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Why "Upgrade" To Office 2007
walterbyrd writes "IMO: Office-2007 is a contender for the least useful upgrade in the history of computing. It's expensive, has a steep learning curve, and it's default format is even less compatible with anything else. Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade to Office 2007?."
a) Because Bill says so
b) Because muppets keep sending you files in a new, super incompatible format that you can't open otherwise
switch to OOo and for that matter, why not OOo on Linux... the training costs for the upgrade to Vista and/or office 2007 might as well be considered as similar to those for switching away from the proprietary lockin and moving to truly open formats for your data. Then you will have jumped off the upgrade treadmill and will be free to upgrade at your own pace instead, when you want to rather than when outside pressures force you to...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
FTA: While I have the utmost respect for Mr Mossberg, I can't help but feel that the words in the second paragraph contradict and negate the words of the first. To my mind, a logical layout of commands and functions would obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions.
While I have the utmost respect for Mr. Beer, I can't help but feel that he has laid out an impossibly high standard for software menus. Is it even possible to, as he puts it, "obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions?"
Take what I said with a grain of salt, I'm bitter 'cause wish I had a kewl last name like his. Cue the "free-as-in-beer jokes." In 3, 2, 1...
These arguments are EXACTLY the arguments used with every major innovation in the past.
DOS vs Windows anyone?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Why the same reason you install any Microsoft Software, because you like a challenge.
All the article says is "the ribbon interface is less intuitive than the menu driven one, and it takes time to learn".
Meanwhile, Office 2007 would probably be mandatory for new functionality in new products from Microsoft - just as Office 2003 is mandatory for some functionality (edit in dataview) for Sharepoint Server 2003
"A question that must be asked then is whether some of the time taken to master Office 2007 would be better used to gain a more advanced knowledge of Office 2003, with the rest of the time being used to do some productive work? After trialling Office 2007 for some weeks, while away from home base, I believe the answer is a resounding yes."
A better question would be 'whether some of the time taken to master Office 2007 would be better used to gain a knowledge of OpenOffice, reducing our need to jump every time Microsoft releases a new version of office'.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
Microsoft isn't holding a gun to your head. You don't have a need for a ribbon. You may find out later that it increases your productivity and then you may learn that it provides a better solution for your problems. But if you're accomplishing your job and tasks with older copies of Office, why do you need 2007? The fact is you probably don't. I myself am quite successful with OpenOffice.org but I don't use the spreadsheet much if at all.
Hell, as long as Microsoft keeps supporting the copy of Office you use, who cares about 2007? Let the early adopters play around with it and work the bugs out. I'll use the ribbon when everyone else is--no reason for me to learn another "J++" Microsoft product only to have that skill be completely useless. Office 2007 will probably be the de facto standard but why pay the price and risk of an early adopter?
We're all intelligent people here (I think), and we're all capable of weighing the pros and cons of software. Office 2007 should be no different. If you want to present a good article to me on 2007, I'd like to see all sides of the issue, not just telling me why I need to use it.
My work here is dung.
The banner might be more attractive to true first-time users, but will pose a whole new learning hurdle for rare users and much more for users with simple requirements (80+% of all users). The tasks have moved and now are much less obvious.
MS has shot themselves in the foot again. I don't know whether they hit an artery.
Someone here at my job has Office 2007 installed. It has some weird graphical things, like transparant popup windows when selecting text. this window shows options like bold/italic, etc. when moving the mouse over it, it slowly fades in. Moving the mouse out of the window makes it transparent again. I really don't see the use of it. Then there is this OSX background and still too much buttons.
The problems mentioned mostly exist for existing 'power' users who already know Office 2K3 and are unfamiliar with the new 'ribbon' interface of Office 2007. I think that the vast majority of users out there in the real world, however, use Microsoft Office as a fancy word processor and don't really know the true functionality of Word or Excel or PowerPoint.
For those users, the ribbon may be a great help in unlocking the use of the tool.
Of course, the real question is will the PHBs in major corporations see it that way? If they don't adopt Office 2007 in droves, it will die. If they do, then due to file format differences, everyone will be forced to upgrade and this becomes an entirely moot point. *sigh* Which is too bad for those of are using OpenOffice.org and other competing open source products.
My blog
As an employer, you'll want to upgrade because that's what all the college students will be trained in.
I'm still irritated that the college I work at jumps on every little thing from Microsoft, but still doesn't cover anything recent from the UNIX or Mac worlds.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
.docx is not a nice file format. Yah, the program has a steep learning curve, I couldn't find anything that I needed, plus, even with 512MB of RAM it runs slow/like crap. Its just a pretty version of Office with crappy default file format.
The only feature I have heard of that makes me want to upgrade is the ability to have more than 65,536 rows in excel. Of course, if you have that many rows of data, maybe you should be converting the data into a real database format and working with the data that way.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
It supports saving/loading backwards compatible formats too...
It also had a surprisingly low learning curve for me, despite the vastly more accessible UI it seems to have than 2003 with its menu jungles.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This seems the least thought through attempt at jumping on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon - Office 2007 is the first version in 12 years that really changes the way you use office to truly make you more productive. There are tools in Office 2007 to let you do some of the things that used to take you upwards of half an hour in under a minute.
It's sad that MS is slagged of for not changing Office much over the years, then why they finally do innovate, and change it to improve productivity and usefulness people slag it off with "Booohooo it has a steep learning curve". Honestly, Microsoft may do a lot of things wrong, but they do also do something right (i.e. the XBox 360, Visual Studio etc.), I honestly think Office 2007 is one of those things they've done right.
There are some useful features in Office 2007. However, you have to evaluate whether those features are necessary enough to overcome the upgrade costs as well as the re-training that will be involved with the new interface. Some people really want/need the new features. The problem for MS is that most users are just fine with the features from Office 97.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
But before I answer that, can someone tell me why I should upgrade from Word 95? And the only justification I can think of to upgrade to Word 95 is long filename support.
I've been a diehard Microsoft Office user for years and have recently installed Outlook 2007 (upgrading from 2003) and discovered that they've replaced everything with a new font system which, on my dual high resolution LCD's, looks awful and blurred. To most people it's an improvement, however one of the original co-creators of Cleartype has gone on record to say that many humans have the ability to perceive more colors and these humans may find Cleartype to seem blurred or less clear. Going back to a non-Cleartype setup is extremely difficult, involving changes made in four separate areas of Outlook's unintuitive option screens.
The only reason to switch to 2007 will be to read the documents that others send you. This is nothing new. When the organisation for which I work switched to 2003, for example, it was not because we needed any of the "functionality" new to 2003. Nor had our users pushed Office to its limits and were crying out for new functionality. Let's be clear, 95% of users use maybe 5% of an office suite's functionality. The other 5% use maybe 50%, at best.
But Microsoft never fails to make the new Office write files, by default, that the old Office can't read. Eventually, one grows fatigued with having to send a reply to every email asking that the sender "save the document in Word 2003, please, so I can open it."
This is the way MS has sold each and every one of its upgrades. It's a tried-and-true strategy for them and they've made billions from it. Why would anyone expect them to change at this juncture?
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
You'll change because that's what Microsoft tells you to do. Or, rather, they will progressively stop supporting earlier versions. This coming from a fell who uses Word 2000 when he has to (OOffice or LaTeX otherwise).
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I don't know what these new "ribbon" menus are or what they look like, but this just prompted me to speak of my biggest pet peeve of Windows menus that came on the scene a few years back: Dynamic menus. What I mean by this is how the drop-down menus off of the toolbar change to reflect the most recently-selected options. Thus every time you pull down a drop-down menu it looks different, and you must seek out the option you need, ususally by clicking on "more options" to see the "full" menu.
Whatever menus look like, they need to be consistent. Menus that change every time you look at them suck.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Kind of ... Nvu ... granted it doesn't have as many bells and whistles but it's fine for basic pages. If you're looking for more whiz-bang things like image viewers, etc ... then no, not really. However, Nvu pages will work in all browsers, unlike the incompatible HTML FP puts out.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
There are (probably many) corporations that use software rented from Microsoft - for those, there will be little choice when Microsoft decide to force the change.
Anyway, here some "snowball effect" is needed for the file format change to force upgrading the Office version
http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmleditors/tp/aatpw yslinux.htm/
A simple Google search would reveal this plus other links to WYSIWYG html editors for Linux.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Site's down -- try mirrordot -- http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/cf8757aa5cc8bc162 ddb78c82313ed5f/index.html
The best reason to upgrade is probably if you have to much expendable cash and you want to see a really cool UI.
The ability to open large datasets in Excel, instead of having to use vim to figure out what the structure is. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the rest of the features aren't a step backwards, but it'll still be worth it the next time I have to figure out why SAS is choking on some huge text file.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
no sense of adventure, eh?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
As you are the first person who claims to use the colaboration features (I assume that is what you mean by "simplifies processes") I have heard I would love to hear more about how you use it.
Funny how you are so keen on a feature that MS has been marketing heavilly and that most real users do not care about.
What exactly do you mean by "ties up our services"?
Let me see if I can translate that:
My business just loves the new features, but I'm not going to tell you which new features we love, and why we love them! Nyah nyah!
And you got modded +5 Insightful... Amazing...
try nvue
Cheap storage VM.
More like +5 elitist.
I hate sigs.
What about a serious investigation of whether or not the new features will help his organization?
How about a review of their current users, features used/wanted, to find out whether an upgrade would be cost effective and return something for the investment?
Why does every new MS Office release inspire a new round of articles from dopes wanting someone else to tell them what would be good for their business, without much effort on their own behalf?
Anytime I hear or read someone asking whether they should upgrade to the latest version of ANYTHING, I just want to choke them.
By the time a new product comes out, there has been MORE than enough time for due dillegance, and the answer should be apparent before release candidates are distributed, unless of course, you are an idiot, and your company sucks.
When a owner of smooth running Windows shop with dozens of .NET applications and centralized SharePoint askes me about switching to Linux to 'save a few bucks', I immediately do a quick cost/benefit analysis on whether or not I should just beat his ass and change professions.
I've been using Excel for nearly 15 years, and for the entirety of that time, I've been limited to 256 columns. Now the limit is 16,384 columns. This may not seem like much to the average person, but to a little abused VBA monkey who's had to use every trick in the book to handle the manipulation of big WIDE data, this is a godsend.
