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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Pehaps you could check your bells and wistels in Open Office spellchecker before posting ?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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 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.
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