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Office 2010 Technical Preview Leaked
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft was planning on giving out the Office 2010 Technical Preview to select testers in July on an invite-only basis. Office 2010 will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and both flavors have been leaked to torrent sites and the like. Multiple screenshots of each application are available. '... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'"
Is this really a mistake or is it a clever marketing ploy to get this into the hands of everyone who is running the Windows 7 Release Candidate (which is the Ultimate version, btw). Get 'em hooked now, and then when the preview version expires hope that turns into sales ...
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
I've gotten used to the ribbon by force, but Im still not the biggest fan. I find the location of alot of commands to be counter intuitive. For example, no Page Setup in the print option from the Office Orb item. Office 2007 introduced alot of good features such as saving as a PDF but I wish they would give users the option of collapsing the ribbon back in to proper menu's for consistency with every other app not made by Microsoft. Its great they are trying something different but seem to have little buy in from software vendors, otherwise all apps would be ribbons instead of menus
was for developers to stop creating their own interfaces for things like printing or saving files. Our applications would be more usable if we just used the underlying platform's routines and conventions.
I wonder whether Office turning its back on Windows UI conventions isn't a long term hedge against the desktop OS monopoly collapsing. Without a monopoly, is Windows worth the effort and cost for Microsoft?
Imagine that Windows fails. Office remains an economically important platform. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a return to the days of dedicated word processing hardware, with devices that "run office".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Outline mode? I know they want to add it to Write but I didn't think it was there yet. Until then, OO is useless for anything longer than a page or two.
I know Office extremely well... Or at least I used to. With these latest releases, it's like the developers have taken magic mushrooms and decided to visit Venus. Seriously, what's going on? Why has everything changed? Who are these changes designed to help? Why did they decide to abandon the system of menus that's been in service since 1984? Just because they've been in service since 1984? That's like Ford abandoning the idea of a steering wheel because it's been used in cars since 1900. When I look at things like this, I see how far from the straight and narrow Microsoft has strayed. They are really losing all track of what's important to users. They've just lost touch completely. I'll say one thing for Bill Gates, and one thing only, but the guy could keep his organization together and produce some half-decent software. Ballmer's just a nutjob who's steering the company into the ground.
No thanks.
Notepad has always been all I've needed. If I need something else, I code it.
"ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake."
Who cares if it's consistent; it still seriously overshadows all the other good things Microsoft has done to Office.
TFA should have read, "the ribbon still sucks, and now it's on every application."
FTFY.
And you get what you pay for. Like bugs guaranteed to put you at risk for losing saved data, discovered in beta, but released anyway without being fixed. The mother fuckers responsible should have lost their job... oh wait, it's open source. Who cares. If you value your time and work you're probably better off buying Sun's Star Office. For typing notes to grandma, OO is great.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
Everything I need is in OpenOffice, and at a WAY better price!
That may be the case for you, but the fact is there is nothing along the lines of Microsoft Vizio in OpenOffice, and the OpenOffice Calc is simply not up to par with Microsoft Excel. The word processing is great in OpenOffice, but for some things OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Go ahead, flame me, mod me down. But I'm sticking with Microsoft Office. I probably won't update to 2010 anytime soon (I just updated to 2007 when I had a chance to pay only $20 for it). Microsoft is pain, .docx is a dick move, but the fact remains that overall, for the advanced user, M$ Office is better. And yes, I do have an Ubuntu computer as well as a Windows computer and I have used OpenOffice and I am not a fanboy of Microsoft.
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot. It all seems to be centered on "but they changed it".
Slashdot is an technology community: we're the people who're either instigating change, or are always putting ourselves on the bleeding edge. We accept the fact that we often have to relearn things, because we then gain the advantages of progress.
Ribbon's a really good example. Once you're used to it, you'll find it so much easier to use than the old system that you'll never want to go back.
For example, take Excel 2007. One of the most common functions in Excel is creation of pretty reports using tables and charts. With Ribbon it's so much easier to create and use tables. The interface is fantastic. Far superiour to the old menuing system. The way that they've build the seperation of symantics and style, an made is easy to use is just fantastic. I mean, you've got an cell in an spreadsheet which contains faulty data.
Like most slashdotters I was suspicious at first. You can't help but be after hearing such bad press. However within a day of actually using it, the benefits were clear.
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
Probably the only thing that can be counted on is that some to many of the changes will change again by the time the official release comes out. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, just that it tends to happen with most large programs/suites. Release early preview, get feedback, make some changes, release preview 2, etc. Actually, I guess that would probably put it into the "good" category.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Read my post again - everything I need is in OO. Everything you need is not.
Welcome to the world of free software - you get to choose.
And why should you be modded down or flamed? You make valid points - for some things OO doesn't cut it, that is true, but for everything I (and everybody I know who uses it) need OO cuts it very well.
Btw if you do not need MSAccess you can run Office very well on that Ubuntu PC of yours if you have Crossover for Linux (I prefer it to WINE.)
Have a nice day, and here's to you plunking that Windows install very soon!
Unless you are a gamer - the "other" geek ;)
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Pehaps you could check your bells and wistels in Open Office spellchecker before posting ?
Psst! You're flaming him/her/it. Gently, but nevertheless. The bolded "you" is the tip-off.
As a power user of Word and Excel I find the inclusion of a native 64 bit version to be very welcomed indeed.
Excel 2007 added some much needed features that has truely turned it into a portable database program, whereby increasing the amount of rows from 64k to over 1 million, and from 256 columns to over 10k among other notable changes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx#Office2007excelPerf_BigGridIncreasedLimitsExcel
Like most people, I was apprehensive of the ribbon UI however after about 2 weeks of solid use I fell in love with it. Microsoft really nailed it, something had to be done given the shear amount of features available in a modern editor.
I hope to see some innovation from the OOo team to give their program a fresh face although I was impressed to see some improvements in their 3.1 release.
Have you tried Dia as an alternative to Visio? I've used Visio myself in the past, but it seems that Dia does just as much as I ever did with Visio.
He could have. But I don't know of many people who type into their Office application of choice rather than just their browser or a lightweight pad when posting.
Why do I hate the Ribbon.
It took me about 2 months to get used to the UI differences between Windows 2003 and OpenOffice.
At 9 months and counting- I still havn't regained my productivity in Office. There are some things which I just haven't figured out a quick way to do again.
AND- ever since it was installed my laptop went from being a speedster to being a dog.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Huh?
Vizio isn't part of any of the Office suites. It's effectively a completely separate package.
Anyway, OpenOffice Draw has no equivalent in the MS collection and is arguably much more useful to the average user.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Cedric: Why don't you want to wear the ribbon?
Kramer: Why should I?
Cedric: You have to, everyone is.
Kramer: That's why I don't want to.
While I agree with you about Excel (I use Excel at work, Calc at home), the difference doesn't tend to be significant. I find life a little smoother with Excel, but there's nothing I fundamentally can't do in Calc relatively easily. Excel has handy features which make day to day jobs easier, but they're all features that exist in a lesser form in Calc. I could live with Calc no problem.
I've never used Vizio, and I prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word. Powerpoint and Impress are near as dammit for what I need, and I rarely have call to use the rest.
Bearing in mind that OpenOffice is free (beer, speech, etc.), I find the comparison very favourable.
'... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'
Meh. What we really want to know is: How's the ODF compatibility?
Looks like they can't generate enough commercial interest and have had to upload it as a torrent as with Windows 7, Windows ME 2 (Vista) BIOS hack etc.
Sry, just installed windows7 rc, and I don't have everything in yet :/ lol, including my bootloader :p
www.aleo.no
Have you tried Dia as an alternative to Visio?
Dia is off to a great start (I use it myself), but it's got a long way to go to catch up with Visio. The interface is not as intuitive (sort of the GIMP syndrome), and it needs a library of shapes designed by good artists.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
"If I need to read the manual before I can use the new version of X, the interface is crap". That's what I have against the ribbon. Thankfully, I rarely have to deal with MS Office.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
In my experience, the Ribbon is a vast improvement over the 'old' UI. Sure, the 'old' UI wasn't broken, but neither were steam engines.