Word 2007 is much better for technical documents. The features that were hidden in 2003 (like styles) are now very easily accessed. Another example is tables: in 2003, you either had to browse through menus to open the Tables and Borders toolbar and then close it to save screen space, now you simply switch to the Tables tab. Also, a lot of buttons have labels beside them, meaning you don't need to hold the cursor near every button for 1 second in order to see the tooltip. Oh, and did I mention instant previews when choosing styles?
And the new equation editor simply rocks. It combines the best of TeX, Classic Equation Editor and OpenOffice Writer's equivalent. You can write some TeX code, press the Space key and Word automatically converts it to a WYSIWYG formula, which behaves pretty much like the equations in the Classic version.
I thought Front Page was part of the Office package. Oh well.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Well, we researched the product, and while Office 2007 isn't a bad thing, its way too damn expensive. When we are looking to upgrade 125+ licenses, its going to cost us way more than any of us can justify, no matter how cool the options are. We are currently running Office 2000 and our next "upgrade" is, Open Office.
I've been using the betas for months and I'm really dreading having to go back to 2003. I can't afford 2007 and I didn't get the promised free copy of 2007 Office Pro when I went to MS's stupid "Ready for a New Day" launch event in Toronto so I guess I'm SOL. Real shame to because I absolutely adore Office 2007 but I would never spend so much money on an office suite. I'd sooner start using Google Docs.
The intervention of friends, family, professionals, or other community members might sometimes be required for escape.
Just as the recently rescued kidnapped boys didn't walk or ride away when they apparently had chances for freedom, similar mental lock-in may very well apply in this case.
Pay attention to even those you know only casually.
You could be the one to spot their captivity and take them to freedom.
I've been here long enough to know the reasons i upgrade aren't the same reasons anyone else would consider it.
7
My point is, i've explained myself MILLIONS of times to the slashdot crowd and they always point out how those features are useless, misleading or done in other products but they forget the simple fact that Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
Too many times i get drilled down for all the wrong reasons, so if you can't find whats right with something on your own then what *I* say won't make any difference to you.
Not my fault this place is stacked with ignorant users.
For a list of features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_200
As for streamlining our business, we use Microsoft CRM and our smaller offices uses Accounting 2007 Pro and tying everything together through Office 2k7 is easy as 1-2-3. We use services in Windows 2003, Windows Longhorne Server, SharePoint, Jboss Portal, and Jahia app server to tie things together, share files and publish services/data to our clients and extranet/intranet portals.
Users love it, thats all that we needed. Upgrade was a breeze and included as part of our services.
Eventually more and more customers and clients will send you documents encoded in MS format. You will need to not only read them but edit them and send them back. So far no one has ever been able to create a document in MS WOrd that is 100% platform interchangable. Even MS word on mac is in 100% compatible with ms word on PC, though it's pretty close, the page layouts shift subtly with tables and figures changing positions and dimensions.
Thus the only way you can work with other people's word documents is to own word. anything else as the parent points out is a waste of valuable time. the cost of word is negligible compared to your time
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't know why MS doesn't just skip these "major releases" and just charge everyone a subscription (quarterly, annual, quadrennial, "lifetime") to the online "Windows Update" service. The initial purchase would include security patches for, say, a decade, or the lifetime of the product (when MS can force most everyone to pay again). But nonsecurity bugfixes, new features, extra modules (new formats, GUI styles, interops) would require the subscription.
MS could still package "milestones" with their sizzlingest features to attract new subscribers, especially among the "legacy" users whose subscriptions have lapsed. With the huge marketing pushes at those milestones that are the current "upgrade" releases' biggest features. While offering new marketing kickoffs at any time they want to do it.
MS would lockin not just users using their standard tricks, but actually lockin their subscription money. Especially with enterprises, their main market, they'd get budgeted in perpetuity, a massive entitlement that would require executive action (thereby happen less often) to cancel, rather than have to do something every time an upgrade decision comes up.
I wouldn't like it. But that's never stopped MS from doing things before. Maybe this "why upgrade?" release of Office, and the similarly tepid reception as Vista arrives, is the MS way to get us to think we're smart for choosing subscriptions instead of upgrades, "outsmarting Microsoft".
--
make install -not war
I've been using Office 2007 since it was released to MSDN Subscribers back in November.
I went into the upgrade with high expectations for the ribbon. I had read a lot about it, and honestly it just makes a lot of sense. Commands that are grouped logically and presented contextually, while at the same time not being buried in a menu that few will ever see, simply seems like the right way to do things.
At the same time I realized that I have been using Office for many, many years, and the fairly dramatic UI shift would probably result in some learning curve.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised. For the most part, commands are where they should be. If I want to change the alignment of some text I go to the layout tab. (Or just highlight the text and move my mouse toward the fading in popup thingy.) If I want to insert a picture, surprise surprise, I got to the insert tab. It all makes a lot of sense.
Furthermore, in just the couple of months that I've been using Office 2007, I've discovered a lot of functionality I never new existed. (And, as many of you know, most Office users only use a very small fraction of Office's features.)
Each Office upgrade before 2007 has, for the most part, been an exercise in adding features that few will ever use because they don't know they're there. Office 2007's new UI changes that. For many users, it will be like Microsoft added thousands of new features when, in fact, they've been there all along but were never seen.
If you go two layers deep into the "Tools" menu, you'll see that "Auto-Astroturf" is by default enabled, where it automatically monitors RSS feeds for relevant discussions and posts pro-Office messages without user intervention!
Whats your business? Microsoft? Just kidding. I have been seeing so many contradicting reports on this...I am bit confused. Not too long ago slashdot had a link to an article that claimed office 2007 was one of the top 10 products of last year. Either we had a crappy year as far as good products are concerned or people are completely biased and the truth is somewhere in between.
Why does everybody love it? Specifically what feature in Office-2007 ties up your services and simplifies your processes?
Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade my seb servers?.
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Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
2) Want to see how a change will affect your document without changing it? Just put your mouse over a document skin or formatting and the document will temporarly "apply" the changes for you. The formatting will reverse to normal when your mouse is out of the area.
3)The new contextual spelling checker.
4)Building Blocks. Great time saver That's only from the op of my head, but of course if you are a average slashdotter MS could add *real gold* toolbars and you won't like it, so...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I've been beta testing Office 2007 for some time and I don't get why everyone's crying about this "steep learning curve" Office 2007 is like a Dick and Jane picture book. It only took me a few minutes to learn where they moved everything. Switching to 2007 was like going from command line to a GUI. I'm working on a multi processor system and when I have to do vlookups on a 24,000+ row spreadsheet, I have to say it's faster then any Office I've used in the past decade. This is not to say that I love 2007, I find that all the added graphics has chewed up way too much of my screen real estate and I would prefer the small ribbons of the past. They should have made all the pretty graphics a choice - just like you can use a classic shell when using XP.
Our license vendor will no longer sell licenses for Office 2003, it's 2007 or nothing. Needless to say, we are now looking for a new license vendor.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Hmmm... website http://www.xbox.com/
Shill, anyone?
Are you sure you are commenting the right article? Nobody suggested coverting to Linux, or even OpenOffice.
All the article is saying is: "why not just stay with your present version of ms-office" ?
oh come on, either talk about something you have a clue about or stop lying. you can download a little tool free from MS
here that lets you read new office 2007 files in older versions.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Hey, that's great news! How does one turn off dynamic menus in Windows?
Thanks.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Probably OT: I know it's a cliche phrase, and nobody thinks about what it really means, but "a steep learning curve" is a good thing. Assuming the graph has axes for time (horizontal) and knowledge (vertical), one would want the curve to be steep -- showing knowledge going up quickly in a short amount of time.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Actually, DOS programs work great on Linux with DOSBox and DOSEmu. No reason to upgrade there if your program works for you. As far as a DOS platform goes, Linux is probably the best thing going right now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
This is the best reason for small businesses installing OpenOffice that I have heard yet. That'll read and write Office 2007 a few days after (or even before) it's released. Bugger 'avoiding the MS tax', start thinking about 'avoiding the MS upgrade treadmill'.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Compatibility Pack for 2007 File Formats.
Also see Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, Visio 2002 Viewer, Word 97/2000 Converter for Word 6, etc.
Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of closed formats; rather, an alternative for staying software version/vendor-independent.
WordPerfect 4.x was almost perfect - NO CLUTTER AT ALL. What was on the screen was your document. WP5.1 hid its menus nicely - they were GONE unless you needed them, then you could Alt-= and see them. Still no clutter while editing. Windows programs originally had a menu bar, but were mostly clutter free. Then they got a row of icons (SmartIcons in Ami Pro, later added to MS Office) and a status bar. Word then got a row of menus, TWO ROWS OF ICONS, and a status bar. Now there's more clutter - a "ribbon bar" (and I've only seen screen shots, not used it) and who knows what else. Meanwhile, the point of a word processor is to process your words, not deal with all the clutter on the screen. Anything that sacrifices screen real estate that belongs to your document's words for anything else is not an improvement and not progress. I think in all the race to add features to Word, they've completely forgotten the point of the program.
So someone hates Microsoft. Tough. As a technical editor I use MS Office every day. I can't wait until we adopt Office 2007 because there are features there that will make my life easier and I am not a moron, so I will not have any problems with the "learning curve" that Office presents. Since I work for a government contractor, our upgrades are a long way off, but eventually 2007 will become the standard whether you upgrade or not.
If I upgraded today I'd be putting a mostly untested, untried, totally unproven product into production on every system in my enterprise. If I did that, the only thing I would be 'ignoring' is the voice of my own experience... ANd that voice is screaming at me not to trust a 1.0 of anything, least of all from Microsoft.
Feel free to jump first into Office 2007... It is "early adopters" who miss some crucial detail (or who get hammered with an enterprise-wide shutdown when the first zero-day bug is successfully exploited by virus and worm writers) who make my job simpler... Who, in the long run, pay my bills through huge emergency consulting fees, and make my arguments for security that much easier to make.
Again, we've got a huge installed base of Office 2003 users who are doing great--why would I disrupt their productivity for one or two minor improvements? Nobody in my enterprise is doing spreadsheets large enough to trigger the bug described in this thread... With that exception, what "Feature" is missing from Office 2003 that I need so desperately... I don't see it yet, and probably the only reason we (eventually) do it is to "keep up with the Joneses"--but that's not for another year or more.
As for Vista? I'm hoping to ride out Windows XP until we can move the desktops away from Windows entirely. We'll see if I get my wish or not...
Who did what now?
an impossibly high standard for software menus. Is it even possible to, as he puts it, "obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions?"
