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Visual Tour of Office 2007 Beta 2
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."
The public beta 2 is actually availableto the public today.
McCullough and Wilson wrote a paper about Office back in 1997 which ripped Excel to shreds on its statistical accuracy and random number generation. They reissued the paper in 2002, and Excel still had the same problems in Office2000 and OfficeXP. Many of the worst problems were still there in Office2003. Have they actually fixed the horrible errors?
1) Word's default font is now Calibri, not Arial. Calibri is a highly readable font.
2)The File menu is gone; now you have to somehow guess that the big icon in the upper left corner is its replacement.
3)The "most recently used" list is no longer limited to the last nine files
4)Track Changes now won't flag as "different" text that is simply moved, which is smart.
5) Ability to export documents to PDF and to their own pdf-like format, whatever that is.
May be misleading but so far if you want to utilise all the features of this office package you will probably need:
Exchange
Share point
Rights Management
Active Directory
Plus the associated CALS, and OS licenses, the technical staff, the hardware and the training for your user base. Oh and there are NO alternatives for use with MS Office (correct me if I am wrong), Personally I'd rather build my own out of the bits that are available in OpenSource land, use the features that I (my company) needs and lump the rest, but thats not everyones cup of tea. All I really want in life is Visio for linux, or a decent clone, preferably with the network architect toolkit or similar.
I'll live in hope or maybe I should learn a real programming language and spend some time...
However, in the real world we don't have weeks to fine-tune and optimize our Swing UIs.
And you really don't need to. I find it astonishing the way that criticisms of Swing that were fair 4-5 years ago are still being repeated. Swing has been fast since the later releases of Java 1.4. Swing has no performance issues on Java 1.5, and Java 1.5 apps start fast (I have just opened JEdit on my laptop PC. It started up faster than IE or Acrobat on the same machine. The menus and controls are instantly responsive).
If you have any issues with performance, get an up-to-date Java. Java 1.5 has been around for 18 months - there is no excuse!
My point is that not everyone uses Excel as a database and this is a welcome change for us.
What the hell is XPS?
It stands for XML Paper Specification and is Microsoft's answer to PDF for document archival and printing. In fact, the whole Vista printing architecture centers around it. All Office applications will be able to save to it and there will be a viewer for non-Vista systems. It's pretty open (especially in Microsoft terms) and overall a good thing (IMHO). See Wikipedia Entry.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
So it looks like we may have to wait for Beta 3...
May be misleading but so far if you want to utilise all the features of this office package you will probably need:
Exchange
Share point
Rights Management
Active Directory
Plus the associated CALS, and OS licenses, the technical staff, the hardware and the training for your user base. Oh and there are NO alternatives for use with MS Office (correct me if I am wrong), Personally I'd rather build my own out of the bits that are available in OpenSource land, use the features that I (my company) needs and lump the rest, but thats not everyones cup of tea. All I really want in life is Visio for linux, or a decent clone, preferably with the network architect toolkit or similar.
Um, No... Oh and also NO....
Where do people get this information? Are you really in the beta, because if you are, meet me in the groups and we can discuss this, because what you wrote is about as insane as it gets.
Just for an example:
Outlook works and 'collaborates' quite well with ANY Mail server, you can eve do Office forms, Replies and a lot of the other features, including LDAP support all with a simple and even FREE mail server softare. If your Mail server supports POP3 or IMAP, you are quite set with Outlook.
Sure Outlook is ALSO an exchange client and will use the exchange features, but NEITHER require each other, understand?
As for these others:
Share point
Rights Management
Active Directory
Do you even know what you are talking about? Active Directory is something not even used by Office unless you are running a SERVER VERSION of Office, which 99.9% of the people using Office do not. Also the 'Active Directory' requirements are NOT even exclusive to Windows Server Active Directory Server.
As for the CALS, do you NOT realize that each VERSION of Office is its own CAL? That is what it is, a client application, there are no additional server CALs needed. Even Outlook qualifies to be a full CAL for Exchange.
You need to read up quite a bit before making outlandish posts.
Oh, also you state 'rights management' WTF are you even talking about?
I just want to point out that the menus (file, edit, view, etc) were not *replaced* by the new Ribbon.
The old menus still exist, they are just turned off by default with the Ribbon enabled. For die-hard people who don't want to give the ribbon a try, the old interface can easily be brought back.
I also want to point out that there was once a time when people thought WYSIWYG and icons were Bad Things. I see the Ribbon as a possible next step in the evolution of a GUI. Task Panes in 2003 were a great step forward and this might be too.
-David
You're right; it would be absurd for me to think my dogma outweighs usability studies.
But I've read a lot of usability studies. Mostly from Apple and NextStep, but I actually did read two Microsoft ones. And I've read the human interface guidelines from Apple, Microsoft and Sun, cover to cover. Even the accessibility parts. Oh, and I've read a few books on the subject, too.
So when I say that ribbons aren't significantly better than menus, I don't mean that I dislike ribbons; I mean that ribbons don't address the issues which have been raised in the usability studies I've read over the last twenty years or so. I mean that, based on what I've read about the expectations of most users, I believe ribbons will not enhance productivity and may very well take away from it.
I wonder if a Microsoft usability study was what led to the introduction of "personalized menus." That may have addressed a need of users, but it didn't address it at all well.
UI design is largely about the art of communication, and ribbons don't seem to communicate available options very well. I believe Microsoft either has done or will do a usability study on that very subject, but I doubt that study will carry the weight it should. It certainly appears to have been pushed to the side where other Microsoft products are concerned.
When Microsoft says it's better, I'm afraid I don't trust them, because they have a history of not putting the users' experience at the front of their list of priorities.
The Internet is full. Go away.
As for the CALS, do you NOT realize that each VERSION of Office is its own CAL? That is what it is, a client application, there are no additional server CALs needed. Even Outlook qualifies to be a full CAL for Exchange.
You need to read up quite a bit before making outlandish posts.
As do you. Buying a copy of Office is NOT the same as buying an Exchange CAL. You're horribly confusing software licenses with client access licenses... And further, if you use Sharepoint or Exchange, or other authenticated services, you pay a server license fee, for the server application.
To wit, the original poster is closer to the truth. To fully leverage the MS Office Suite (mostly Outlook), you need Exchange, which requires Active Directory, and you need Sharepoint if you want to use any of the "collaborative" features. If you're corporate or academic, you can volume license CALs but if you go that route, you need 1) Office CAL (covers Office suite), 2) Core CAL (covers Exchange, Sharepoint, SMS, other authenticated Windows services), 3) Windows Server OS licenses, and 4) server application licenses. Buying #1, the Office CAL, does not entitle you to any of the other three....