I was really hoping to lambast MS for getting it wrong again with change for the sake of change, but I really think they got it right this time.
Microsoft had a program in Office 2000 (Premium Edition) called PhotoDraw. Apparently, it was not popular enough as Microsoft discontinued PhotoDraw.
The preview site http://www.office2010themovie.com/index-hd.html requires Silverlight. I refuse to install yet another plug-in. Hope Microsoft doesn't require Silverlight to use Office 2010.
My browser (called "Firefox") has a spellchecker...
No sig today...
The old way is broken, menubars and static toolbars do not scale well to all the fancy functionality wanted in a modern office suite!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Keep in mind that for the longest time something excel could do that calc couldn't was determine the linear regression for a set of data and display that regression equation on the graph. That's a fundamental difference I've encountered that's forced me to use Excel in the past. Open office can now display the regression equations on the graph but there are bound to be more fundamental differences out there.
That may be the case for you, but the fact is there is nothing along the lines of Microsoft Vizio in OpenOffice.
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Why do we hate the ribbon? Because it's dynamic.
Microsoft sees that as a plus: customize the UI based on what Office thinks the user is trying to do. Nice, in theory. But it depends on a level of application telepathy that doens't exist. (Yet?)
Users see it as a minus: the commands they want aren't always where they expect to find them, so they end up wasting productive time trying to find them. More than a little frustrating when you have a deadline bearing down on you.
If Office did a better job of reading the user's mind, the Ribbon would rock. But since that's not likely to happen, Microsoft should go back to UI Design 101: a good UI is a consistent UI.
Don't suprise users by capriciously moving tools, or they'll hate you forever. Which is pretty much where 90% of Office '07 are right now.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Expression Design is their equivalent program. I guess it targets Adobe Illustrator more than OpenOffice Draw.
However, their "Mac support" is a copy of Parallels. Sorry, that isn't going to work.
He could have. But I don't know of many people who type into their Office application of choice rather than just their browser or a lightweight pad when posting.
Ugh. That just reminded me of all the times I'd open up a word document that was sent as an email attachment that just said something like "Project meeting today at 2:00."
Dual Opteron < $600
Considering I'm not really a heavy Excel user, but I do occasionally create tables and charts.
In my experience, it could not be 'much easier' with the Ribbon as it wasn't hard before the ribbon.
Having used both I can confirm that it really isn't 'Much Easier' to do it via the ribbon because it really wasn't hard and only took one more click in the old version. (2003)
If you think this new interface is 'far superiour' you have become a fanboy. Its not really a lot different, they mostly just jumbled up the toolbar by craming the menu and the toolbar together.
The reason most of slashdot's problem with it is 'because they changed it' is because thats really all they did. To anyone who knew how to use the products before hand its an annoying change that costs people time. For people who think they've made things easier, all thats happened is that you bothered to take the time to look around for a change and find features.
I've spent a couple years using 2007 now, I still hate it. From reading your post, I can say that your problem is that you never really knew how to use Office in the first place, so now that you've been hit in the face with a 2x4 of change you finally bothered to look into it more. This is not good if it happens to everyone.
People who go crazy with Office 'Features' make documents that are fucking shit to work with.
People who use many features in Word and Excel as a general rule are doing it wrong. Playing with all your fonts, sizes and such in Word is generally a sign you're doing it wrong. You use standard styles so the document can be restyled later as needed or converted to another format. Instead people like you who have suddenly found the ribbon start setting fonts, colors, sizes and other formatting options on the text itself trying to make it look like YOU think it should look, even though most of you couldn't pass highschool english if you're life depended on it.
And I'm really happy that people are finding Excel's features, thats all I needed. Documents that are basically CSV's being turned into something akin to a powerpoint with a bunch of retarded charts and effects that matter not to the data nor do they present it in a better way, they just detract from it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Need to insert a column or row in Excel? Go to the tab labeled Insert and...
Looking at the screenshots Visio is not present - only "Visio Viewer". Perhaps it'll be an additional-cost addon?
Same applies to Groove (not that anyone I know uses it). Its not listed in the installer list. Possibly this is a good thing.
As for Excel, fair enough, excel is pretty powerful. However I think that is a problem. If you need all that power with it scripting and macros and so on, you're creating the worst kind of monstrosity spreadsheets that should never, ever have been created in the first place.
Desperately trying to make it seem like anyone still cares..
I bet it's not even going to get pirated. Pirates only make duplicates where it makes money, and I'm not sure anyone will care. Which is a good thing IMHO.
Insert
Visio isn't part of any of the Office suites. It's effectively a completely separate package.
Did you even look at the screenshots in the article that clearly show Visio as part of Office 2010 in the Start Menu? There's a difference between "part of the Office suites" and "included in the Office suite that most people have." And the fact that only a few advanced users use Visio just goes to further my point.
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them.
Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
It was squirted.
C|N>K
I guess you don't need calendaring functionality that works with your Blackberry. Business users need that capability, especially to interoperate with our business systems.
I can see how OpenOffice is useful for the average college student, though.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Not to mention the fact that Dia has has stability issues of late on Windows.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
In Greece its use is negligible, as in "OpenOffice: Is this the new name of MS office? really?"... on the other hand we always are at least a couple of years behind the real world. :)
Fortune Rota Volvitur
*blink*
I can see somebody used to the old software being temporarily slowed down finding functions in new software.
But I just don't believe you when you claim you have to read the manual to use the new version.
If someone isn't familiar with the terminology for these things it's a pain in the ass. Click the big multi colored button thing. Click the icon that looks like..., no the other one..., no to the left of that.
Menus were a lot easier to describe to people.
Vizio is not included with any version of Microsoft Office, but Draw is an alternative to MS Publisher (which DOES come with Office Professional). Sure, Draw is substantially different than Publisher IMO, but it's competing for the same mind share.
I love OO -- Writer is a fantastic word processor. There are even certain things it does better IMO (the way it handles containers/tables, built-in PDF support and support for alternative formats among other things...)
But OO just isn't suitable to compete against MSO Professional for people who actually use the extra junk that Professional comes with. There's no Outlook alternative, for example. Using Thunderbird as an IMAP alternative does *email* fine, but you can forget meeting scheduling, calendaring, sharing contacts and tons of other junk. (including a lot of proprietary MS BS) People really do use this stuff though.
While I believe Writer is the most viable alternative to anything in the MSO suite, it too, has its shortcomings. MSO takes the lead in usability and polish with things like grammar checking, being able to hold the Shift + CTRL keys and selecting separate swaths of text or cells at once, commenting is clearer and more visible and so many other 'little things'.
I think the bottom-line is though, OO does everything *most* people (Read: Home users & some businesses) need out of the box... and it's free.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
The Nazis had ribbons that they made the Jews use instead of standard menus
I use OpenOffice Draw as an alternative to Visio. I'm able to make good looking flowcharts and network diagrams and save them to PDF. Works great for what I need it for. Colleagues have never had a negative comment regarding the diagrams etc.
It's odd how little need I have for spreadsheet software. I don't know where I'm going wrong that I don't get to use one more often :) As a network engineer and administrator, I still find the only value for me in a spreadsheet is doing my monthly finances (very simple) at home. Once in a while I'll use Calc to format some cvs file before importing to a database. I guess I've also built up some service quotes in a spreadsheet, but Calc was good enough for that as well, and the resulting PDF looked great, rather professional even.
I have several customers whose CEO/CFO know spreadsheets. They don't have the budget to have database (even Access) people on staff to adjust the interface when they want some numbers.
It's totally the wrong way to go, but telling the guy who signs the checks that *he* has to change is not the best way to keep your job. All the recommendations, presentations and examples don't change the fact that the owner is comfortable with it.
C'est la vie.
