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Visual Tour of Office 2007 Beta 2

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hope-they-are-ready-for-the-support-calls dept.

feminazi writes "Computerworld has a review and visual tour of the newest installment of Office. No more toolbars & menus; those have been replace with 'ribbons.' Of the various products in the suite, Word is the most changed. Styles are easier to invoke, but no easier to create or understand. A couple of the redeeming characteristics is the ability to save as PDF and XPS and an improved Track Changes. Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet -- and new and better visualization abilities. Lots new in Outlook including multiple calendars and direct support for RSS feeds. And the apps all work together better than before. From the article: 'The major change in Beta 2 was the introduction of Office SharePoint Server.' This means that Sharepoint Server is required, but it also means more & better collaboration and advanced search abilities are supported."

14 of 495 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it by Volante3192 · · Score: 2, Funny

    WTF? If I've got anyone in IT putting 1,000,000 rows in a spreadsheet, I'm seriously considering demoting them. If you're going to have a million rows, get a database.

    But I REALLY need to let Nina in Corporate Accounts Payable be able to =SUM(A1:A1000000)...

  2. Re:Ribbons! by CyberSlugGump · · Score: 2, Funny


    Ctrl+scrollUp in Internet Explorer 7 beta now matches the behavior in Office 2003 (zoom in). Let's just hope that someone didn't "fix" Office 2007 to match IE 6....

  3. Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it by stinerman · · Score: 5, Funny

    The listed prices range from $149 ... subtract $170 or so for the upgrade version

    Sold!

  4. why bother? by Surt · · Score: 3, Funny

    I mean, there's nothing there that OpenOffice hasn't had for like -3 years.

    --
    "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  5. Re:million-row spreadsheets by bryan_is_a_kfo · · Score: 2, Funny

    I think you just described a new circle of hell, I could hear faint shrieking in my head as I read that.

    Do you have any kind of basis for the distributed data assumption? That doesn't seem like an easy feature to sell to consumers, let alone the MS developers who would have to implement it...

  6. Clippy! by Tackhead · · Score: 4, Funny
    > Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet
    >
    > what kind of a jackass ....? use a fucking relational database! I don't want to think how blazingly slow that big of a spreadsheet would be, not to mention any dataset that large is going to almost certainly be something that is supposed to be used by more than one person at a time

    It looks like you are trying to implement a relational database in Excel!

    Would you like to...

    • Add another 100,000 rows to the worksheet? (You're my kind of jackass!)
    • Use a fucking relational database? (but not MySQL or Oracle!)
    • Suck it, Ellison!, and don't show me this tip again or I'll throw a chair at you. (I'm still bitter about the year you beat me.)
  7. Re:try it for yourself... by ElleyKitten · · Score: 4, Funny

    The public beta 2 is actually availableto the public today.

    Well, it was available, until you told slashdot...

    --
    "What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
  8. Re:try it for yourself... by wbren · · Score: 2, Funny

    I downloaded my preview weeks ago from this website.

    --
    -William Brendel
  9. Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it by ahsile · · Score: 2, Funny

    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
    Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment. ...

    --


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  10. Makes my documents LOOK GREAT! by TimmyDee · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wow! I can't wait for all these great new features that Office will let me do to make my documents look great!

    1. Change my fonts.
    2. Change my font sizes.
    3. Tell Word where a picture should sit on the page (c00l!)
    4. Change my margins (I never new I could do that!)
    5. 1 million rows in Excel so I can finally tell my database to kiss off.

    All this and more with a great, sure-to-be-lagless preview as I mouse over EVERYTHING!

    But don't take my Word (tehe) for it. This video tells me how my documents can LOOK GREAT!

    --
    Per Square Mile, a blog about density
  11. Re:try it for yourself... by rduke15 · · Score: 2, Funny

    They don't seem to have the Beta 2, but I noticed on left side of the screen a few gorgeous women who just happen to live in my area! I'm off to get in touch with them... They look much better than some unfinished computer program.

  12. The spirit of Clippy by SuperKendall · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yes, I think the spirit of Clippy lives on in the new Office, which is why your document changes as you mouse over ribbon items - it's like a high-tech Ouija board where clippy tries to send you messages from the Great Digital Beyond via subtle font changes.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  13. Toolbars Are Now Ribbons by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 2, Funny

    In related news, Microsoft has announced the when Vists is eventually released, icons will be called symbols.

    --
    Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
  14. Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it by mattspammail · · Score: 2, Funny

    And the next version will have

    ** 100 BEELION ROWS **

    mwaha ha ha

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