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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Menus are an archaic throwback to a time where we had to press keyboard combinations to access anything. They aren't well organized for mouse users, but the fact that they're organized in an "up-down/left-right" fashion makes them perfect for people who use the keyboard to navigate. I find the ribbons make me much faster at formatting documents than the old system of menus. What's really nice is that I don't have to enter 4 sub menus just to insert a math equation or a symbol into my work. And the visual table insertion tool is really useful for those of us who don't want to think about how many, just how it should look.
Seriously, if you keep one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard, it's much faster to create equations and documents in Word than in OpenOffice. I used to be a staunch OpenOffice supporter, but it's nice to not have to memorize keywords and keypress combos just to be halfway efficient at writing documents.
$200.00 is $200 well spent for me.
SRSLY.
'... 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?
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.
I know I've posted this before, but MS actually has a presentation about why they made the decisions they did with the Ribbon, and it was persented at MIX last year. They talk about all the usability and UI research that they did on Office 2003 that caused them to develop the ribbon for 2007, and then they spend some time talking about how they came up with the idea and worked out the details of the ribbon.
It's an interesting presentation if you work on UI design and have some time, or are curious as to why the hell they went to the ribbon.