Maybe not, but if you are charging people money for software that's supposed to be easy you can do better. M$ owed it to their customers to get things right the first time they made the menus. If they had, they would never have needed change. Even if they hadn't, change is a bad idea after spending years telling people that change is hard and that alone is reason to stick with M$. The problem is that it's all been a lie. They never got it right, sold bloat and arbitrary changes as new versions and continue to do so. The new Office represents the most radical departure yet, because they have abandoned the shortcuts that so many had committed to muscle memory. Still, it's nothing new from M$ and the cumulative result is a horribly fragmented and inconsistent GUI
.Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've been showing Office 2007 off for quite some time now to my clients, people I work with at the local university, and friends of mine.
Not once has their response been "where is the file menu?" or "where are my icons?" Each time they've seen the ribbon and thought "Oh, that is smart!" They see how easy it is to change margins or add a Header/Footer and immediately want to know when they can buy it.
Will businesses think it's worth $400 per desk? If it saves that employee about an hour of time every month, because they can do tasks faster now, then it pays for itself quite quickly.
That's not mentioning how much *better* things look when created in Office 2007 using their new features. Have you seen the new shape rendering tools? Professional looking slides can be created in PowerPoint without the aide of the graphic design guys. Same goes for charts.
Employees will make better use of styles in Word, conditional formatting in Excel, all because the features are easier to find now.
People who boo-hoo Microsoft really need to sit down in front of Office 2007 for ten minutes and just check out its new features. Throw out your old ideas of menus and icons and just give it a try before you bash it.
-David
A typical example: I was called once to help a group who was doing some studies in antenna radiation patterns. The way they found the zero of a function: calculate 256 values, one for each column of a spreadsheet, find which cell has a sign that's different from its neighbor. Not enough precision? Their "solution" was to flip the spreadsheet, use lines instead of columns...
Spreadsheets, if they are to be used at all, should be limited to small problems, because they depend so much on manual operations. When your problem becomes too big for 256 columns, you would be much more productive if you learned how to write programs, instead of trying to do it in a spreadsheet. In the case I mentioned above, I wrote a ten line python program that could find the zero of a function to arbitrary precision. With the standard 16 digit precision used in floating point operations today, that means you would need 1000000000000000 lines to get the same result in Excel. How would you scroll such a spreadsheet?
"My point is, i've explained myself MILLIONS of times to the slashdot crowd"
:-)
But.. how?! You only have 1013 posts!
I would recommend against anything large in Office. The file sizes get ridiculous, and the programs grind to a halt.
Tex for large documents and Matlab for large datasets. Infinitely better suited.
Now I only have to learn some decent programming language (like FORTRAN (sic) or C) for the stuff that even Matlab is too slow for.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I've heard Wolfram Mathematica is just blazing fast, but I don't even bother keeping track of the prices these days. (I hope they still have the $100 student license.)
No, I don't work for Microsoft. And I didn't ever think I'd say this about Office, but this upgrade comes with a vastly improved user experience. The grouping of functions on the toolbar is very good, and toolbars that contextually adjusts to the situation hand-holds me trough things that were always (in my opinion) hard to find and do. This, together with much better default templates and styles than before, actually made Office a little more fun to use.
And one minor improvement is actually quite important: The 65,000 rows limit of Excel spreadsheets is now gone.
While I can complain about monopolistic practices of MS like everyone else, in other areas it can be a big benefit. One of those benefits is Office 2007 integration with MS Sharepoint.
Sharepoint is a great tool for intranets and document management and the extra integration with Office is a nice feature. As an example, when someone creates a new document from a managed directory, the document template is set for the user and they are prompted to enter any required metadata. Sure you could live without the feature, but it's a lot of nice streamlining.
As for the ribbon, at least MS is trying something new. If it's a success I'm sure OSS developers will race to copy it. UIs change and evolve. Does anyone else remember the keyboard overlays for hinting at all the WordPerfect commands? I guess that was the height of word processing.
Like any upgrade, you just have to evaluate the factors and make a decision. For the company I work for, it looks like a good move.
"I am not a number! I am a free man!"-- The Prisoner
- It's an upgrade.
- It's the latest version.
- Everybody knows you have to keep your software up to date.
- It's the logical thing to do.
- Your computer will be happier if you upgrade.
- Upgrading is a no-brainer.
- You don't want to be left behind.
- You don't want to look stupid.
- It's the newest thing.
- The old version is stale.
- The new version is trendy and cool. Maybe even tubular.
- You'll be more productive.
- Soon, everyone will upgrade.
- Hell, they're already upgrading!
- The boss is already using it at home.
- Some of our other offices have already upgraded.
- Soon, the users will be demanding it.
- The developers are already using it.
- The old version doesn't have support for the new file format.
- We budgeted the cost over three years ago.
- It's a better investment anyway.
- It'll save you a lot of extra time and money if you don't think and just do it!
- You should never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
- They're selling the new version everywhere.
- You can't even buy the old version anymore.
- The manufacturer recommends the new version.
- Our supplier recommends the new version.
- They're offering us a discount if we upgrade now!
- The new OS has better support for the new version.
- It integrates better with the new interface.
- The manufacturer will discontinue support for the old version anyway.
- The new version is a superior product.
- It's the result of years of research.
- It gets rid of all the old bugs.
- It's the new standard.
- It's easy to install.
- It's more efficient.
- It's more intuitive.
- It's more secure.
- It's more stable.
- It's more faster.
- It's more better.
Just because!I'm an Office 2007 user since june/2006. IMO it is a great evolution in the way you interact with a software. Sure it has menus, different ones called Ribbon, but they are way more productive and intuitive. Every change has a learning curve. That's why it is a change.
By the way, it seems to me that the person who wrote TFA probably prefers vi than any other text editor software. That's an assumption and I may be wrong. Anyway, why would such a person mind to express his opinion about a software he would hate anyway? Give me a break. Stop the unreasonable Microsoft-sucks-sucks-sucks articles and comments.
Actually the file sizes are 50% (or so) smaller in the new version of excel. The ability to handle large files is a plus... many times a database would be more suitable than excel, but for one-off data analysis and manipulation excel is really powerful tool. I had a one time need for a 120,000 row by 100 column spreadsheet and excel didn't choke on it.
What was really amazing was the speed of pivot tables...even working on the full spreadsheets pivot tables were nearly instanteous even on a relatively old Pentium 4 (with 3 GB memory.)
From Word (or any Office product, most likely):
TOOLS -> CUSTOMIZE -> OPTIONS -> "Always show full menus" (check!)
Whether it was a good idea or not, the new document formats (docx, xlsx) are all part of a new open standard called Office Open XML (OOXML).
Wikipedia OOXML
People might get PO'd that they can't open these formats in older versions of office, but then again it also might force everybody still hanging on to Office 97 to finally upgrade so they can view the latest ISO documents.
Not seen 2007, probably won't. But THE biggest thing that irks me about Office, Word in particular, as we use 2002, is that things which seem absolutely commonsense to use EASILY, BECAUSE they are rarely used are strangely difficult or damn near impossible. Why is making a TOC so problematic and why does it take so much work. Why do pasted in tables take on a margin arrangement life of their own? Why do random words think they have to be spelled checked in French when the other 99% of the docyument is clearly written in English and is spell checked in English? Why is formatting text in a footer so damn hard? Especially something like not counting an arbitrary number of pages up front, like the rest of the publishing industry for the past 150 years? The point is, these things are hard because they're only used rarely. I'm sure that if had to monkey with it every day I'd memorize the 90 steps needed to do it. But why? Also why does font mapping between MS office and Notes just suck? Seems that 'Arial' should be 'Arial' and if it's 10pt in one doc it shouldn't naturally be converted to 24pt bold in another.
BTW - the differences in the interface between 2002 an 2003 are almost completely for the sake of upgrading and eye candy alone. Except for the annoying default that checks help ONLINE which is really a huge pain the ass.
I submit that MS spends little time actually bothering to find out what people what, and how they use it and they instead assume that whatever they like must be what we would naturally prefer too. OO is no better either since it follows MS's lead.
Having said that, I can appreciate you folks who have to use spreadsheets to run your business and you might actually have a real need to use some of those high end obscure functions. Me? No. And no thanks. I think it's a shame that you have to run business functions in a glorified spreadsheet and wordprocessor though or that we have an 'Office Suite' that attempts to compose memos and keep the books and make toast and service the wife, etc....maybe that's the approach that's wrong. My wife runs our rental properties and budgets with a spreadsheet and no matter what I tell her about something basic like MS Money she won't use it. And please make no mistake she knows jack shit about Excel and can't use it beyond typing anyway.
Anyway the problem with MS Office is that it's arbitrary. If the new version is still arbitrary then it's shit. If it's new kinds of arbitrary then it's shit. Either make my life easier or go away. I do not need to learn new workarounds.
Depending on how you purchased or use office there are a couple of upgrade options. For student (K-12) and teachers you can by the student/teacher version at a significant discount. Downside is it is for non-commercial use and cannot be upgraded at a discount.
Buying a new machine with office is another option (if you're in a hardware upgrade cycle). MS Office Small Biz (word, PPT, excel, publisher, outlook) is about $200 (depending on your pricing level, contract, machine).
The other question about an upgrade is the value of your time...if you can save half a day with the upgrade it might justify it on that alone.
If you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel...no one NEEDs office (or a computer, or HD cable, or...).
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Most of the evolution/revolution has come in the form of layout. Yes, many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc. You can't compare this to Word Perfect for DOS.
That's funny, because I can remember doing most of that with Word Perfect for DOS. See the Wiki, nothing is new in typesetting:
The only thing that I don't remember doing with Word Perfect 4 was rotating text. That might just be because I had printers that would not do that and had no need. Pictures, tables, columns and the rest have been part of any decent text processor for thirty years. Word may have lacked such features, but then again the Word Perfect memory manager was better than the one provided by DOS and Windows 3.1. You have to wonder if M$ ever caught up with Windows 95 or any subsequent memory manager because their system still hogs all your RAM and a huge swap file.
As for menu layout and ease of use, the simple keyboard template and reveal codes of Word Perfect have yet to be surpassed. KWord, with it's rational style sheet and excellent format management comes close. The M$ way of hiding options is the exact opposite and dead wrong method of ease of use - nothing is more difficult than invisible options!
The destruction of Word Perfect is one of the most obvious of M$'s monopoly abuses. Those who use Word suffer that abuse to this day.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Unfortunately, I doubt this will be the case.