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio network diagrams are the currency used in many IT procurement departments.
Dual Opteron < $600
no open office's database program is not where near (although a step in the right direction) there and mysql is overkill (not to mention not a form / report engine)... import from access is approximative (no forms, no queries, no reports)... let alone writing in the format. You'll say why... because it makes it impossible to interact with legacy databases... so impossible to transition... and a lot of people will say... well if it ain't broke, dont fix it.
Of course you can use OLEDB with mysql as a datasource within access to migrate... but it's a one way conversion... you can't export to access (well easily at least)
I agree also that dia is a good start... but needs lots of work, particularely in usability
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
If you have to read the manual to get the Ribbon, you're beyond help. You'd be just as confused by any other computer UI, and probably most household appliances.
Comment of the year
People just don't do it. The application should take human behavior into account.
I handle support calls for a large office. Things like this happen all the time. A user will work on a new document for hours and not save it at all. They close the application they are working in and when the application asks them if they want to save the document they inadvertently hit No. The user screwed up. However, it would be nice if their error were recoverable in some way. It would be great to grab the unsaved file from some temporary location C:\usererror\backup.
Would you mind posting examples of your OO.o network diagrams? I was looking for examples a while ago and couldn't find any good ones. Also, do you just use generic shapes or have you found a set of images that work together?
Dual Opteron < $600
The point isn't that we (people writing long documents) *need* it, the point is that having it saves *by far* enough time and effort to make up for the purchase of Microsoft Office.
The entire "it's not there but you don't *need* it" argument completely misses the point. There are a hundred things in my house I don't *need* (plumbing, wall sockets, lighting, cable TV hookup, phone hookup, insulation), but I'd never move into a house that didn't have them. Would you?
Comment of the year
Can one develop addins to Open Office, like for Excel?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
You would think then that Excel is at least accurate (links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric )? Or that it's possible to install some other software alongside OOo, to have Visio equivalents? ;p
Now, more seriously...
What you say is of course valid - some people absolutelly require certain funcionalities of MS Office (though I do wonder sometimes what they did before those features? ;) ).
But...this in NO WAY explains the dominant position of MS Office on the market. Heck, even OpenOffice is total overkill - vast majority of people I know have (pirated) MS Office installed only so they can:
a) Create horrible presentations with Powerpoint. Those things should be banned.
b) Write horribly looking things in Word. Haven't ever heard of styles (when I tell them, some of them like the idea, but nobody actualy adopts it); all formatting is done with tab, spacebar and enter. Something between Wordpad and Abiword, in functionality, would be enough for them.
c) Use Excel as a...weird kind of simple database. I believe it doesn't really matter which kind of modern spreadsheet software is used for that...
PS. Perhaps we should really look at the limited/boneheaded ways in which MS Office is really used in the wild; and build the alternative on conclusions.
One that hath name thou can not otter
First off, I haven't played with it for days, I've been swearing at it for the last 6 months.
If you're a beginner user of don't write long docs or have spreadsheets that have not too much special in them, or have Powerpoint with not too much thinking, fine.
However, when you have been using the Office suite for some serious doc work where you use a lot of functionality, doc variables and on top of that you're using keyboard shortcuts because a mouse slows you down - well, forget the ribbon. Add to that the help "enhancements" which means it now suffers the Google effect if you're trying to find something (search for one thing and find 1000 irrelevant entries to wade through) and you can see why I lack your enthusiasm.
Where it gets interesting is that I'm not the only one, and if MS didn't make it impossible to buy the "old" version we would have switched back - the whole office apart from some people that mainly live in Powerpoint.
I would LOVE to go back the old way. The net loss of productivity this new version has caused with this rubbish has quadrupled the total cost of the product. So we're heading towards OpenOffice..
Insert
If you were looking for the file menu, didn't you notice the orb in it's place was glowing (fading to brignt orange and back) until you click on it for the first time?
Why does everyone have to hate any changes to something they think "is the way it should be?" I for one, have gotten used to the ribbon. sure there are changes, but there's also a fully interactive tutorial right there on the help tab that shows where options have moved to. "you used to click here, then here, then here.. now you just click here."
Not to mention the fact that now EVERY option is available through the keyboard? try hitting alt and see what happens! you can even script, or macro commonly used functions. and the quick access toolbar is even better... if there something ou use a lot, make your own shortcut! alt+4 is WAAAAY faster than "alt-f>p>r>tab tab tab"
Why is it that people fear change so much? God, people, grow some (proverbial) nuts and learn something new.
Vizio isn't part of any of the Office suites. It's effectively a completely separate package.
First of all, it's spelled "Visio." Secondly, it's not part of any of the Office suites (oddly; you'd think it would be in Ultimate at least), but it is an "Office product." So... there's that. Thirdly, it's by far the least-popular Office product, so... there's that as well.
Anyway, OpenOffice Draw has no equivalent in the MS collection and is arguably much more useful to the average user.
All the Office applications have vector drawing tools in them. There's also Publisher, which seems the closest to meeting this requirement...
Of course, if you don't care about the brand, you can get Expression Design, which is a pretty full-featured vector drawing program from Microsoft. It's just in the Expression suite, not the Office suite.
Comment of the year
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio is a type of vector-art program specifically designed for making diagrams. The textbook example would be a flowchart, but the most common usage seems to be things like network diagrams. (Of course I worked with network people...) It has dozens of "sets" of shapes for use with any kind of diagramming out there, and they all have the correct "connectors" and text labels and such in-place, so it's really easy to create a powerful diagram from scratch.
It has a lot of cool features, for example, you can point it at a SQL database and it'll automatically populate a diagram with all your tables and relations. I use that one all the time.
You can also script it, like you can most Office applications, to make horrible abominations unto God: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Customer-Friendly_System.aspx
Comment of the year
Dia also has some presentation issues on the export.
I had to scramble to get some diagrams out and pulled it down.
If I had to pay for Visio I would probably stick with dia, but since the company purchases said software...
I'm actually fairly open to any visio/dia competitor if anyone has any suggestions (free or otherwise).
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Then you must not have used the ribbon with the keyboard. Hit the ALT key and EVERYTHING is available through the keyboard. direct to the function you're looking for.
Want to search a library for a citations to insert? SCL. 4 keys in total. who uses that function? I don't know. I'm sure someone does. it's a big button, which you DO NOT HAVE TO USE THE MOUSE FOR.
The only thing you have to take your hands on the mouse for now, is to play solitaire.
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Software is designed for actual human beings. Actual human beings, in generally, don't hit ctrl-s every 2 minutes by instinct, therefore your software should cope with that usage scenario. Posts like yours just demonstrate why open source applications usually have horrible usability. Sure it's a small point, but those small points add-up.
Comment of the year
I bet CTRL+S still works.
So is any office app... If you've got to write three pages you'll definitely need LaTeX :)
It bothers me when the open source community benefits so much from Apple and Microsoft's UI research. I mean OpenOffice's interface *is* Office 97-- the amount of work saved by the OpenOffice team because they had a model to work from is tremendous. Nobody's going to fault you for using other people's good ideas in your own products, but you could at least appreciate it, instead of just slamming Microsoft for it.
Microsoft may be no good at it, but who's better? Adobe's recent UI "innovations" have been criminally-bad. Apple's made some good progress with their iWork suite, but the unfortunate fact is that Pages has a simple UI because it's a simple product without a lot of features.
(And this next new idea you're slamming will undoubtedly make its way into open source products any day now, at which point it will become "innovative" and "brilliant." to the Slashdot hordes.)
Comment of the year
Recently, I've become a heavy user of Autodesk products, mainly Inventor and AutoCAD Mechanical - and in the 2010 version, which came out a month ago (yeah, someone must have made a prank with the wall calendar at the Autodesk offices and they didn't notice until it was too late), they switched to ribbons. So, Inventor 2010 looks just like Microsoft Office, with the big icon in the corner and so on - thus the look is there, but the feel, it's different. They dropped most of the context-driven dynamic ribbon failure and just add a new tab when applicable, but the core set of tabs stays the same in a much wider context. Moreover, the tools are actually in right places and properly grouped. Oh, and for anyone used to the old ways, there was an option to switch to the old-style interface, I think. But I didn't, after trying out the ribbons - they are really well-done and speed things up a lot.
