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Under the Hood of Office 12

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-xls-with-unusable-macros dept.

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."

4 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why exactly is it called Office 12? by buro9 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    "

  2. Re:Competition driving innovation by tpgp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  3. Undo past save? by JPyObjC+Dude · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. Re:Competition driving innovation by MarkWatson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hello utnow,

    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 :-) and I wrote two published books with OOo.

    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