Office will simply become another darned application that has a non-standard interface (non-standard with regards to "normal" Windows applications).
And lets not forget - one of Windows' major attraction for users is its *standardized* user interface. A user can move from one application to another, and *expect* to find clipboard functions hanging off the Edit menu. Take that away, and you lose one major attraction of the OS.
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
Other questions to ask:
Why do I need another hole in my head?
Why do I need a switch kick in the nads?
Eyes. Do I really need them?
What are the advantages of early onset dementia?
In the mac world, word 6 actually had fewer features and was harder to use than mac word 5. the difference was that it was identical to the PC product. that is, they advanced the PC product to have features that were already in the mac product, and then regressesed and reskinned the mac product ot make it identical. I remember my extreme rage, shared by many, at this and vowen not to upgrade. Then after a month or so I got a critical contract application form in word 6. I could not read it in word 5 and had to buy word 6. so yes to your question.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So Microsoft's old menus were shit, so they should have changed them, but they shouldn't have changed them because they should have got them right first time because change is bad. Seeing as I first used wordprocessors on an Amstrad, which was entirely text based, should they have stuck with that?
Which you've admitted to never using, as you've said you haven't used an MS product in 7 years, so how would you even know? At least I had the decency to use OpenOffice before I deleted it.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
[nothing] in word processing in the last ten years at least has been revolutionary. And how many thousands of dollars in Word upgrades have there been in 10 years?
The only revolutionary thing to happen to text editing in the last twenty years has been software freedom. Anyone who learned how to use Emacs back in the 80s is still happily using the same muscle memory today if they choose.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You need its new contextual spelling checker, by the looks of your post.
[quote]As for streamlining our business, we use Microsoft CRM and our smaller offices uses Accounting 2007 Pro and tying everything together through Office 2k7 is easy as 1-2-3. We use services in Windows 2003, Windows Longhorne Server, SharePoint, Jboss Portal, and Jahia app server to tie things together, share files and publish services/data to our clients and extranet/intranet portals.[/quote]
/sarcasm.
Except you're not running unix/linux/macOS and therefore completely insecure and really stupid for not using my OS. Oh god what a tard for not doing things this way, that way, the other way, blah blah blah.
If it works, it works. Simple as that. It works for me, the UI isn't so bad that you can't learn it, the format can be changed, you can still save as earlier compatible versions with not much issue, so I agree with you - no problem.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
You WOULD NOT use MS Word.
Unless you all have the same printers and drivers and so do your customers.
You'd use a press format like, say PDF.
You need Visio 2007 to reverse-engineer an Oracle 10g database. That's reason enough for me!
From reading the comments to this article, it is very clear that MSFT PR and Marketing folks have been very very busy. Fact is, you do not need to upgrade *at all*. And, for most businesses, they do not need to use or submit or receive *any* Microsoft documents (Word, Excel, etc.) at all! Nothing makes Microsoft Office 2007 worth the upgrade cost, absolutely nothing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Add to "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" the phrase "and large megacorporations".
The change to ribbon interface I'm sure will survive. Vendors change formats all the time in search of a most ergonomic way of doing things. It's a way of saying "we (the vendor) can do better than we (the vendor) did before".
However, I suspect the public will not ultimately put up with "lack of customization" as a long-term strategy. That's a way of saying "we (the vendor) can do better than you (the user) did before". That's a great deal more dicey as a claim. It's one thing to not give a user customization, as Apple did in its early days, because it didn't understand what it was about and how much user demand there was; it's another to move from a customizable environment to a non-customizable one. I don't expect that part of the shift to play as well.
I've installed just IE7, not the Office beta, and am already quite nervous. IE6 got me used to rearranging my menu items and left me feeling that more rearranging on my part would help even more. When I installed IE7, I was shocked: For all its new features, the one thing I really hate beyond words is the inability to customize my own experience in terms of button arrangement. The very next thing I did after installing IE7 was to download Firefox.
People who customize things know they're going at odds with documentation. They can cope, or they don't do it. I don't care if I have to click a 20-page EULA saying I agree not to complain that the doc is at odds with where I've customized something. Just don't tell me I can't customize things. I didn't like the auto-abbreviating smart menus, but at least there was a checkbox to turn them off, and I didn't begrudge their having them because it didn't bother me. (I might quibble with the default, but that's a business choice.) As long as someone isn't forced to to rearrange their menus, I don't see the issue. Let me rearrange mine and them not rearrange theirs. Where is the problem?
But for Microsoft to limit customization seems suspect. Everything about .NET is about flexible rearrangement of components and functionalities, so if they're saying they have to hold back for a material reason like that they can't do adequate documentation/training in the face of customization, there are deeper problems in their business plan than simply this ribbon change.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
You guys get so busy trying to prove why a problem doesn't have to exist that you forget that a problem doesn't need to exist in order to require a solution. If it makes it any easier to understand, try remembering that MS is NOT the worlds greatest software company. They are the world's greatest MARKETING company.
But.. how?! You only have 1013 posts!
obcviously he is counting him explaining as ecvery time someone reads his comment!
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
I firmly believe MS is going down now! Microsoft wants to be cool so they redesign the look of a serious well established office application so it looks like a childrens story writing game.
My homepage: www.erkan.se
The one feature that I expected 2007 to have that is doesn't is dual monitor support for Excel. Right now the only way to look at two spreadsheets side by side using a dual monitor config is to open a second instance of Excel. The only problem with this is that you cannot link forulae between the two instances. Comparing two spreadsheets on a dual monitor system is what dual monitors were made for, shame on MS for not having the forethought to make it work.
Website
Hmm, well, this will cost me my karma, but ehmz, I use LaTeX and all my documents look exactly how I want them to look..... if it doesn't look good, I know I have goofed up some formatting command. Good luck with Word trying to figure out why the styles have changed all of a sudden..
Did they fix that horrendous page numbering system? I haven't seen any improvements in that department going in between the versions of Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003 Pro....... it's still hellish to fix sections and pagenumberings the way you want it in Word.
But no more so than any previous version of Office.
Only if "steep" == "not perfectly flat".
In other words, it changed from an almost inscrutable memory dump to XML.
The only need here was a slashbot's need to check his watch, see that it had been 15 minutes since the last micro$oft-is-teh-suxx0r wankfest, and submit a lazy troll post.
</vent>
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There are a lot of enhancements to Excel that make it of interest to financial institutions, such as being to spread the calculation of financial products modelling spreadsheets across several back-end servers, and the work flow tools that can be used to keep an audit trail of spreadsheet changes.
2 459.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/06/26/64
I know one of our big factors is unified messaging. It fits the direction we're headed, and from what I've seen/heard of it, it's pretty slick. Just my two cents.
It is possible to explain something more than once per post.
It is possible to explain something more than once per post.
It is possible to explain something more than once per post.
If the collaberation features were easy, they would be extremely well-used in the department I work with. My guess, though, is that they will go unused in most situations. The complexity factor is going to be a bit weird to deal with.
My little site.
Real tie in between desktop and server apps is a killer feature, and collaboration is a very meaningful feature to a lot of people. The average Slashdot hack may not recognize this, but people like Dries (founder of Drupal, a php web "cms") do... http://buytaert.net/sharepoint-2007
We're looking at Jahia ourselves, would you mind sending me an email as I have some questions.
vid_sdcybrthng@zooid.org
Thanks!
I'm sorry, i know this is a nerd news site-- but wtf is with posting an "article" that begins with "IMO:"? Way to go Slashdot.
.. does it, by default, save to a format that the older versions can't read?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I agree that most companies could easily convert to Linux/BSD/FOSS with OO/Firefox/Evolution. Here I could switch the entire training & call center systems to Open source. If I took the time to skin it right, I doubt they would even notice the difference. My problems are custom software - we have 1 program that's on all of the systems related to account provisioning/repair/etc. It's a piece of systems integration to tie between us & our supplier - and it's not available on Linux. The other issue is a suppliers interface which is a Java applet that only works with 1 specific version of Windows Java implimentation - down to the point where you need a specific patch number from MS or it won't work. That's it 2 chunks of software - both 3rd party interfaces that keep us from going to Linux. Heck, our entire backend - except for the server for 1 of them - is already Linux/BSD.
offtopic or not, I have to know
I was really loving your post,. feeling the energy, until the 4th paragraph, third line, 2nd word.
why is it, anytime someone glorifies or expounds, or shares joy, on the program known as PowerPoint, I immeditely think PHB or mid-level flunky, or stupid meeting or InDuhVidual..
I like, and use, and appreciate office. I bought a license to SBS just because I wanted to edumacate myself on server, exchange, and other pffoce features... it's a hobby for me. However, I launch powerpoint NEVER after having used it once to see what it could do.
I have occasionally used the PP viewer- when forced to view somthing. I can't help but believe and think anyone who generates PP stuff regularly must be miserable, yell at their spouse, kick their dog, and have drug using children..
yoich.. does anyone else share this vehement hatred for it, and not the rest of office?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If you've banging your head on the ceiling trying to do data analysis on more than 64,000 rows, or if you'd like to sort cells by the colo(u)r of their background, Excel 2007 will be more useful to you. Whether it's worth the cost of the upgrade - well, that's your call.
This article gets rewritten for every upgrade of every product sold by Microsoft:
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2000?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office XP?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2003?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2007?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office:Mac v.X?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office:Mac 2004?
Always with "upgrade" in quotes.
It just never stops. Is any of this "news for nerds?"
If you are a corporate user, odds are either the company is going to cheap out and skip the upgrade, unless you get issued a brand new PC that will come bundled with Office, and those usually ship with whatever the current version is. If your company decides to do a wide upgrade to 2007 it will sure as hell be their choice and not yours, since odds are a very tiny percentage of the Slashdot user base is a CTO or CIO type that can control such a decision for a big company.
The only people that can make that choice know enough to not volunteer to such an upgrade, so why bother? Is anyone actually worried that OOo supporters are actually considering spending money in corporate licenses for MSO 2007? Not a chance in hell.
Why nobody writes something about why it is not such a good idea to upgrade from Firefox 1.5.x to 2.0.x on OS X, at least until somebody can figure out why the hell it is so unstable?
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
WE did the same here. WE are sticking with Office 97. it works great, does everything we need and works way faster than office 2000 or higher does.