So, the ribbons themselves are quite a good idea, if implemented properly, it's just the MS Office that doesn't use them to their full potential.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
When my workplace "upgraded" to Office 2007, performance became abysmal. Powerpoint is now awful, and Excel is slow, too. Navigating slides is now an exercise in patience. (The performance of Vista, now available on XP!) Any word on whether Office 2010 can bring back reasonable performance?
A business coach friend said he can spend 3 hours plodding through MS Office 2007, or he can switch to his Mac and do the same thing in 1 hour. I also found that the ribbons are a total waste of time, so I switched to OpenOffice and it felt like bliss, because the fscking things are where they fscking are so you can fscking find them again the next fscking time...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What he means is "if I have to use Help to use the ribbon", and at that point *HE* is no longer beyond help, "Help" is. Now it is "online", your simple quest for that elusive facility turns into ANOTHER complete time waster: trying to figure out which of the gazillion answers the one is you're looking for. Try finding "document variables" (I keep using this as an example because it's about the most stupid thing I've come across).
You will eventually find that it's no longer a 2 step jump - not until you've waded through about 4 levels of menu to switch doc properties on. And in that you will find (click + pulldown) eventually that old menu. Which doesn't work as good as it should either.
I like the format preview in Powerpoint, but that's about it. To me, 2007 sucks seven ways to Sunday and beyond. And don't get me started about foreign and multiple language support.
Having said that, OOo isn't devoid of stupid things either, but at least they stay consistent per release. Try doing conditional format in Calc - somehow you need to magically plan ahead and define the format you're going to apply, because you can't do it in the conditional format box. Makes for consistency, but also a huge amount of irritation the first few times you come across this. For the rest it's quite OK to work with, and word prediction in Writer is a lifesaver if you have complex words or foreign names.
Insert
It's not all bad news, though, at least they have left the ONE facility in that OO still lacks - track back cursor. Using shift-F5 you track back the cursor moves so if you just scrolled up to find something it'll take you straight back where you came from.
It's still there, but I guess now I've mentioned it as useful the UI team will probably remove it..
Insert
Easier to use: Maybe, but I find the ribbon a lot slower. My experience is that to some serious job in Excel, you find yourself switching back and forth between tabs all the time. In Word it is not as bad, but I still find it annoying.
The big problem with the Ribbon is that it is insufficiently customizable. In older versions of Office, you could pull frequently used functionality into toolbars, and impose your own ordering and grouping. In comparison the Ribbon only offers the same one-size-fits-nobody solution for everyone. Perhaps it works for the average Office user, but it doesn't work for me.
However, the Ribbon, if an issue at all, is certainly not the biggest problem with the user interface of Office 2007. For example, the biggest downgrade in Excel 2007 functionality is in the pop-up menus for charts. Here you are really slowed down, with functionality scattered around over different pages, and default settings that are inane. And PowerPoint 2007 has a maddingly annoying grid positioning system, which doesn't allow you to put drawn objects where you want them.
For anyone who seriously uses Excel, there is no comparison. I just gave Calc a serious try, and I gave up after a week.
Secondly, there is the issue of compatibility. I cannot go about importing every single dependent spreadsheet or presentation, hoping that all the features came through. I spent some time importing and exporting between the two applications and gave up. Sooner or later, you spend more time fixing the discrepancies rather than working on the real content.
Besides, you cannot very well go to a client executive and email them a presentation made in some open source application when all they have known about is MS Office. Yes, in the ideal, imaginary world that most Slashdotters seem to be a part of, it will happen -- but it is quite impossible in the real world.
MS Office is a thing of beauty - in terms of usability, support and features. OO is great for amateur users, but for those that use Office on a daily basis.
i really hate thes crap plugins. flash was bad enough. now i have to install quicktime and silverlight too. i have promised myself that i won't ever install quicktime and silverlight crap on my system. try as i might i can't expect decent browsing without flash. its become viral. people use it just because they don't know enough javascript.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
And available now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Human beings that have previously worked on awful school computers instinctively hit ctrl-s every minute or two! After losing a couple of documents because the thing froze I learned this habit. I feel dumb when I am making a post somewhere and it gets lengthy and I begin to ctrl-s in the middle of it.
I would use OOCalc if it weren't for the fact that most of our spreadsheets at work are now talking to third party programs via VBA and dlls that the programs ship. There are other things that you just have to use VBA for. Importing a txt file(not a csv but actual text with, like a performance data printout) without having to run it through a separate program to make it a csv, even then, try convincing excel to put the values into merged cells. Anyways, let me know when OOCalc can use a scripting language where the script is embedded in the file, and written in the OOcal and can use libraries from the host system. until then don't expect OOCalc to replace excel in business anytime soon.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
64-bit office application! Something is going wrong in the software industry?
MS has always been a student of the other school of thought, the school that says users do no memorize locations, but read through all the menus every time they use them. Therefore, the primary issue is minimizing the movement of the mouse so that the time saved can be used in comprehending and choosing menu commands. This philosophy was the basis of using dynamic menus in applications, that is hiding commands that have not been active in a while so the user, when reading through the commands, will not waste time reading the relatively unused options. This works for some people, either because they do very limited work on the PC and therefore only need a few commands, or do not in fact memorize menus and indeed to hunt for each command, just like some users hunt for each key on a keyboard.
Ribbons are an extension and re-visioning of this philosophy. Some of this is an improvement for some users.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
But I hate OpenOffice, and I love MS Office 2k7.
Now you might think that I was some MS fanboy (I chose my nickname before I got into Linux). But I think most MS products suck compared to their Linux/FOSS counterparts. But until they release Office for *NIX (Hey they did it with IE) I will be content with running a VM for the sole reason of running Office.
Now I will admit that it did take a little getting used to the new Interface but once I did I found it better, and they added some cool features. The Equation editing is vastly improved, as is the list generator.
Also OO spell check sucks, and it lacks a grammer checker(at least in the one I use 2.1). Don't tell me its my job to check a 9 page paper, to find places were it put "The the car" (The way I write my paper tends to make this happen alot, I write a bunch of sub sections then paste them together).
For people who think they've made things easier, all thats happened is that you bothered to take the time to look around for a change and find features.
This is an interesting point; something I've noticed for own software (at my ISV) is that a significant proportion of our users just never, ever 'peruse' the menus (or even if they do, they forget what was there, or where they found something). By adding toolbar shortcuts for various commonly used things, we found they literally seem to think they're 'finding new functionality' because they suddenly easily spot things that were actually there years ago already.
From a software design perspective, there is some redundancy between menus and toolbars - two different ways to access many of the same functions. So I suppose the ribbon was an attempt to combine the two, and I can follow the logic of that idea, sure - see if there's a smart way to remove that redundancy, just like Mac's Doc cleverly removes the redundancy between shortcuts for launching apps and buttons for currently open apps. But with the ribbon, they goofed I'm afraid.
And it would have been absolutely *trivial* for Microsoft to also include a "Use classic menus" option, I really don't understand why they didn't --- they could've just had both "as an option" for a few years transitional period. This must have been a huge management mistake (given the technical ease of doing it, and the ribbon fallout they've had), so the only reason they don't do it now is probably to save face - that would be like admitting it's a failure. Yet there's so much demand for the old menus that some company now makes a living selling a plugin that brings the old menus back, which really tells you just how big the demand for this is (and thus just how bad the ribbons are) - people are willing to pay *extra* money to bring them back.
I've spent a couple years using 2007 now, I still hate it.
Likewise, I spent well over a year using 2007, and still hated it and found it slower. It was really badly done.
