, during this conversation she mentioned that the feature in question would not be in Office 12, but some part of it will be considered for Office 14.
Office 14? So what happened to Office 13?
Could it be that Microsoft are superstitious enough to not want to number a feature version of Office as Office 13?
Or am I reading too much into this, and did they just use Excel to do the numbering?
Maybe someone should point out to them that missing 13 doesn't make it any less Office 13.
"
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.
Indeed. I used to work for an extremely large company in Australia - they are still standardised on Office 97 on Windows NT.
They see no business motive to change - and frankly, I think they're taking the right approach. If they wait long enough, they will be able to "jump sideways" as it were to a completely open solution, with no loss in functionality and vastly improved management.
My pics.
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.
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
Wordperfect had it 10 years ago. They called it 'WYSBYGI" - What You See Before You Get It'. And yes, it was a nice feature.
I personally will not install any Beta microsoft product so I cannot verify.
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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
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
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.
Hello utnow,
:-) and I wrote two published books with OOo.
:-)
Only tried it for 5 minutes? That does not seem like long enough for a good evaluation.
I'm an author (nothing good on TV, so might as well write
Yes, I do own Office licences for Windows and OS X, but I find that OOo just stays out of my way so I can get my work done.
I also very much like the drawing program for technical figures.
Give it another try
-Mark