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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."
I believe the summary is misleading - Office 2007 will not require Sharepoint server (i.e. for an individual/independant user), though it will be needed to take advantage of it's collaborative features.
if your data set is a million rows, you probably want to consider using something other than spreadsheets. I'm fond of the current limit on excel, it forces analysts to think about their tool selection sometimes.
Is it just me, or do these new "ribbons" look alot like Apple Works? I RTFA, and it didn't seem to justify upgrading for the average user - which although a geek, I include myself (I still prefer my text editor!). Office 2007 appears to be Office 2000 (98 too) with a tighter leash to M$, with a few bells and whistles most people won't use.
"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."
/recovering accountant here.
It's not the IT guys you have to worry about, it's the beancounters.
And yes, we had several databases that started as an useable Excel spreadsheet and blossomed into ridiculous rowcounts. And no, management wouldn't let us convert to a real database, Excel was the only approved file format in accounting.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So Word 2007 introduces yeat another obscure acronym?
What the hell is XPS?
Google says X-Ray Photoemission Spectroscopy. That is it's ony result, and it is taken from the place I would have gone next: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPS.
You are aware the previous limit in Excel was 65k rows. There's a lot of area between 65k and 1M which is handled better by a spreadsheet rather than a database.
MS expanding the limit (granted 10 years overdue) and offering the flexibility is a good thing no matter how you may want to spin it otherwise.
I assume OO.o won't be "copying" any of them, correct?
I'm sure there will be lots of interesting commentary here on Office 2007, and I'm sure a lot of it will be along the lines of "New interface is goofy/sucks/bad for users/too different/etc." and/or "OpenOffice rules, why go MS?" and so on.
Which is all fine and good. Really. But the changes in Office aren't targeted at power users. In fact, it probably is true that the new UI will frustrate power users. So, why did MS bother?
Because for every power user, there are 100s of regular users. They want to do more with Word, Excel, etc, but have a hard time finding the features they want. So, this is the first step in this direction. It won't be perfect, but what does do is break from tradition in some interesting ways.
Believe me that MS has been sticking this in front of users and doing usability studies. And I'm willing to bet that enough regular users think that the new UI isn't so bad, that it's pretty cool after you get used to it, and it's easier to find features and play around with them.
All the live preview featues and ribbon bars and so on are to make it easier to regular users to goof around with changes without making them permanent. Also, remember that this is Beta2, so it isn't clear that all the live preview features are in yet, so it could very well be that paragrpah sytle previews will be in the final product.
Finally, I think it is important to note something about the ribbons. The ribbons don't change. This is not the custom menu idea, where menus "adapted to users" whihc just translated to stuff moved on the menus, and you don't know why. You choose a ribbon, you get the tools for that ribbon period. They don't move around.
Will it work? Hard to say. But I like the idea that the idea of Office applications is being looked at in a fresh way.
Yeah, but if it couldn't support many, you'd be the first saying: Heh look at teh l4me Excel. It's because evil M$ wantz joo to buy SQL server. Evil, evil.
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I used spreadsheets to process loads of data samples, hundreds of thousands of points and frankly excel or any spreadsheet is ideal for preliminary data processing, as long as it handles the data. The grandparent should get his prejudices out of the way the fewer arbitrary limits any software has the better, what it's actually used for is irrelevant and up to the users.
Deleted
rosewood: "Also, multiple calendars have been available in Outlook for ages. Multiple calendar viewing has been available since 2003 as well. Not the best summary in the world."
Yah. I also noticed this:
TFA: "Among the more significant new features: Excel 2007's new ways of visualizing data. For example, you can use conditional formatting to color the background of cells based on their value..."
That's present at least in Excel 2003, and I think maybe as far back as 2000.
How can someone review Office 2007 for what's new if they don't even know what's in the older versions?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You know that Microsoft does usability tests, right? They don't just randomly place things (well, they did in Office for a long time, which is why they're fixing that now), and they don't just rip-off other programs like open source projects to. You can bet your ass that if Microsoft is making a change for usability reasons, they have documented, repeatable, scientific evidence that the new version is better.
What you're griping is basically, "but I don't like to learn new things!," which is the opposite of how most Slashdotters seem to be... for instance, a lot of Slashdotters recommend starting with Gentoo when switching to Linux you can see how Linux works, or learning the CLI even if you're already experienced at a GUI interface.
Of course, with Microsoft involved, you know that 80% of these comments are saying it'll be a crappy product without even having tried it.
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There's a lot of area between 65k and 1M which is handled better by a spreadsheet rather than a database.
If the data set is better handled by a spreadsheet than a database, then it shouldn't matter how many records there are.
Inversely, if a data set is better handled by a database than a spreadsheet, then it shouldn't matter how few records there are.
They're different tools, and they serve different purposes. I have to wonder where this problem came from where people so often use the wrong tool for the job. Is it because Excel and Access both display data in grid format? Is it because spreadsheets made headway into personal computing space long before RDBMS's did?
It's fine and dandy that Microsoft is re-compiling the Excel source with larger values for the MAX_ROWS and MAX_COLS constants. But there's no technical reason why such fixed limits should still even exist anymore. Can't they devise a way to allow spreadsheets to be limited in dimensions only by the available resources of the machine? Or will we have to wait and buy Office 2010 to get the ability to have 32,000 columns instead of just 16,000?
Making features easier to find/discover is [apparently] one of the biggest benefits. Word has a zillion features, and most people use about 10.
Anyway, I'd recommend the blog as an interesting read for those people interested in user interface design for a product with hunderds of millions of users.