I suspect that most people who like it probably just actually like how pretty it looks, and don't realise that aesthetics is not linked to practicality. And you also get a class of users that is naturally kind of 'slow' and patient - these users actually aren't that bothered if some functionality takes slightly longer to access. Thus you get a small minority of people who like the ribbon. The mistake is when they think that because they like it, everybody who disses it has no point whatsoever. It really *is* a worse experience for most people.
Either you're a Microsoft shill, or you never took the couple minutes of effort to use the Customize... feature of many office versions to add your own commonly used feature to a toolbar. The first things I add to any pre-2007 Word tool bar, for example, are Style button, Word Count, Thesaurus, and Paste Special. Those fit my unique needs. To go through 4 sub menus for years to find an often used command rather than implement the provided solution renders anything you say questionable.
Overall I'm betting on shill.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You probably meant WordPerfect (and no, not the Corel variety), but I can forgive people for forgetting such old history.
Does anyone know whether, in Outlook, when you reply to an e-mail, you can selectively get rid of the blue 'quote' line to the left?
Yes, I know it seems nitpicky, but it'sr eally not. In Outlook 2007, they changed things from the previous version. Previously you could un-indent when you wanted to reply to a part of a quite and the blue quote-line would disappear. In 2007, best I can tell it's absolutely impossible to remove that quote line. Unindenting just makes your text appear behind the quote line. Incredibly fucking annoying and I have no idea why MS did it. It basically forces you to put your entire reply above the entire quote now. Dumb dumb dumb.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
If only it didn't take 30 seconds to launch up and gobble all your gigabytes of RAM.
I haven't used Vista, so I can't tell: Is this really the normal icon size for Vista?
http://static.arstechnica.com/2010tp_icons.jpg
I mean, W.T.F.??
Why not require one display per icon? ^^
Why not just put a preview of the file or thing itself an that place?
I just don't get it. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That may be the case for you, but the fact is there is nothing along the lines of Microsoft Vizio in OpenOffice, ...
Oh, Lord, I hate Visio (BTW note the spelling).
We had an department administrator who, among her other failings, would do just about everything in Visio - and then send it to me and say "put it on the web". I'd explain to her how that'd require anyone who viewed it to have Visio; I'd tell her how it's not cross-platform (we're an academic department, we don't provide Office to our students, and even back then a significant number of them weren't using Windows); I'd show her how to make a PDF from Visio so she could send THAT to me since I was on a Mac and couldn't easily view the files myself (this was in the PPC days of Mac, so Virtual PC was something to be avoided when possible). But no, she kept sending me those Visio files and telling me to put them on the web...
She eventually left the department, and I haven't had to deal with a Visio file since then.
Visio may very well have it's place; but the fact that no one in our department has seen a need to use it for the past 5-6 years makes me wonder what its place is.
#DeleteChrome
It looses my data upon the world like Godzilla?
The term "beta" is becoming more and more worthless. We live in the age of the perpetual beta, which is generally completely open, and treated by all like an actual release, with none of the hassle of actually finishing it, or closing the large obvious bugs, at worst it is treated like a general release with relaxed liability for your own bad coding.
When you have a large distribution, and have been in beta for more than three years or so, I don't think your software should really be considered a beta anymore.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I see you arguing that UI should be consistent so you can remember where options are without reading them. Well, I would say that UI is really only needed for people looking for something (in which case dynamic is fine). For people who already know what they want, they would be using keyboard shortcuts anyways which beats the mouse every time.
You are giving my memory far more credit than it deserves -- and in quite a cavalier manner too. To expect me to remember dozens of changes and instantly be able to map between them is asking more than my old mind can -- or should be expected -- to handle. Overall I'd rather stay with any of their older versions than put up with interface change B.S. just for the sake of change. There's not a single new feature I need, yet MS is doing everything they can to force me to spend money upgrading to a system I don't even want.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You will probably not need silverlight for basic programs as word, excel, etc if you do anything that is web based, SharePoint, convert word, excel etc is web pages then yes you will need silverlight.
It amazes me that people are still complaining about the ribbon, especially with arguments such as these. Tough I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise here on slashdot.
The ribbon is not dynamic. At least, not in the way you suggest it is. It doesn't attempt to guess what the user is trying to do, the key tabs stay exactly the same no matter what you do and only the individual groupings or buttons are expanded if there is sufficient screen space.
If your main complaint is regarding the additional tabs which appear when the user selects a certain element, again Office is hardly guessing the user's intent. Simply, when the user clicks on an embedded image, a tab with image manipulation options which would otherwise be hidden in menus or a modal dialog somewhere appears to the right of the default ones. This happens every time the user selects an image, so it's not inconsistent. So if you still have a problem with that, you also probably have an issue with context menus, after all, they also change depending on the type of object the user right-clicks on!
This is not to say that the UI in Office 2007 is perfect, but it's a great improvement over the terrible mess of menus and toolbars which we had in the previous versions. It's hard to say if anything else has been changed in the tech preview release based just on the screenshots, but thankfully they didn't dump the ribbon.
Another simple method is to just copy the diagram and then paste it into Word or any graphics program. The diagram will be converted to a bitmap, then it can be saved as a JPG or GIF.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
So many people haven't even bothered moving to 2007 due to the lack of *useful* new features, why do we care 2010 is coming?
Same story with Vista, there was no real compelling reason to deal with it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you'd read what you're responding to, rather than skimming it and making assumptions, perhaps you wouldn't make such an ass of yourself.
The person you were responding to was complaining not because beta software had bugs, but because *RELEASED* software still had data corruption bugs that had been reported in beta.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them. Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
First of all, I'll concede that 80% figure. If it were any lower no one would ever use the damn thing.
But, it's not "an extra click" the other 20% of the time. In my experience, and that of my cow-orkers, it's more like "roll the cursor over every icon in the current ribbon thet you don't immediately recognize and read the Tool Tip, in case the command you want is cleverly hidden in plain sight, and if you don't find it there, click through ALL the tabs at random and repeat the Tool Tip thing until you stumble upon the command wherever Microsoft decided to hide it, and when that doesn't provide joy, open Help and click on a half dozen different topics until you find the treasure." That's the part that gets really, really old, really, really fast.
Listen, on a certain level, I give Microsoft a lot of credit for trying to simplify their UI, and take it to another level. But as it always is with MS products, the problem is in the implementation. It is NO exageration to say that 90%+ of the people I now and work with who've had the misfortune to be forced to use Office 2007, hate it with a white-hot passion generally reserved for child molesters or GWB. If it works for you, then vaya con dios, muchacho. You're one of the blessed.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Actually, no...
OpenOffice's problem is that it's not really an open source app. Well, sure, the source is open and available, but it was developed as an open source app. It was developed as a commercial app that was later open sourced. What's worse, the company that open sourced it maintains their commercial version of it. This means they're still at the mercy of commercial interests and can't, for example as was the case with Firefox, rewrite it from scratch.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
The perfect example of how MS bloat comes about, at least at par or possibly worse than mails standard in html (and answering before/above the question)...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yeah and there's a nice Notepad clone in Wine :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
For people who already know what they want, they would be using keyboard shortcuts anyways which beats the mouse every time.
Thank GOD for that. That's been the only saving grace for '07 for me: the keyboard shortcuts for the tools I use most don't seem to have changed much, which is good because that's often the ONLY way I've been able to find commonly-used commands. I just don't have the time to play the usual hide 'n' seek game that Microsoft seems to think makes using Office '07 "fun".
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
I don't understand that companies put people in jobs without even elementary instructions on the tools supplied yet it seems to be the rule rather than the exception...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yes, but OpenOffice 4 is not "leaked" yet and OpenOffice has no leakage.
While i agree with you in a point to point comparison with something like excel/calc, what is in OO takes care of 95% of the users, which is most of the market..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And you get what you pay for. Like bugs guaranteed to put you at risk for losing saved data, discovered in beta, but released anyway without being fixed. The mother fuckers responsible should have lost their job... oh wait, it's open source.