Those that will whine about outlook, we do not use it we use a different groupware setup that does not lock us into Microsoft on the server side.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Look, you irritating AC, you've posted this reply to twitter over a dozen times. We get it, you're on some personal crusade against twitter. Now fuck off and stop spamming every thread you see a twitter post in with this reply, or better yet- stop posting it AC and have the balls to back your nonsense up. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Same as for any MS product: New and interesting bugs! More and exciting ways to have your PC remote controlled! Be the first on your block to experience that 0-day live!
Plus, of course, who would want to support those communist hippies and their free Open Office? Like air and sex, it's only worth what you pay for... err... wait... wrong turn back there...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wow! I didn't know Mike Cox posted here as well as on Zdnet!
Good to see you man. How's the microsoft sales rep doing lately?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
All I really want to know is how unobtrusive it can be. Word 2003 seems congenitally incapable of letting me write an entire sentence without doing something to distract me from the thought I'm trying to express. And you have to go all over the place to turn all that crap off. "Ooh! That looks like an e-mail address! Let's have a deep conversation with Outlook then make a hyperlink!" "Ooh! That file server called monday has a name just like a day of the week! Let's capitalize that word!" "Ooh! Someone you never met who worked here a few years ago wrote something with those three words in the title. Let's put some tiny dots underneath!" STFU and let me type.
This is not my sandwich.
Don't like it, don't buy it. Funny how that works!
Then don't!
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
FFS! I've told cybrthng a billion times not to exaggerate!
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I am sorry, but isn't the move to Open Office going to cost more? Think of the RAM upgrades needed and the loss in productivity.
No, I am not a Windoze fanboi - I would consider moving to something like KOffice to be a "cheap" and effective solution for most uses. Of course, if I already had the licences I would stick with Office 2000 which is a fine product (at least better than Office 97 and Office XP). And that is especially if you work with spreadsheets. Excel is the one app that MS got very right.
The worst incompatibility that users are likely to encounter between Mac/PC Office files: images pasted from the Mac clipboard (or drag/dropped from the Safari browser) show up fine as long as you're on a Mac, but an erroneous "Quicktime / TIFF decompressor could not be found" error appears in its stead if you open it on a PC.
Dragged-and-dropped image files from the Finder are fine, as are those put in via Insert > Image. But, copy/paste is done far more often.
This has been going on at least as far back as Mac Ofice 98, and is still in v2004. All MS had to do was auto-convert the pasted image to whatever format MS normally uses (Windows Metafile perhaps; it's certainly not BMP or JPG). Macs, after all, have no issue viewing images pasted into the Windows versions of Office.
The "compatibility checker" in Mac Office 2004 doesn't catch this. Imagine an electronically-submitted assignment--the average Mac user has no clue it's broken, and another point goes to MS when the PC user thinks to himself ahah, Macs ARE less compatible!
People will buy it anyways because it's easy for Microsoft to appeal to businesses and govt sysadmins. And a lot of naive people are then going to go out and buy it because they think having it at home is going to make it easier to make their stuff work with their work computers.
Relearn a UI????
Omg! Office 2007 will sooooooo fail! Look at the Steeeeeeep learning curve!
I'm rather off playing on my Wii, I mean the Wiimote rocks! No one has done such a cool new way of interacting.. ah you get the point.
K.
If you upgrade to Office 2007, the chair-throwing terrorist wins.
Care about privacy? Read this!
And determined that computers in general were too expensive.
so we called office Depot up and ordered pads of paper and pencils for everyone in the company.
Umm... if it's easy as 1-2-3, you ought to be using Lotus 1-2-3, not Office 2-0-0-7, right ?
This signature is DRM protected. By the DMCA, you are not allowed to counteract or oppose to it.
Excel works just fine for a word processor, thank you very much.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
When and where did you hear that? In my experience, Mathematica is only for symbolic exercises and abstraction. MATLAB is designed for actual data and numeric simulations, and is just about unbeatable for that purpose. I doubt this has changed since I stopped using Mathematica about 1.5 years ago (but I'll listen for a few seconds if someone wants to tell me it has).
In addition, on the subject of Office, I've done some spreadsheet (excel and others) import/export in both MATLAB and Mathematica, and MATLAB's interface makes it much better suited for the task. Mathematica's UI is designed to feel like writing in a notebook, doing math homework, while MATLAB is more like, well, working with data on a computer. If you're looking to process huge datasets, Mathematica is in the wrong section of the store.
Last night, I went to the MS website and downloaded the trial 2007. Over the next few days, I am going to test out all the applications in 2007 pro. For me, I use Word, Excel, Access and Power Point regularly for school and work. At home, I usually use alternatives. But, where I am at and what is on the machine is what I have to use for now.
I figure I am going to give it some time and try out the new features, decide for myself what the pros and cons are.. and if - for me - in what circumstances it would or would not be worth upgrading about.
Installation was pretty simple, and the trail also allowed me to keep the Office version that I already have on the computer and allowed me to add the 2007 as well. So far, that is a plus.. and the 2nd download was for upgrading / installing Net 2.0 and adding a couple of more features (it has 2 3xx MB downloads - disk one and disk 2.
Normally, I see it as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
One thing I do not like so far is on the website it mentions that family and friends who read documents created in Office 2007 will have to download a conversion pack to read the documents - if they are using a lower version. I am going to see if it will let you save excel, word and the like in lower formats - such as when going from 97 or 95 to 2000, 2000 let you save in lower formats... or in that case you could also download a conversion kit. I was not too thrilled to see that MS suggested everyone else download a conversion kit. Although I am pretty tech savvy... Many secretaries, upper management, students and others who use OFfice that are NOT tec savvy.. might not want to - or might not even be allowed to download conversion kits - depending on how their network runs.
For me, I have to stop and remember what is easy for me to catch on to and learn... it is not always the case for a good majority of people who use office. Schools, teachers, manangement, etc... if it is too "steep" of a learning curve... might not want to or have time to learn all the new features. Sooo many people use office... but then again, they are used to the office 95-office 2003 where it is all pretty much similar.. and may have doubts and limited time about wanting to or being able to relearn a "new" version.
Just my 2 cents so far. I am sure many of the tech savvy people will not agree with what I had to say... but I am in a positions where that it might be easy for me.. but I have to think about what the non tech savvy people will want to do with it.
Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
I find this a very interesting statement coming from someone who represents themself as a businessman.
The successful businesspersons I know are always very concerned about what two groups of people are thinking: their customers and their competitors. That is in the front of their minds whenever they are addressing a group that might hold either a customer or a competitor, even slashdot. But you appear to be too independent a thinker to worry about those outsiders. By buying now into MS Office 2007 (and I presume Vista in all its glory), you are willing to pioneer new approaches to business data flows.
That means taking your eye off the ball for a moment while you budget in the added costs of software, hardware, and arrange for installations and staff training. And you can bet you will be distracted a few more times when you find that the training has to be modified to fit unexpected aspects of usage, new procedures need to be set up to take advantage of the new capabilities, and those new procedures have to be shaken down before they work right.
Meanwhile, some of your competitors are planning to stick with their old systems for a while. The money and effort they are NOT putting into an upgrade process is available for other things— such as a concerted effort to target your customer base. They can and will promise demonstrated performance in critical areas of customer satisfaction where, for the moment, all you can offer is blue sky promises of being able to do better than you used to do. The money you are spending on your upgrade they can and will spend on new customer incentive programs. They can and will say that they are watching your experiment very closely, and will make a similar change if it looks like it will work out for you.
If you are the first in your industry to take on an expensive and unproven upgrade, your customer base will shrink; your revenues will be depressed; and your immediate expenses will clearly be higher. Unless it is sliding toward bankruptcy and needs a miracle, it is always better to be the second business in the industry to do the upgrade dance. Wait until someone else has blazed the trail; pick up his ex customers while he's busy planning his route and building bridges, learn from his experiences and avoid his mistakes.
A quote borrowed from Jeff Duntemann is appropriate: It's the pioneers who catch the arrows.
Yeah, and I bet it won't be possible to get it for free in warez rings, either.
I will be upgrading, but not the Windows version of Office. I will be upgrading the Mac version. The reason is very simple, it will be the first Universal binary of it. I only use it because I need to exchange documents a lot with Windows users, otherwise I would just buy iWork.
It will be a very long time before I upgrade to Vista. Presently, the *ONLY* thing I use my Windows install for is Battle Field 2. (and I don't even play it that often, been playing my PS3 most of the time)
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Nice article, mods. Please remind me of why I still read /. before I leave for home today, k?
Too long. Didn't read.
As an afterthought, if you don't care about GP's opinion, why spew bile when he gives it to you?
I have to use Office. I hate it. Awkward, poorly-organized, heavy-handed - in short, OSS gets it right because (and I'm guessing here, never having had the pleasure - or pain?) even if they use the exact same interface, they do it for free.
Think about that, if you are able.
For everyone else, I remember Word 5.1 - it worked just fine, nothing needed changing in it's functionality. When 6 came out, it was like... why bother? What do I get? The answer, to my recollection, was dick, and we have gotten it in spades ever since.
Cheers.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
I have never purchased a copy of Office, nor do I plan to anytime soon. I do, however, use Office 2007. In my opinion the learning curve using the ribbon is much smaller than that of previous versions of Office. 2007 runs smoother, I have not yet experience a crash, and there are several features that just make the experience much more pleasant than previous versions. Really, it's mostly just a lot of small things (live preview, save as PDF, etc) that should have been included in Office 2000 or earlier that makes me prefer Office 2007. Now mod me down for being pro-Microsoft
My sig beat up your sig.
This reads as typical fanboy fud! Now that you're upset... Were any of them power users? People who build applications on top of office? Did you try any plug ins? Scripts? Mail merge? Anything?
Sorry for the fanboy remark, but when I sat down in front of it, I said... What the hell is this? It ain't office.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
The ability to open large datasets in Excel, instead of having to use vim to figure out what the structure is.
Aren't you supposed to use DATABASE software to open and manipulate large DATA sets? Furthermore, isn't using a text editor to open such a large file even more cumbersome?
I'd think that if you were dealing with 65000+ records of data in some kind of text format (suggested by the fact that you resort ti vim) that a spreadsheet by its very nature would be an awkward tool for the task. What about importing such a file into a database for analysis? If you figure there is structure at fault why not pass the raw data through a Perl script (or sed, awk, grep, etc) to try to search/parse/manipulate the file?
Finally, if text editors and spreadsheets are all you are comfortable with why not try Gnumeric or OO.o's spreadsheet? IIRC, they've supported larger datasets than MS Excel for a long time.
