Slashdot Mirror
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.
The public beta 2 is actually availableto the public today.
"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
The listed prices range from $149 ... subtract $170 or so for the upgrade version
Sold!
WTF? But I like my menu bars and toolbars, thank you very much. Menu bars has been a part of Windows since 1985 (and the Mac since 1983 thanks to the Lisa). I think most users would have a hard time understanding "ribbons"; I don't like it when programs try to be "smart" and hide features away from me. There must be an option to use the old menus and toolbars in Office 2007; if not, then I'm not buying it.
I find that Vista and Office 2007 seems to change menus around and get rid of long-standing GUI features for no apparent usability reason. What's wrong with the old Windows interface? To me, the Windows 2000 interface was the perfect user interface; I still use Classic on my Windows XP partition, and even my KDE desktop on FreeBSD is reminiscent of Windows 2000. I used Vista for a while; I'm not too impressed. Microsoft can take my copy of Office 2000 (I'd still happily be using Office 97 if somebody didn't give me his upgrade disks) and Windows XP when it pries it from my cold, dead fingers. When XP and Office 2000 become obsolete, I would have long switched to FreeBSD and OS X with OpenOffice by then (I'm already a FreeBSD user, too; I just need to buy a Mac to make the switch complete).
Why must they change the interface when the old one worked so well?
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.
While this may be slightly off-topic, hopefully it is interesting. Someone I know at work was looking to buy a used copy of MS Office. I suggested that he download OpenOffice.org. When I asked him about it a week later, he told me that he had downloaded it and was now using it. OpenOffice.org did everything he needed it to do and he really liked the price tag!
Now I will try to relate this back to the topic at hand. Now that Microsoft is radically changing Office, it is a great time to switch to OpenOffice.org. The interface is close enough to Office, that retraining is minimal. It is questionable how many companies will use the collaboration features. Generally features are used as justification for upgrading but often the additional features are not well-utilized.
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
I assume OO.o won't be "copying" any of them, correct?
>
> what kind of a jackass
It looks like you are trying to implement a relational database in Excel!
Would you like to...
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.
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.
Get your own free personal location tracker
This is an extension of the abstration of the chevron menus... alter the user's environment based on usage. It doesn't work. I've used environments like this and it takes getting used to. You think it was confusing trying to show people how to use Microsoft products when the pulldown menus changed seemingly randomly? Wait until their "ribbons" change based on cursor position.
I just gave this a try in Word 12. It is a lot less drastic than you imply. If I have a word document with a bunch of text and a table in the middle, changing the cursor position does not change the current tab (where each tab is basically a set of toolbars grouped by task). All that changes is a little section of the window is highlighted indicating which tabs are related to table design. It's not intrusive, but conveys the point very clearly.
Office 12 does a lot to expose existing functionality to the typical user. Things that used to be buried deep in menus and dialog boxes are presented in a much more intuitive way. Try it out some time if you get a chance. Yes, the UI is different from most other applications, but it seems to be a model worthy of consideration for other applications.
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.
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
Thats the worst put, some of these Excel people can be dumb as dirt, but when it comes to Excel, my god they can perform wizardry. As an actual example ive seen at work, there are spreadsheets that hit the 65K limit but they are so key to peoples job functions they find "work arounds", like creating "archive" spreadsheets once they hit the fixed limit and starting a new copy of the sheet that cross references all the archives.
Hell, ive seen people in excel basically create relational databases WITHIN excel. Dont under estimate what these people can come up with, some of its pretty damned scary.
Plus, atleast where I am, we have HUNDREDS of Excel workbooks and pidly ass Access databases that really should be in Oracle or SQL, but at the same time, they work. Our IT department is nowhere big enough to port and maintain each of these solutions to a more robust system. Plus, people creating these systems are pretty damned good at taking ownership of them. However, if they dont create the sheet/DB that last thing they want to do is maintain it. A double edge sword really.
For the most part both Excel and Access are necisarry evils, unless you have a huge IT budget.
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?
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
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.