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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.
The listed prices range from $149 ... subtract $170 or so for the upgrade version
Sold!
You are aware the previous limit in Excel was 65k rows. There's a lot of area between 65k and 1M which is handled better by a spreadsheet rather than a database.
MS expanding the limit (granted 10 years overdue) and offering the flexibility is a good thing no matter how you may want to spin it otherwise.
While this may be slightly off-topic, hopefully it is interesting. Someone I know at work was looking to buy a used copy of MS Office. I suggested that he download OpenOffice.org. When I asked him about it a week later, he told me that he had downloaded it and was now using it. OpenOffice.org did everything he needed it to do and he really liked the price tag!
Now I will try to relate this back to the topic at hand. Now that Microsoft is radically changing Office, it is a great time to switch to OpenOffice.org. The interface is close enough to Office, that retraining is minimal. It is questionable how many companies will use the collaboration features. Generally features are used as justification for upgrading but often the additional features are not well-utilized.
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Yeah, but if it couldn't support many, you'd be the first saying: Heh look at teh l4me Excel. It's because evil M$ wantz joo to buy SQL server. Evil, evil.
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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?