MS are very well aware that 95% of users only use 5% of features and that's exactly why this new version of Office introduces very few new functions, but instead makes the existing ones far easier to use. It's always hard to explain a new paradigm in words so simply try using Office 2007; there's no learning curve. It is very easy to use. And MS haven't changed the file format since 1997, so ten years with one format isn't bad. Even now you can get free viewers if you only want to read the new files, and if you want to open them in your existing Office installation, you can get convertors from MS.
Ya screwed up, spyrochaete. I've got Vista Business and Office 2k7 pro on the way (says 6 weeks after RTM), and I didn't have to get out of mien kamphy chair... powertogether.com
Did you think Open Office was only for Linux? It works just fine on Windows, so no need to switch to Linux on that account. Check it out: http://openoffice.org/
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Here are my reasons:
:)
1) I fully admit it will be the first version of MS-Office I haven't "liberated" or "borrowed".
2) My wife uses Office daily. I rarely use it, as I am usually just viewing docs she creates or others create and not creating them myself, so having the official viewers from MS work just fine for me.
3) Open Office doesn't cut it. Neither do Star Office or any of the others for the purposes for which my wife uses Office for (certain functions, forumulas, etc in Excel and whatnot that the others don't have or that don't migrate over to other Office packages).
4) As long as I can read the docs I need to read, I could give a rat's ass which program they were created in or what format the end file uses.
5) I don't have to pay for it, as I am getting it free via the "Power Together" campaign. So, I will have a full, legal, licensed version of the latest Office version I can use and not worry about OGA, etc? And better yet, I didn't have to pay for it? Sweet.
6) It made the wife very happy. And for those of you with wives, you know very well of what it means to have a happy wife.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
> Answer: Nobody needs to upgrade to Office 2007.
Anyone whose job depend on smooth communication with partners who use MS Office 2007 does.
We have *never* upgraded our MS Office software in order to get new or better features, it is each and every time in order to be able to cooperate with our partners.
If you don't use that latest offering from Microsoft, any communication glitches will be your fault for using outdated (older MS Office versions) or non-standard (OO.o) software.
yup. we moved to open office (or most of us). despite any comments to the contrary the reality is that the free software is pretty damn good. certainly good enough for most of us. until the pay software gets cheaper, they are the ones with the burden of proof now. we can all just download the free ones and try for ourselves. i am not shelling hundreds to try the pay version unless the free one is horrible and no longer an option.
He was talking in base two, obviously. One million in base two is forty in base sixteen (and sixty-four in base ten)
This is in fact the major argument against upgrading to GNU/Linux. Retraining put the TCO above the already known Microsoft software.
The fun thing is that same the argument doesn't apply when switching to a different version of the Microsoft software, even if the UI change is larger.
Macthorpe just wanted an answer to his original question. He's obviously unfamiliar with Twitter's modus operandi. Twitter won't defend any of his assertions.
You know what's really sad? I've given Twitter the "Foe -6" treatment, so he's invisible to me. Yet I can still find his posts by inference. I just have to stumble on a reasonable comment, followed by "1 reply beneath your current threshold", followed by an incredulous, frustrated reaction. And I just know that, when I click "1 reply", I'll find one of Twitter's spiteful, irrational, paranoid screeds.
At least he's keeping his sock puppet accounts straight today.
This sig intentionally left blank.
So why not include it as a semi-mandatory update for 3? Because it would hurt 7's sales of course...
I tried to be a part of the "Open Office" crowd, but the product is merely too limiting. I found it had too many performance problems and was a major memory hog. I was very disappointed with Open Office. As a result, I think that money paid for MS Office more than offsets the cost of the product and its install. I have found that if your business looks at IT as a cost center, its time to look for a new job.
Your time is entirely your own, or whoever has had you on staff for the last six months. That ISP is probably M$ because they are the only organization that could exchange M$ documents that long without complaining, publically that is.
I already answered your questions, but I'll do it explicitly. I hold M$ to "higher" standards of performance than free software because:
Just the same, they fail miserably to match any kind of competition. I can say so from watching my peers use any M$ program and noticing that things have gotten worse, not better.
How the fuck do you know that Office's new UI is worse when you haven't used it?
Because I've watched a long time Office user get stumped by it trying out the simplest of tasks and I've read reviews. Amazing how something can suck from such a distance, isn't it? That's the way monopolies are.
Is it better to change or not to change? If it's better to change and evolve, why don't MS have the right to make their products better without the insane 'usability is broken because people know how it worked before' argument?
It's better to change incrementally, offering features and improvements that users actually want. This is what free software does and that's why Konqueror, KWord even Open Office are more consistent and easier to use than M$ junk.
What M$ does is mostly for marketing purposes and it has indeed broken their user's knowledge base. Open Office forced this change on M$ because few people were willing to shell out $400 for something that works better and they could get for free. Open Office does everything M$ Office does that any sane person cares about. The new Word, IE and Vista interface are change for change's sake. They provide an illusion of newness but the underlying features are mostly the same. The only thing that's really changed are the buttons the user has to push and where they are hidden. Because Office had lots and lots of buttons to push for every task, there are a lot of people who are going to be pushing lots of the wrong buttons for years to come.
Monopolies are bad. They always provide the worst services at the greatest cost. Their entire focus is on keeping others out of the market instead of what their original purpose.
Fortunately, tech monopolies don't last long, especially one as flaky as software. Vista and the new Office are the end of Microsoft. Both openly show contempt for the user.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not sure I agree. I tried out their beta, and it took me several minutes just to figure out how to save a document. I looked up and down the ribbons for one that had a picture of a floppy diskette, or a hard drive, or the word "Save," or _something_. Even the online help had trouble finding the answer.
Apparently, I was supposed to click on the weird, ill-fitting, awkwardly-sized, non-button-like lozenge thingy with the Office logo in it. That was supposed to be a button?
And saving documents is hardly a power-user feature.
I'm not saying a big redesign isn't occasionally in order for some apps. But this particular redesign of this particular app seems to be a bad one.
"I call a baby goat a 'goatse.'" -- my non-Internet-savvy 6-year-old stepdaughter
What is the lead poster smoking, and are the police aware of it?
Almost the entire corporate world uses MS Word. So how does an upgrade to 2007 bring a "steep learning curve"? O2007 isn't all that different, aside from some GUI changes. And I'll bet they can be disabled back to a 'classic' view, just like Vista can.
Sadly, once again, the Slashdot community is on the wrong side of progress. I guess that's why their darlings, Lunix and Open Office, will always be chasing MS's tail lights.
***psssst!**
(whispers) and it's also very pretty and sparkly, like magic pixies.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
Explain, please ... ;-)
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Anyone here can learn a new interface quickly. Many people here can fix broken software. But if it's closed source and broken there's no real hope.
In terms of functionality I've usually wound up having to Google in order to wrestle Word into doing something logical, e.g. with numbered lists or outlines ("always use styles" is good advice but far from complete).
Wondering whether I was just incapable of learning new things, I asked a professional tech writer whether I was imagining that every new revision of Word was harder to use than the one before. She said they really were going downhill.
The advice I'm getting now from someone who uses Office for a living (as opposed to playing with it for a review) is to avoid Office 2007. Maybe Excel is better: one of their goals was to make pivot tables accessible to non-accountants.
>>These arguments are EXACTLY the arguments used with every major innovation in the past. gui interface at the least.
windows 3.1 to windows 95 -> TCP/IP
nt 4.0 -> windows 2000 -> active directory, increased stability
Those are substantial, measurable, improvements. Those can be considered compelling reasons to upgrade. What is the compelling reason to "upgrade" from office-2003 to office-2007?
KOffice ported to Windows is an ongoing project, as far as I know. OO runs fine on 512KB of memory and has for me for the past couple years. The difference in startup time between OO and MS Office is negligible. MS Office has just gotten slower and slower over the years, and it's funny that a piece of software written in native code actually sometimes seems like it takes longer to start up than something that requires a VM.
OO is essentially a finished product, and is at revision 2.1. KOffice, on the other hand, as far as I know, isn't there yet for Windows users.
That ISP is probably M$ because they are the only organization that could exchange M$ documents that long without complaining, publically that is.
I was waiting for the 'astroturfing' allegation. You can't actually have a discussion without getting that one in, can you? I work in the UK, and MS doesn't have an ISP over here. That pisses that little theory up the wall, doesn't it?
they fail miserably to match any kind of competition. I can say so from watching my peers use any M$ program and noticing that things have gotten worse, not better.
Bullshit and more FUD from your addled brain.
Because Office had lots and lots of buttons to push for every task, there are a lot of people who are going to be pushing lots of the wrong buttons for years to come.
This is laughable. Show me how having 2 or more buttons for the same action is bad for a UI. Following that, show me how having to re-learn a UI to improve your efficiency is bad for a user, and then continue to make a case as for why all consumers should relearn all their UIs in order to transfer to Linux or OSS solutions. You just don't get that you can't eat your cake and have it too.
Monopolies are bad. They always provide the worst services at the greatest cost. Their entire focus is on keeping others out of the market instead of what their original purpose.
Except for when you're banned from doing so and are under a tremendous amount of legal and consumer scrutiny to keep it that way. Can you provide proof, actual solid evidence that Microsoft continues to abuse their monopoly position, other than "Slashdot sez so"?
Vista and the new Office are the end of Microsoft
I remember when WinME was the end of Microsoft. I remember when XP was the end of Microsoft. I remember when WGA was the end of Microsoft. Newsflash: the sky isn't falling, no matter how much you wish it.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
WP5.1 FTW
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Microsoft is rich and famous. How did they get there? Well, they did a lot of things, some of which some people don't agree with, but I'm not going to get into that. Part of their success has to do with the philosphy, "Give the customer whatever he wants." For example, look at the history of the Windows system. It was packed with features to woo and wow the consumer, who was hungry for multimedia, while lacking in other features like stability and security. Those deficiencies cost the customer big time, but almost nothing was done about it because the customer actually just didn't care about those things. Microsoft tightened security in their systems only recently because all of the sudden people realized that they wanted it. Even when asked during interviews on why his company spent more time working on new features than fixing bugs, Bill Gates himself said it: "We don't fix bugs unless our customers want us to. More of our customers want new features than fixes."
Give the customer what he wants.
Now, why upgrade? To the average Slashdot reader, who is usually saavy when it comes to software, sticking with tried and true software is not that unusual. Hell, our most popular system (GNU) is based on an OS design dating back close to 40 years now. A lot of us use even older systems that aren't as actively developed or as modernized as GNU. To us, new is not necessarily better.
