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Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Released, Supports ODF Out of the Box
shutdown -p now writes "On April 28, Microsoft released service pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Among other changes, it includes the earlier-promised support for ODF text documents and spreadsheets, featured prominently on the 'Save As' menu alongside Office Open XML and the legacy Office 97-2007 formats. It is also possible to configure Office applications to use ODF as the default format for new documents. In addition, the service pack also includes 'Save as PDF' out of the box, and better Firefox support by SharePoint."
Like AcidTest for browsers, is there a standard test that will test the export/import compliance with standards for the Office documents? Mod me paranoid, but I am worried Microsoft will implement ODF export/import deliberately in a buggy way to damage the reputation of the ODF format.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What would prompt them to give FOSS such an easy opening?
There are still a great many things they can do to ensure people use their format including...
. Make loading/saving ODF documents much slower.
. Save documents in such a way that they dont always render correctly when loaded in other software.
. Refuse to load some files claiming they are corrupted.
And dont forget they still have the only software that can render their format 100% correctly because of all the 'render this the way Office 97 does' legacy crap. They can claim to be the only software that fully supports all the ISO standards.
double-click the ribbon categories. they hide.
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
I thought it was a nice advancement, but since then switched to OpenOffice at home (being 100% legit with software) and like the simplicity of the menus. It also reduced screen real estate and is easy to add/remove buttons.
M$ made a HUGE mistake not having a 'classic menu' option in Office 2007.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Embrace.
Extend.
Extinquish.
Here be signatures
Small as it may seem, a major victory has been won, here.
Ever notice that the price of MS Office exceeds the price of the rest of the computer? Whole swaths of public records stand at risk, tied to a format that's both obsolete and undocumented. But, by commoditizing the document format with open standards, this has the effect of requiring Microsoft to compete on real terms - stability, usability, features, price - rather than by effective lockout through underhanded OEM de3als and shady use of their Monopoly status.
This is a very, very good thing for everybody. (Even Microsoft - if they aren't forced to compete on real terms, they will atrophy and wither, eventually losing their monopoly and going the way of DEC)
As always, the ball's not out of the park yet, we must remain ever vigilant and work to preserve a competitive marketplace....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It runs on Linux?
Retraining will be needed only once while every new version of Office will cost something like $400. If a few clients upgrade to a new version of Office and send you stuff in an incompatible format you'll be forced to upgrade.
You are insane. Office 2007 was a horribly slow, buggy nightmare. SP2 is wonderful, though. Finally, I don't have to deal with Outlook freezing on me for 2+ minutes several times per day.
Office 2007 was crap from the start. Only now is it even usable.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I am the type of user who types it first, then makes it pretty. Too often in the past going back to WordPerfect5.1 for DOS days, the darned program would try to guess what I wanted to do next and force different styles on me. i.e. bullet points.
Having to stop what I am doing and FIX the errors that computer has made is complete regression in UI design, and 10+ years later they still have not learnt.
So now all of my data input happens in nano. I use OO as needed, as opposed to more regularly.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Yes, you need to think different here. Forget menus and toolbars. The ribbon is a great thing when you understand that they are somehow like toolbars, but they are dynamic as well. When you realize how the thing work, then you cannot live without it.
You really aren't saying anything here. "It's great when you understand it, and then you can't live without it". Why?
I will tell you one thing that is not great about Office 2007 - lack of keyboard shortcuts. There's all sorts of things I used to do in Office 1997-2003 without having to constantly taking my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. Incidentally, that's why people hated dynamic menus in the first place - it broke all the finger macros. Previously, there was a way to disable them...alas, with the ribbon, you're stuck with it.
Office 2007 is slower the use. End of story as far as I'm concerned. But gosh, maybe I just don't "realize what a great invention" the ribbon is.
Advice: on VPS providers
Some people are receiving documents created in OpenOffice. Microsoft would like to have these people open those documents in Microsoft Office rather than download OpenOffice to open them. Otherwise, the next thing you know, people might actually use OpenOffice to create new documents. Ugh! This FOSS stuff spreads just like a virus!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Regular users of Office 2007 and OpenOffice know that Office 2007 isn't merely superior "in some senses". It's in almost every sense, as long as you have a relatively modern computer.
How the shit did you get modded +2 Insightful? You're completely wrong. MS Office 2007 SP2 adds ODF support to Word, Excel and PowerPoint to read and write ODT, ODS and ODP respectively.
Forget menus and toolbars.
No. Toolbars and menus worked well. In fact, for every other application out there, they still work well. And they stay out of the way of whatever I'm working on.
Ribbons take up entirely too much space on the screen. I need them to be hidden/minimized/whatever for two reasons: (1) My work, the main thing I'm focusing on, gets more space on the screen and (2) it gives me the illusion that I still have some sort of menu.
When I have a series of words on a bar at the top of my window, I expect them to yield menus, not toolbars, when I click on them. This is how every GUI I have ever known has worked, and I have never once had a problem with it, nor have I ever felt like there was a better way to lay everything out.
Give me one good reason why it was a good idea to use these bastardized toolbars instead of the usual menus and normal toolbars.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
MS will simply provide a message box triggered by every ODF save which will warn that the file format selected may not save correctly. With no more information than this, most will just revert to DOCX, or some "safe" MS format, and that will be the end of it. Of course, MS will reap the advantage of offering the capability of opening ODF files, which will mostly be converted back to the "preferred" DOCX format at the first coerced save. La.
I will tell you one thing that is not great about Office 2007 - lack of keyboard shortcuts.
You're trolling.
Name one -- ONE -- keyboard shortcut that went away in 2007 that you used.
M$ made a HUGE mistake not having a 'classic menu' option in Office 2007.
Why was it a mistake? Why was it a mistake to leave behind something that was no longer working as intended? 73% of all new features that the public requested were command that already existed in the programs. The menu structure clearly wasn't letting people find these features.
All you need to do is put your common commands on the quick access toolbar, hide the ribbon and you have something that looks a lot like the old menu/toolbar scenario. Don't get me wrong, I loathed the change at first. But after 2 years of teaching 2007, and seeing the feedback of users who were as equally entrenched in the old system, there is barely anyone I know who yearns or pines for the old menu.
I did try open office at home. The word processor was ok, but not robust, and the spreadsheet module would crash whenever I tried opening anything beyond a basic invoice with only sum functions. They need to work on that if they want it to be taken as a serious competitor to Excel. It is barely robust enough for a home budget file.
Damn, good thing OpenOffice doesn't do this with .doc files. Oh wait...
Uhh, but Office 2007 has exactly the same shortcuts as Office 2003. Here is a list for Word: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290938
And here is a list of the changes between the 2 versions: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926809/ I count a total of 6 items on the list. In fact MS added Keytips for better keyboard navigation of UI: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/13/480568.aspx
Ironically, they did it precisely the other way - they've implemented the ODF spec to the letter, and ignored any conformance bugs in OpenOffice (and in pretty much all other existing ODF implementations, which tend to follow OpenOffice behavior). The result is that you will have problems moving ODF documents between MSOffice and OpenOffice, but Microsoft gets to point a blaming finger at OpenOffice guys if asked.
I wonder, also, how it will affect any government tenders on Office suites. If one of the requirements is support for ODF, then Microsoft can just say that they're the only ones on the market with a fully compliant implementation, and point out flaws in OO.org...
They put out a new version of "the box" with each service pack, and you can create your own also, with slipstreaming.