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Hands-On Preview of Microsoft Office 2010
Barence writes "Microsoft has announced full details of Office 2010 and its plans for an accompanying suite of online applications, and PC Pro has been given special access to a technical preview. Contributing Editor Simon Jones gives his initial verdict on the new suite, concluding that there's 'still a long way to go in terms of fit and finish ... but overall Microsoft has made good strides in increasing usability, cohesiveness and collaboration.' This is followed by detailed first looks at Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010, with Outlook certainly looking to be the greatest beneficiary. And finally, a gallery of screenshots shows off all the new interface touches in Office 2010, including Outlook's conversation view, Word's picture-editing function and the new cut-and-paste preview option."
Any traction on solving or at least improving Microsoft's ODF implementation? The last time I checked, there were serious issues with the implementation.
By the way, how does Office 2007's "Save-As-PDF" feature compare to the real thing?
me neither.
office 97 had enough features already. the bloat continues ever forward.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Good Lord, the business hardly deployed Office 2007 with big troubles, we just got used to the new interface absolute madness and yet again more changes :(
Will this crazy running for "the new" ever end?
Word's been around, what, 20 years? Guys, if you want to provide maximum usability to use users, leave it alone. We've all figured out how the app works, what the keyboard shortcuts are, where in each menu our most-used commands are, and how to use mail merge. STOP CHANGING IT. Every time you change how Word works, all you're doing is decreasing my usability and needlessly taking away time I could otherwise spend doing actual productive work.
Full disclosure: I've been trying to avoid Office for the past year or so, relying on Apple's Pages instead - in part simply because Word is a bloated beast, and in part because Microsoft just keeps pointlessly adding useless crap and changing things to give the illusion of "innovation".
#DeleteChrome
â¦but can PowerPoint incorporate BOTH a landscape and portrait setting in the same slideshow yet? Or can users rearrange the Quick Access Toolbar by dragging the icons around instead of the retarded way of going into the Options/Customize area? Or Excel open with the page break showing, as in dotted lines showing the margins?
I find that hard to believe.
Well it's a good thing that your incredulity doesn't override statistical evidence.
How many of those people they asked actually used office as a mission critical application in their day to day use? In my admittedly small sample, nobody that I work with at all enjoys using the ribbons, which is about 5 that I have spoken to about it.
In my larger sample of about 30-50 people almost all of them enjoy the new GUI and once they start using Office 2007 for a few weeks they never want to go back to 2003. I guess this is why anecdotes aren't good evidence of something.
Have you set foot in a typical large business lately? These people live and die by these things, on -TOP- of using wikis and such. A big part of it is that you can't really link a customer waiting to sign a 15 million dollar contract a link to a wiki, and the accounting department can't do their "one shot deal" calculations on their blog.
I could have been happy using WordPerfect 5.1 for the rest of my life -- it did everything I need a word processor to do.
-kgj
Mod parent -1 incredibly naive
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
In my very humble opinion, and as an additional (possibly worthless) data point, people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything (like me).
The rest of the demographic that tends to use Office software - you know, the millions of corporate users that still have the default background, theme, sounds and everything else that originally came with their laptop or desktop - the ribbon tends to be a little baffling at first and eventually extremely useful to them, because it mirrors the way they work. That's the reason it was designed and why it was introduced with 2007.
Microsoft places much more importance on the latter group and tends to make design decisions based on their working habits and patterns. If you are part of the first group, it's best to get used to that fact.
And of course, there are millions of people still using Office 2003 and even 2000.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
First Question: Does it run on XP?
Would be the first time that MS has tried to force an OS upgrade.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Exchange / Outlook is a pretty substantial requirement for every company I've ever worked for.
- Dan
1: It takes away valuable vertical screen real estate and cannot be repositioned to less valuable side areas.
2: It changes based on what it's Application Telepathy thinks you are doing.
3: You are not even offered the option of backwards compatibility to the old, customizable, fixed menuing system -- Microsoft dictates that they know what's best for you!
Can forced Dvorak keyboards with no QWERTY option be far behind?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not really. Open Office resembles MS Office 2000 more than MS Office 2007(2010??). Therefore, people are willing to go to OO rather than have change.
And Linux can be configured to look and function just like XP, and Ubuntu, except for the "start bar" being at the top, functions almost like XP for most things.
Further, if people are being made (forced) to "learn" something new, they are more willing to look at alternatives, like OO and Linux or even Apple.
The point being, if people are having to "change" they are willing to REALLY change. My In-laws are a great example. They are an older couple, in the sixties and seventies, and they don't like VISTA. My Father in law asked me the other day to show him Linux, and he said, that it looks a lot like Windows.
He was able to open Firefox, OO, Email, everything he does, quickly without any fuss. Ubuntu is getting very close to getting mom n pop .
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I agree that it's a start, but I can't see Microsoft ever "dying" outright. All I see is a few pieces of competition, perhaps a few that will grab a few more percentage points of market share from Microsoft every year.
The interesting note to watch is what happens when the next generation of computer users comes forward. Teenagers these days know a lot more about computers than their parents do, on average. They understand the difference between Mac and Windows (and a heck of a lot know about Ubuntu - more than you might think), and can use their computers in fairly efficient ways. Will they be more willing to adapt and allow the market to morph? Considering that the market nowadays panders to the lowest common denominator (people who think "Windows" is a synonym with "computer") the fundamental shift in the next decade or two is when that lowest common denominator starts to rise. As computers become more integral to the average user's life, the more they'll bother to understand it.
Car analogy: while most people don't quite understand the entire workings of a car, they know enough to keep it running. This is not true for a hell of a lot of computer users, but when and how will this change?
You're right, but there's one other important thing about Microsoft you have to realize:
When they have no competition, they don't bother. When Microsoft's web browser competition dissolved away, we ended up with IE6 for years and years and years-- when the web browser competition picked-up again, thanks to Mozilla and Apple and later Google, suddenly, WHAM! IE7, IE8, back to a regular development schedule, tons of great features.
Office moves slow because it has very little serious competition. And, hell, even at Office's slow pace, it's out-pacing OpenOffice. So they must be doing something right. Now, if Apple ported Pages/Numbers to Windows, and Adobe released OfficeShop, then you'd see Microsoft moving-ass on getting Office up-to-snuff. As is, why should they bother?
Comment of the year
Outlook's had Threaded View for decades. I don't exactly know what "conversation view" is, but it's something new.
But good job posting your ignorant bullshit for everybody to read. I guess it's easier to lie about what features Outlook has than to check your facts. Why do people mod up posts that *make shit up*?
Comment of the year
You're still missing the point. No, standards don't force anyone to do anything, but you can at least say "You're not conforming to the standard".
And as I said, yes, you can weasel word your way around any standard, but that's not what Microsoft is doing.
The only reason that so many apps that use ODF are interoperable is because they all chose to reverse engineer the way OOo did it, or they used OOo's code. That's called a de-facto standard, which is what .doc and .xls are. de-facto standards are not good.
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