You may be surprised, however, that most software consumers have no concept of "old is good." The only people who prefer older systems are regarded as backwards and cranky. Mainstream culture says that when it comes to technology (computers especially), the newest version is always the most desirable. Who can blame them for thinking that? The companies producing know how to market it. From their standpoint, it's better in every way--it's progress.
Sadly, everybody is going to want to upgrade to Office 2007 because it's the latest thing. That's all. You think people are reluctant to spend the money? The pressure to stay up to date is cultural, and even businesses will drop a lot of cash to "keep up." Microsoft is the arbiter of software culture here.
Office 2007 has been the best thing ive ever upgraded. Theres so much functionality added even for users like myself who use it primarily for Word but also dabble in Excel and Access. "Ribbons" as microsoft has dubbed them allows for graphical icons to be used for different features which allows people like me who don't know the term for say having the first letter of a paragraph be a large script letter like in books, can finally use that functionality. Being able to use different types of citations directly in word and create a table of contents with the click of a mouse.. Having lots of graphical themes to make reports look nicer, i mean its the best thing ever ive definitely been very impressed by it. I find slashdot unfortunately has a un-Microsoft bias. Thats too bad, Id hate for my favorite tech news site to be bias.
"A steep learning curve" would occur when you gain a lot of knowledge quickly so that would be good, wouldn't it?
The problem with PDF is that it isn't an editable format. If you're doing a collaborative document (or even just joint editing) PDF doesn't work. I can be pretty certain if I send a client a Word document that they will be able to open it and not get any strange formatting/messages.
You know when a consultant sends you a PDF that they are just fee burning for each edit.
Folks like me, who do our own meta-moderation.
O2007 isn't all that different, aside from some GUI changes.
/. poster makes an incendiary comment that completely lacks any supporting evidence. MS Office is the one chasing tail lights here. MS is only now migrating to leaner, more transparent XML-based file formats, whereas the Free alternatives made open formats a priority for years before. Alternatives like Gnumeric have outclassed Excel on some functionality as well (larger spreadsheet sizes though "65K rows ought to be enough for anyone" when you think about it, better statistical analysis functions, etc). MS has been chasing not only Mac OSX but also open source efforts on the desktop as well.
Pears aren't all that different from apples either--except for the shape, colour and taste. Win95 wasn't all that different from Win3.11 with the Win32 add-on--except for some UI changes. Have you seriously even given the new office a quick test drive? My impression is that power-users will catch on quick enough, but the majority of typical users will be frustrated for days or weeks. The new (enabled by default) interface is quite a departure.
And I'll bet they can be disabled back to a 'classic' view, just like Vista can.
MS (to their credit) has ALWAYS put in such operational modes to help ease users into a new product--right back to the initial Windows version of MS Word with help files and keyboard shortcuts to assist WordPerfect and WordStar users. The same with Windows--you could run 3.x-style Program Manager and File Manager instead of the start-button-and-taskbar explorer if the transition was too jarring. However in the effort to nudge users forward MS NEVER makes such settings default, and doesn't explain front-and-centre how to enable such legacy modes. Furthermore the illusion is shattered when you delve deeper into the system because emulation of the old UI is never complete. Windows XP can be made to look very much like NT4 on the surface, but it doesn't take long to find some navigation path or altered UI that is just different enough to trip over.
Sadly, once again, the Slashdot community is on the wrong side of progress. I guess that's why their darlings, Lunix and Open Office, will always be chasing MS's tail lights.
Once again some ignorant
I find that Free software tends to progress at a faster rate by quite a margin when compared to MS. Thankfully, such progress is more incremental and consistent (minor to moderate changes happening more frequently). MS has this massive house of cards built on a sand foundation to support which impedes progress, and when progress is made it tends to be drastic but infrequent. If you take a good look at the state of things, the competition is only behind MS in market share, not in actual quality of the software, so the chance of gaining ground is good for Free software.
O2007 isn't all that different, aside from some GUI changes. And I'll bet they can be disabled back to a 'classic' view, just like Vista can.
.NET and XML to describe one via code.
Nope. And the only way to get a custom ribbon is to learn the combination of
Still, I think the good outweighs the bad. Even if there's no easy way for me to apply my styles by typing the name anymore.
I am the IT guy for a growing company. Currently we have some Acrobat licenses so a few people can do the PDFing (yes I know there are cheaper alternatives but it's hard to get people to use them). We use Sage ACT! as a CRM, but only version 6 because for what we use it for it's not worth the huge upgrade cost. We have an exchange server which we don't use to the full potential because of some users still running older versions of MS Office so it can run with the aforementioned version of ACT!, etc etc etc
To ensure that everyone that needs to be able to pdf can pdf would cost thousands in additional acrobat licenses. To upgrade ACT! would cost thousands in upgrade costs.
What I love about the new office is these and other things. In my professional capacity I love the fact that :
- Office can save documents as PDF files using the "Save as" dialogue instead of having to PDF using Adobe Acrobat or something like PDFMaker
- Office can act as a CRM (some versions - Outlook w/ Business Contact Manager). Whilst not as fully functional (have yet to test 2007) as some of the dedicated solutions it will integrate. Something that the current CRM I use refuses to do with versions of Office newer than 2002 (XP). There was a BCM in Outlook 2003 but this was not easily able to be shared across a network as it was designed as a single-user sort of product.
- The new file format, while not as well supported at present, saves significant amounts of disk space. When running a server on a budget that means I have to manage the space available very carefully, the fact that Office documents willl take up 10%-60% of the space they once did is significant (the largest saving I have had on a like-for-like document is a 150kb document shrinking to 15kb)
Now on to the layout. Yes it's different. Yes I forsee a LOT of headaches coming my way teaching the less adept users how to use the new interface.
However past the initial headaches and retraining I forsee a lot of benefits. The new interface is very simple to use when you get used to it. I now use Word 2007 for all my blogging thanks to the fact it can effortlessly integrate with my Wordpress blog. I use Outlook for all my scheduling, emailing, contact in general (although in all fairness outlook seems generally unchanged on the surface)
With MS Office 2007 I will be getting all members of my company up to the same version simplifying troubleshooting because I won't have the problem that some users will be running different versions for compatinility with older software. I will be able to standardise installations because all users current and future will run MS Office 2007 and so I won't need to have loads of CDS and all that.
Well, I am starting to babble on now, all in all I love office. It will cost a lot in the short term to upgrade, that is why I will likely be opting for a volume license agreement to cut down immediate costs. I think that over time it will be worth every penny.
The geek that actually likes Windows. I got cookies.
I haven't bothered to upgrade any Microsoft software since 2001. I didn't like that upgrade as it is. There are only so many bells and whistles you need in a spreadsheet or wordprocessor.
It just doesn't get any better than that.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Expensive, difficult to use, and incompatible with applications from other companies.
Sounds very much like normal Microsoft software to me.
So what layout program does one use with Word?
+5 Microsoft Shill
Rated by the other Microsoft shills here, of course...
This is
"Unbiased" comments are automatically deleted by Slash and the user's account revoked.
I can live with it.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No - HE has only five posts. Even Bill himself has posted more times than this guy. Or maybe this guy IS Bill (I assume Bill IS too busy to post here daily.)
The OTHER 800 Microsoft shills using his login ID have done the others.
And they don't interact much, so he doesn't know how many posts they've made in aggregate under this login ID.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I assume he meant "Longhorn Server" - which doesn't exist yet (and may never exist).
You are correct that nothing else is relevant to Office 2007.
He's acting like CRM, Web services, groupware, and portals don't exist for any other OS - even while he claims to be using JBoss (which happens to be OSS and runs on Linux just as well as on Windows.)
In other words, a Microsoft shill who knows NOTHING about what is available for FREE on OSS.
Everything he claims to be doing on Windows you can do on OSS for NO MONEY.
Pure Windows shill.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Somebody please mod parent "Informative".
My statics isn't up to understanding everything on the reference link. The pieces that I do grok--well, I guess I need to see what the story is with OO Calc. It may not be any better.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
I think the Office 2007 upgrade is one of the best there has ever been in the wake of Office applications. The layout is wonderful in every program. The only complaint I have is the default lack of rulers (for margins) in Word...aside from that I'm very satisfied.
Power user's will adapt and overcome after some initial awkwardness. Normal users will be completely fucked. The type of person who if you hide their desktop IE icon thinks the "Internet is gone" will be lost. Most office workers get by at knowing the minimum to do their job in MS Word. Take that away from them and they are without a doubt screwed and will require lots of retraining.
Microsoft messed up big time. The only people happy with the new interface are Trainers who are currently raking in cash big time training people how to overcome the new "improved" interface in MS Office.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Viewers are good for version independence, but not for vendor independence. Unless these run under Wine or something, you're still locked into a MS OS. Until OO supports the format. Or you could open the archive, sed the XML off, and at least have text. Any graphics are in there as well...
This shouldn't be too difficult an issue. I doubt it will take long.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
As a Mac user I welcome the interface change. I've seen some screenshots here and there of Office 2007 and I have to say I'm eager to try out Office 2008 for the Mac when it comes out later this year. Even as a PC user I've found the last few iterations of Office to be a toolbar and menu nightmare. Too many options, too many badly rendered icons and the contextual menu, an abomination I'm sure all of us have turned off. That probably wasn't the reaction Microsoft's UI designers expected or wanted when Office 2003 came out.
Bring on the ribbon.
Can it get any worse? How about some built-in adware? Does the EULA have a clause signing over the rights to the user's first bor--oh, forget it...
Do people actually take courses to get trained in that sort of thing? It was generally assumed that we would know how to use a word processor, e-mail (I'd never heard of Pine before, but it didn't take long to figure out), basic spreadsheet functions, connecting to a proxy server for Ovid searches, etc... or that we would go to a tutorial workshop in the library if we needed help. The only program I ever received training for was Zadall, for prescriptions, patient files, and billing. We don't use it anymore.
*bursts out laughing* Did you read any of the replies to those comments?
Do you notice that nobody, I mean nobody, actually managed to put together a cohesive argument to prove me wrong, except for one, where I actually conceded the point because someone came up with something that was actually informative? Which brings us to you, because instead of continuing to respond to my points, you decided that I 'like MS too much' and therefore you 'can't trust anything I say'? That's absolutely hilarious.
I'm don't what you really do for a living
What?
What I've see above is all designed to aggravate and annoy.