I can't wait for you to tell me how many Microsoft (or any other vendor's) programmers have lost their jobs because they introduced a bug that ended up being remotely exploitable (thus getting hundreds of thousands of computers at risk). That's just an example.
Please, enlighten me...
Marketing...
Writers have been using and relying on outlining far longer than word processors have existed. It's a feature which would make OO more usable for a lot of people.
Saying that you don't need it because product X didn't have it is a perverse form of marketing in and of itself.
Expression Design isn't really meant as a general purpose consumer drawing program. It's more focused on high-touch authoring of XAML objects for WPF/Silverlight use.
That said, XAML is just XML, so there are a variety of exporters from other tools. Like this one for Illustrator (Mac/Win)
http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/
Or Kaxaml:
http://www.kaxaml.com/
My video compression blog
"...even though most of you couldn't pass HIGHSCHOOL english if YOU'RE life depended on it." ...well done sir.
That may be the case for you, but the fact is there is nothing along the lines of Microsoft Vizio in OpenOffice
It's not in OpenOffice, but since people are recommending Dia, Kivio in Koffice works well for me, and 2.0 RC runs on Windows (I haven't tried it myself, but I did install KDE on Windows). It comes with a good number of sets of shapes, and can also use Dia shapes. It has a sane 1-window interface like Krita, compared to Dia and the GIMP's mess. And no, I'm pretty sure it only depends on kdelibs, not all of KDE. The windows installer seems to do fine at dependency checking anyway.
I don't know about useless, but Outline mode certainly has made me be a better writer. I wasn't able to use Pages at all because it didn't have a "Normal" (non page preview) mode the first couple of versions. I don't CARE where my page breaks are going to be when I'm doing a 1st draft, because that's not where the page breaks are going to be.
I want to write an outline, then write my words with styles applied, and THEN see how it actually lays out on the page. And then be able to go back to just text without layout, and even back to the outline to rearrange. Being able to switch between those is key to my word processing workflow for longer documents (I've written a couple of books, plenty of whitepapers, and dozens of trade magazine articles).
My video compression blog
You do know you can do the exact same thing in Office 2007, right? They have the quickbar, which you can assign virtually any function to and it's always available, no matter what tab you're on.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
How long before Open Office copy the ribbon interface?
I have everything I need in OpenOffice, and it is better priced too...
Microsoft doesn't sell an office suite.
It sells MS Office as part of a working environment that scales smoothly from the home user to the enterprise.
Microsoft has client side solutions.
It has server side solutions. It has web based solutions.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft the home-use copy of MS Office is the price of the media plus S&H. Microsoft Software Assurance
If you have student ID, the price is $60. The Ultimate Steal
he perfect example of how MS bloat comes about
You can't blame people's stupidity on MS.
Dual Opteron < $600
If, on the other hand, all you do is write little five page or less memos or letters, Office is clearly superior to LaTeX. But then, you would really need to convince me that MS Office saves you any time whatsoever over OpenOffice or KOffice.
Unless, of course, your argument is that Office is faster because you know it already, which really is not valid for the rest of us.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
It bothers me when the open source community benefits so much from Apple and Microsoft's UI research.
And Apple doesn't benefit from BSD?
> Write horribly looking things in Word
Things will always look more or less horrible in Word, regardless. The type-setting engine in Word sucks donkey balls. Unfortunately, Writer isn't any better.
Can't they just license the engine from Latex or something?
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
You actually don't have a lot of things you don't actively or passively use in your house. Maybe you don't use cable and phone hookups, but everything else is used.
I wouldn't care about cable and phone hookups, if I knew that the net connectivity was available by some other means. So if you are using cable internet or DSL, you actually use those things you claim are not important and not *needed*.
Next, OO is not hard to use, and having written quite a few long documents I don't see outline as an essential functionality.
Everyone benefits from everyone, that's the exact point I'm making. The difference is that Apple doesn't look at what BSD's doing and go, "oh that's awful, that's a terrible idea, man it sucks," etc.
Comment of the year
Keyboard commands (and muscle memory) are still available... most old keyboard short-cuts still work. Want to learn the keyboard short cuts? Easy, just press Alt, and the ribbon lights up with all the keypresses that will gain you access to various ribbon tabs and commands.
Additionally you can easily customize keyboard shortcuts and commands to serve your whims.
No, you cannot customize (as in re-arrange) the ribbon itself; however you CAN add frequently used functions to the "quick access toolbar" at the top.
The ribbon works for a great many users, in particular, in making much functionality much more easily dicoverable than before. As for switching menus, I share your perception that this is somehow slower, but I'm beginning to think it's mostly "perception", as really, switching menus and going after items and options in sub-menus, then clicking through dialogs, to other dialogs burried within behind even more buttons was never really that quick either. I think on average it evens out, but it seems slower on the ribbon for some reason. I'd be interested in a study about why that is.
The rest is just an issue of learning curve. Yeah, it was frustrating at first trying to figure out where the hell the options went, or how to convert text into a table, or to work with headers and footers and field codes. But once learned, the ribbon is actually a breeze, and between it and several of the other new UI enhancements, I find working with Word 2007 (my main office app) actually less frustrating than 2003. This is, of course, after getting over that initial learning curve, but that really only took a couple of weeks. There are still a few frustrations I have, but the new ones are essentially balanced out by the lack of some of the older ones I had with 2003 and before.
On the whole, taking all users as a group (new users, casual users, basic users, as well as advanced users and power users), I think the ribbon update is a definite win. Individual users might have issues, but on the whole, it's a better system than the one it replaces.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Well, then you can move on to argument number 2, which is: "why *should* a human have to hit ctrl-S every few minutes?" That sort of automated task is *exactly* what computers are good at-- doing repetitive tasks is exactly what we built computers for in the first place!
If the computer can save 20 minutes of lost work by spending about 100 milliseconds of every minute doing an auto-save, why on God's green earth should it not do that?
So the arguments are, in order:
1) People (generally) don't do it and,
2) People shouldn't have to do it.
Comment of the year
To add a really positive element to OO.o, the Sun presenter console is just incredible! I would never go back to Powerpoint.
Except Office does all those things, *and* has a much easier-to-use interface.
On your point 2: Table of Contents works if your document is laid out correctly. True, Word allows you to lay-out a document in such a way that he ToC won't work, but if you're using Outline mode, you'd break your outline too, most likely.
On your point 4: If you're using Styles the way they're intended to be used, you can easily make document-wide changes like switching from MLA to Chicago simply by changing the associated styles. Again, it's possible to set-up a document incorrectly so this won't work.
Comment of the year
Hmm... Are there any people that have a profession as Productivity Suite User? If no, then there is no such thing as an amateur user.
My primary work tools are OO Writer and OO Impress. And I will be sticking to them.
Actually, Word 2007 does all four of those.
And I'd love to hear how you can "not do a table of contents right." If you say "it gets corrupt after a bunch of edits", that's one thing--but it's also something that's fixed in about two commands.
They didn't ship the PDF export with Office because Adobe sued them to remove. (Yes, your precious "open" format! The current Adobe management is full of asshats.) If you want someone to blame for that fiasco, blame Adobe, not Microsoft!
Despite that, you can easily download and install it-- it's a free add-on: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en
Comment of the year
Next, OO is not hard to use, and having written quite a few long documents I don't see outline as an essential functionality.
When I watched TV back in 1999, I didn't see DVR/Tivo as essential functionality. Now that I've had a DVR, I couldn't even imagine watching TV without it. At no point did I (or anyone) say that outline mode is essential for the creation of large documents, what we're saying is that it makes things so much easier it's worth the purchase price of Word to get it.
If you don't like/use the feature, fine. But you can't fault the people who want it from griping that OpenOffice doesn't have it.