Can you not think, maybe, that it only 'aggravates' and 'annoys' you because I don't agree with you? I don't see any negative moderations in there. I also don't see any lies, FUD, or invented stories, which is all I see from you. The AC above me has it right, for once.
Try again!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Did WP4 support OLE (or whatever it was first called)? I remember a shareware package called WordArt which could create rotated (and all kinds of fancy effects) way back in the days of Win3.1, and if WP4 supported OLE, then it supported WordArt. Note - this was in the Word 2.0 days or earlier - ages before MS included 'WordArt' in MS Word, presumably by innovating a large cheque in the direction of the original authors.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'd like to second this. I've deployed Office 2007 in two locations so far. Both locations had existing business licenses for Office XP and 2003. The main reason for the upgrade was that the beancounters wanted the 'latest' version (I did not have a say in the selection of the software).
There were some teething problems but users soon got to like the interface. Now, most people who just need the basic features like the fact that the most frequently used tools are just two clicks away, while more experienced users still use their old keyboard shortcuts without any changes.
Now twitter, don't you remember the last time you did this, with me? And I made you look like a cretin by replying to each and every one of your "arguments" and making them look stupid? And you posted the link to your post everywhere, with my reply IN FULL VIEW?
Same shit.
I also love how "defending M$" (against unsubstantiated allegations and fud) is an unbelievable sin in your eyes, and that the only feelings you can have for any software are unconditional hatred and unconditional love...quite silly. Talk about thinking of the world in black and white.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
"The website twitter links to in his profile (clickers.org) is powered by Windows and ASP.NET."
He's linking to lists.clickers.org, not clickers.org. They're different.
Quoth Netcraft:
"""
Site report for lists.clickers.org
Site http://lists.clickers.org Last reboot 158 days ago Uptime graph
Domain clickers.org Netblock owner Cox Communications
IP address 68.15.174.183 Site rank 2087841
Country US Nameserver a.ns.interland.net
Date first seen August 2004 DNS admin hostmaster@interland.net
Domain Registry unknown Reverse DNS office.clickers.org
Organisation unknown Nameserver Organisation Interland, Inc., 303 Peachtree Center Ave., suite 500, Atlanta, 30303, United States
Check another site:
Hosting HistoryNetblock Owner IP address OS Web Server Last changed
Cox Communications 1400 Lake Hearn Dr. Atlanta GA US 30319 68.15.174.183 Linux Apache/1.3.26 Unix Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2 8-Jan-2007
Cox Communications 1400 Lake Hearn Dr. Atlanta GA US 30319 68.15.174.183 Linux Apache/1.3.26 Unix Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2 8-Sep-2006
Cox Communications 1400 Lake Hearn Dr. Atlanta GA US 30319 68.15.174.183 Linux Apache/1.3.26 Unix Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2 17-Jun-2004
"""
No irony. Simply you shooting yourself in the foot.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I've told you a million times not to exagerrate !
In my company we are using Office 2000 and will not change until The Beast of Redmond curses us for doing so.
Why?
What we have works fine.
In a successful corporation with thousends of workes doing nothing seems to be the best course of action in many instances.
It occurs to me: he spends so much time accusing everyone else of MS astroturfing... who pays him to be pro-Linux, and can we get them to fire him for doing a terrible job of it?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Is there any reasonw why you've copied and pasted previous post about Macthorp, as evidenced by the double-URI bracketing?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Now now, let's not stoop to his level ;)
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Come now, we're a long way from that, surely.
:D
I'm pretty sure I didn't call RMS a liar and all Linux distributions stinking codeholes yet
There's still time, right?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Oh, Twitter! I read it the first time, it's still just as funny as the last. Even more so as you failed to format your post, making it even MORE obvious that you just cut and paste it! As if I wouldn't notice anyway, seeing as I actually do have a brain larger than that of a dehydrated slug.
I digress!
Oh, but you made some modifications! You have saved everyone from reading what you've linked to! How kind of you. I read them anyway, and I stick by every word I said.
You will never find me denying that my language is colourful. Nor will I deny that I have a particularly unique way of getting across my opinion. You will also note that even though I have made such arguments, that I always, ALWAYS, have a point to make. I never call someone an idiot for the sake of it.
I call someone an idiot because I think they're an idiot.
Are you seriously suggesting that because I express my opinion in a way that you find offensive, that I actually have no argument at all? Are you suggesting that because I denigrate my opposition while I dismember their arguments limb from limb, that I actually have no answerable point to make? Because you are absolutely wrong. Absolutely wrong and a prick.
I love how you've now resorted to making no on-topic points whatsoever. You couldn't argue your way out of a wet paper bag. How about you go back ON topic again and respond to what I said regarding UIs, or are you content to carry on being as insufferable as always?
P.S. Do you think someone from Microsoft, desperate to generate good press and publicity on Slashdot, would stoop so low as I to drag your name through the mud? You're a nobody, and you're here for my amusement now. Dance, puppet!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You really opened my eyes up to the wonder of DNS. Now if you don't mind, I'll nitpick that as much as I fucking want. Apparently 'twitter' failed to follow his own rule of not letting friends install "M$ junk".
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
When have we seen unconditional love from Twitter? All we hear from him is how much he hates Microsoft, how much he hates Apple, how much he hates anyone who offers an honest critique of Free Software and the organizations that support it, and how much he hates anyone who doesn't share his hatred.
Even when he manages to complete a post about his Free software of choice without mentioning Microsoft, his true motives bleed through. He can barely contain his contempt for his audience. The mere fact that he has to explain why Mepis is better must be a deep, personal insult to him.
It's not silly, it's truly sad.
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Get only a few machines for conversion purposes (accesible by means of remote terminal software) and then use the application of your choice.
Most people do not need to interchange documents outside their own companies anyway, so the problem seems quite manageable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I guess for him that's the same thing as that old joke about a woman being described as the "ugliest transvestite in the world".
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Nitpicking is supposed to be accurate. You've not demonstrated that ability yet.
Do you have any evidence that someone who publicises a website hosted by an ISP in Atlanta Georgia
<<<
Cox Communications 1400 Lake Hearn Dr. Atlanta GA US 30319 68.15.174.183 Linux Apache/1.3.26 Unix Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2 8-Jan-2007
>>>
was in anyway involved with the setting up of the hosting of a webserver administered by people in Louisiana
<<<
Domain Name:CLICKERS.ORG
Registrant Name:Cajun Clickers Computer Club
Registrant City:Baton Rouge
Registrant State/Province:LA
>>>
?
Because without that evidence, it looks like you're just full of hot air.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
ROFLMAO! Are you serious? WTF? What the hell is the difference if clickers.org and lists.clickers.org are hosted in two different cities or two different countries? Do you not understand the concept of pointing out that 'twitter' here can blabber about "M$" 24/7 and then happily make use of a domain that is run from a Windows (or "Windoze" as he calls it) box? Hell, you know what? Here's a page on clickers.org that points back to the other domain, and even has twitter's real name (or so I understand) on it. There, happy? You really should work on your reading comprehension.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Christ, you're as thick as pigshit, aren't you?
Are you really unable to tell the difference between a computer club that has Corel Draw, Digital Scrapbooking, Digital Video, Family Tree Maker, FrontPage, Hardware Repair, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Quickbooks, and Web Design special interest groups, and the Linux special interest group within that club?
Egregious fallacy of composition.
Twitter may run, own, finance, organise, and be the only fucking member of the Linux SIG, but that doesn't mean he has any influence over how the entire computer club organises itself and its internet connection. Unless you have evidence to the contrary. However, as when I probed you for this mythical evidence already you responded with none, I can only conclude that basically you're just an ignorant vapid fuck.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
The only way people in large quantities will siwtch to Linux/OpenOffice/whatever is when governments or big companies start mandating it. Since that's already happening outside of the USA, it will be eventually like with the metric system, used all over the world except in the USA.
I don't give a fuck what the relationship is. You really don't grok this, do you? I mean, you're not acting like a retarded calf on purpose? As far as I care, if he is associated with a website running "M$ Windoze" then he's not being true to his purported infantile dogma of not installing "M$ junk". Why don't you write that down a few hundred times with a crayon on a big piece of paper. That helps sometimes.
Now do me a favor and go fuck yourself with the sharpest rusted farm implement you can find.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
For the record, as I'm using linux only boxes and there's no way in hell I'm ever going to install W$, I'll not use this software.
That said, I think it's a good idea which I hope will be implemented in linux's WP. As a side note, I can't help but think that saying an interface that's just tabs accessed commands' icons' blocks requires a steep learning curve is just being full of... brown stuff.
I hate replying to old stuff, but it has everything to do with Office 2k7.
Microsoft CRM ties directly into Outlook 2007, Outlook 2007 ties directly into Microsoft Dynamics running on our (beta, yes) Longhorne Server. Not only is Outlook 2007 a core component of Office 2007 we integrate everything through to Word and Excell online and offline. Excell worksheets are shared and published to both Jboss and Jahia from which we use Open Source BI intelligence components to offer our customers access to data according to systems they use and services they purchase from us.
We use Jboss and Jahia as our front end for customer presence. This runs on a linux cluster and we setup portlets to pull in customer data. Jboss integrates with some our our custom monitoring components and we use the business process system to send events across our servers for tasks/triggers/alerts we have active for our internal use as well as external customers.
you my friend are the woefully ignorant one. We use a mix of Open source and Office 2k7 and the cost is irrelevent since we pay for support across the board.
We have tested SugarCRM and its too much of a moving target, we have thought about developing our own system but we're not a software development company - we are a service company and we're more focused on generating revenue than we are concerned about which OS we run or application we run as we run what works, what our users love and what makes our business stay in business.
thanks for your ignorance.
It's you who are ignorant of the options you have.
Commercial vs in-house development are not your only options here. You can outsource development using open source components and get all the functionality of Microsoft CRM.
You don't like Sugar? It's OPEN SOURCE! Modify it as you like! And there are other CRM OSS products. Hire somebody to do the work - like the actual DEVELOPERS of the OSS products!
Paying Microsoft for CRM is ridiculous - especially paying for it year after year while Microsoft - as it has demonstrated with Office 2007 - is ALSO a moving target.
Investment in in-house or outsourced development vs commercial products will always pay off down the road in the CONTROL of the product that allows you to shift gears according to business needs rather than wait on the next commercial release which may not do what you want anyway.
The bottom line is: you're either in control of your software or you're not. If you're not, your business is at the mercy of some idiot in some other company.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!