Comment of the year
I'll help you out here with regards to word processing in OO.o. It, too, isn't good enough. It's close, but has some deal-breakers for me:
1) Setting tabs is a hassle because the only way to get them where you want them is to enter the numbers manually. You can drag the markers on the ruler, but they don't snap to logical, easy units like they do on Word and, um, how they did on electric typewriters (yes, I remember those, and probably still know how to use one).
2) Tables. Tables tables tables. This is where both OO.o and Pages (which is a pretty nice little application that is easy to use--handles styles correctly) fall down for me. I use lots of tables in my writing (stats, mostly), and OO.o just doesn't make them easy to use. I used to have a laundry list of complaints, but I've posted the same sentiment many times on Slashdot, so they're out there somewhere. The only one that comes to mind is the weird border behavior where adjacent cells will both be considered as having borders on the same line, so you get instances of doubled or halved lines if you're not careful. It's a mess.
3) It's not Word. This is probably the biggest drawback in and of itself. You have to export to .doc to share anything, and pray to the gods above that everything makes the transition okay. The only way you can be sure, though, is to open the document in Word and check (and fix whatever didn't survive), in which case... Why not just use Word? This is what happened to me, ultimately, at the end of my one-year experiment with OO.o.
So I'll see everything you said and raise you a word processor. OO.o just doesn't cut it.
Ha ha ha.
As Ballmer's toilet slave you got nothing much to do anyway.
No kidding. It's the only sitting implement that Ballmer can't throw.
Hey, I'm not trying to upset, I'm merely pointing out some facts and trying to clear up some FUD. Noone's 'forcing' you to do anything. If you don't want office 2010... DON'T install it.
The tutorial (Getting Started tab) is actually pretty straight forward. it shows the 03 menuing system. you click on the menu you would have used for whatever function you're looking for, then it shows you the 07 interface, and shows you what to clock. it does this via a flash webpage you can leave up in the background, until you get the hang of the new layout.
As far as the DOCX and XLSX new formats, save as gives you the option to save in legacy word documents, PDF, CSV, RTF you name it. For opening, there is a compatibility pack available for free to automatically convert the new format documents into the legacy formats when you open them, and I believe it gives you a link when you try to open a new file to the webpage with the kit download.
You say you would stay with your current version. Go for it. I'm not telling you to upgrade. Some people like the changes. I hated them at first, then I started to figure out how the logic works with how they grouped items. Now, I like it. I sit down with office 03, and have a hard time remembering how to get to certain things, others are automatic. Remember when File manager turned into Windows Explorer? Or how about when the DOS underneath evereything was ditched to make way for NTLDR? You can still run 98 if you really want to, but good luck getting support from the official channels. I ususally use Google as my first line of support when I need it.
Overall point of my first post was simply this: The changes are implemented. Either get used to them, try to embrace them, or don't. Stick with what you like. Personally, I've moved to 2007. But only becase I got a good deal on it, otherwise I would have stuck with 03. (additionally, in my experience, 07 is a bit easier to deploy via group policy)
and I say good day.
The only thing that requires Silverlight will be the Expression Studio, whose purpose is to compose stuff for Silverlight. Besides, everything I've read indicates that Silverlight is more extensible, has better performance, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) has had fewer security problems than Flash has. I'm generally a platform agnostic, but Silverlight seems to be the better plug-in. I think it's going to be stuck with the same problem as Windows itself as Flash is simply too entrenched and near-universally compatible.
I've used OOo since 2005, and I trade documents with Fortune 10 corporation front-line through executive employees for Engineering, Project Management, and Sales consulting work I do. Spreadsheets and live presentations all the time.
I even use a 10 year old laptop (Pentium 3 @ 500mhz and 256MB ram) that has Xubuntu on it to give those live presentations.
Keep in mind that Windows computer to Windows computer often has different fonts installed - so your carefully crafted MSOffice document may paginate differently from one display to another... just like OOo to MSO...
On my Mac, OOo runs very poorly. It locks up, crashes, locks files so next time I try to open them they are read-only, and it scrolls very slowly.
I've actually found myself using MS Office more recently since I have to write 30+ page papers now. Scrolling between pages in MS Office is smooth; scrolling between pages in OOo is clunky, slow, and rough.
I haven't gotten on Windows in a long time now, so I don't know how OOo is working there. Suffice to say, MS Office has (unfortunately) got me switched over because it's better than OOo. Granted, I got a huge student discount (to the tune of "free" at my law school), so cost wasn't much of an issue.
My browser, IE, has a splelchecker, too. Big whoop.
I think it's amazing that you can call me a shill without looking through my posting history.
SRSLY.
OpenOffice Draw is kind of stunted, but it can do a minimal bit of shapes/connectors and such things. To be honest, I haven't every really tried to do more, but it might be interesting. I believe it is actually marketed as a Visio competitor.
Wasn't that the point behind those liberation fonts that Red Hat put out a year or two ago that had the same metrics as Times New Roman and co. Shouldn't they paginate exactly the same?
Lol. Yeah, because prior interfaces for word processors and office suites were in no way modal.
But I just don't believe you when you claim you have to read the manual to use the new version.
You're right, I just gave up. Seriously, I've often switched to new versions of the software without being totally confused by the new interface. That was the first time I had a spend time just to find how to open a document.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Well gee, Open Office is in my start menu, so it must be part of Windows...
Visio must be bought separately from any of the Office suites and actually costs MORE than the entire equivalent suite ($559.95 for Visio Pro compared to $499.95 for Office Pro).
Microsoft choosing to store its icon in the same start menu folder as other Office packages doesn't make it part of the suite. Bundling it would do that.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
A day playing with it?
Um... no. If I buy a copy, I cannot return it. And I will not "pirate" it. So, it's not happening. If it doesn't run on Solaris and Linux, I can't use it. So, it's not happening.
Which means I use OpenOffice.org. With menus. If I have to use MS Office(tm) I, of course, go nuts. Never had the "training" or familiarity.
So, I say, "stuff it". If it isn't OpenOffice.org compatible, take a hike.
Just sayin' We're not all Microsoft users, ok?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Why oh why can't a company the size of Microsoft develop Office for Mac so it works like the Windows version?
At the very least, Outlook and Entourage feature parity would be nice.
-ted
Not Word. Word will convert it to... an OLE embedded Visio diagram.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Kivio is way better than Dia, though not yet at Visio's level.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Word has in theory been able to do these things for several versions, no? But my experience was that it simply didn't work well. Is Word 2007 better behaved? In the past, my every attempt to use auto-numbered and formatted section headings ended badly. In one case (don't recall if it was 2000 or 2003), inserting a table of contents stripped out my bulleted and enumerated lists and removed the formatting and numbering on all my headings. A web search revealed that there was a bug in normal.dot, but since I required a table of contents, I ended up having to manually reformat every bullet list, every section heading, etc. Based on my experience I simply don't trust Word.
Regarding the interface, this is certainly a matter of taste. I agree that Word has a superior interface for most people, but if you're a command line freak comfortable with Emacs/AucTeX, using Word feels like having skewers inserted into your eyeballs.
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Think Dia, but good.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Actually, Microsoft has patented the Ribbon, so open source products can't use it.
Ugh. That just reminded me of all the times I'd open up a word document that was sent as an email attachment that just said something like "Project meeting today at 2:00."
Atrocious! Obviously, they should have used ODF, to prevent vendor lock-in for the archived mail. ~
Unfortunately, openoffice calc doesn't have solver. That alone is a showstopper for me.
Vizio? You say you're sticking to MS Office because you need Visio so much, and you don't even know its name?
Not if you choose Paste Special, then choose Bitmap.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I've never managed to get Word's autonumbering to work correctly in a continuously edited technical document despite many attempts to reset / modify the Heading X styles. The auto-formatting feature in MS Word is the worst culprit. This has always been MS Word's problem from the beginning (I'm currently using Office 2003 out of necessity).
I've never tried Office 2007, didn't want to invest any more energy on learning an incompatible interface on an application that does not deal well with technical documents.
LyX (LaTeX) is great for stuff like auto-numbering, but diagrams are a pain since there's no easy way to edit the diagram by double clicking on it, besides the lack of good diagramming tools that export to EPS format. Visio generates lousy EPS (deliberately?)
FrameMaker was the best of the lot. Unfortunately its market share and numerous bugs during the time Adobe bought it over meant that it's no longer a real contender for most people.
The lack of a British English dictionary has made it a very difficult sell here in the UK. I have had enquiries from quite a few local schools and universities, as well as students, but all I can really tell them is to try V2 which was the last one to support it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wow, did you swallow a Microsoft Marketing Executive?
I have everything i need in SCiTE + LaTeX
slashwhat?
I've tried Dia. It always leaves me wanting more.
I personally switch to Diarama once it is available.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Should've used Notepad 2 for the coding, it has syntax highlighting.
Last time I checked, TeX was free and open-source. It is (C) Donald Knuth, which, I guess, is a problem for Microsoft. If so, Word typesetting will suck forever.
OOcalc allows sctipting in OObasic, Python, Beanshell and Javascript.
I dont know about linking to shared objects etc with OObasic as I use python which has all functionality of regular python.
These can be saved in either mymacros, oomacros or the document itself.
Most Damage is done by people who are AWAKE
Word has in theory been able to do these things for several versions, no? But my experience was that it simply didn't work well. Is Word 2007 better behaved? In the past, my every attempt to use auto-numbered and formatted section headings ended badly. In one case (don't recall if it was 2000 or 2003), inserting a table of contents stripped out my bulleted and enumerated lists and removed the formatting and numbering on all my headings. A web search revealed that there was a bug in normal.dot, but since I required a table of contents, I ended up having to manually reformat every bullet list, every section heading, etc. Based on my experience I simply don't trust Word.
I've never had that problem.
I agree that Word has a superior interface for most people, but if you're a command line freak comfortable with Emacs/AucTeX, using Word feels like having skewers inserted into your eyeballs.
Ok, so you agree that the vast, vast majority of people are better off with Word than "AucTeX" (whatever the hell that is). So what's the debate about, again?
Comment of the year
For anyone who seriously uses Excel, there is no comparison. I just gave Calc a serious try, and I gave up after a week.
Please, please document your findings and either file bugs and feature requests at the OOo issue tracker, or contact me and let me help you file the issues. You can email me (my gmail username is the same as my slashdot username), phone me (+972-54-788-1700), or use this contact form:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/message.php
Thanks!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Here is the auto-save feature request:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=102041
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Well, here's my Ribbon complaint unrelated to change: it requires two clicks, rather than one, to access something on a tab you aren't on. The way it worked before, the menus contained everything (two clicks, if you know where things are and you turned that horrible autocollapse off), the toolbars contained the things you mostly used (one click). So most of the time, you can do what you need in a single click without the Ribbon there. With the Ribbon, it takes one click if you're doing something on the same tab as you were using before, and two otherwise; for me, that averages to more clicks on average. So someone who knew where things were under the old UI, especially if they set up their toolbars correctly, could be more productive than someone using the new UI who also knows where everything is. I'm not sure how much easier (or harder) the Ribbon makes things to find in the first place; you'd need a large community of people who had never used either version of Office before to test. But for people who already know where things are, it's a disadvantage. (For all I know, the Ribbon's better for people who never bothered to learn; if that's the majority of Office users, the Ribbon may be an improvement overall. But it isn't better for me!)
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
You've gotta be using some pretty advanced MS-specific stuff in Excell for the spreadsheets to not be portable between the two platforms. That sounds like a bug in your spreadsheets, not the application.
Yes, MS Office is one of the better examples of well designed and well integrated software. My biggest problem is with the obvious policy of planned obsolescence that Microsoft has with this software package (the GP mentioned this with ".docx was a dick move"). This practice is at /best/ unethical.
Migration to OOo does require some changes, but in the long run, it means you won't have to re-learn the software every few years because of vendor lock-in.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Collaboration aside (and that's a big thing to throw out), why would you prefer exporting to .doc instead of to .pdf? I would suggest you try LaTeX if you really use that many tables and figures, but even if you don't make that leap it would be easy enough to make sure the format you share works (in the sense of readable with copy/paste-able text) by using .pdf output.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot.
For 25 YEARS we knew where things were in the menu system that was in use since 1984. The standard toolbars were nearly identical for a couple of decades also, and they didn't move around so we always knew where the toolbar icons were without thinking about it.
In contrast, the ribbon only shows a small subset of icons at any one time, and we have to keep jumping around between ribbons in order to reach the icons that we need to use, which is a big waste of time compared to the old workflow with toolbars and menus. Worse is the fact that many of the new locations of things don't make any logical sense based on our 25 YEARS of experience with previous versions of Office, so we have to waste a huge amount of time learning the new setup.
Bottom line, the ribbons don't work well unless you happen to think exactly like the designers of the ribbons. Even so, the ribbons would be fine except for the fact that we are not allowed to fallback to the familiar toolbars and menus since the menus have been hidden and reorganized and the old toolbars have been completely stripped out. They took away the tools that made sense to us and gave us new tools that don't make sense to us, without giving any of us a choice.
They took a quarter CENTURY of user experience and threw it out the window. And you blame us for hating the ribbon? Wouldn't you be frustrated if you bought a new car and it had a trackpad instead of a steering wheel, and there was no option to install a traditional steering wheel to use while you learn the new interface?
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
A day? I've spent a YEAR, and so have many other people I know, and we still hate it. You just happen to like it because you can see some sort of logic behind it. Many of us cannot see any usefulness to the way it is set up. We hate the way that it constantly hides things from us. We hate the fact that each set of buttons is different and quite often the set that we need is not the one that is visible. It's really quite annoying.
This is NOT one of those cases where the new way is really significantly better than the old way. It's not nearly better enough to justify forcing EVERYONE to conform to the new interface immediately while completely removing the old interface. A massive and forced interface change is a perfectly good reason to hate a new interface after you've spent as much as two thirds of your life doing things the old way. Doesn't really matter if the new interface is better or not, it will always be frustrating to be FORCED to use it without the appropriate time and training necessary to use it efficiently.
If they had just allowed us to continue using the "classic" interface for at least one version, I don't think anyone would have had any problem with the ribbon at all.
Microsoft developer Jensen Harris wrote a great series of posts in 2006 on the thinking behind the ribbon.
It wasn't a management-requested "make everything new again", nor was it a fit-and-finish trick to make Office look different from Windows. According to Harris, it was done because:
1. The top 10 requested features in Office were already in Office - but nobody could find them.
2. Office usage doesn't follow the 80/20 rule. You and I use only a tiny portion of Office - but it's a different tiny portion.
Expanding on #2: In Word 2003, the most-used command (Paste) is only 11% of the total command usage. Second place (Save) gets only 5%. And it goes down from there; the top 5 commands together get 32%. The usage difference between #100 (Accept Change) and #400 (Reset Picture) is about the same as the difference between #1 and #11 (Change Font Size).
Essentially, Office was now big enough - and needed to be big enough - that menus and toolbars didn't scale. That's why they've kept trying new UI metaphors: task panes, adaptive menus, etc. But they all made it feel more bloated and confusing, and took up too much real estate.
So the ribbon is their hail-Mary pass; they're trying to reinvent the basic UI to make it more discoverable. I think it works. I'm no Microsoft fan, and I've used every version of Office that ever was, but I've grown to like the ribbon enough that I use Office 2007 via Fusion when I could have OOo for free. The real test: when I haven't used a feature for months, I can usually find it in the ribbon without Googling for it.
WORKSFORME.
For anyone who seriously uses Excel, there is no comparison. I just gave Calc a serious try, and I gave up after a week.
Don't be concerned... after the socio-economic meltdown is complete, there will be no use for your silly spreadsheets, and then you can switch!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth