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."

Comments

ODF

[bogaboga]

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?

Re:who uses it anyway?

[polar red]

me neither.
office 97 had enough features already. the bloat continues ever forward.

ribbons

[je ne sais quoi]

From TFA:

Forrester Research surveys have shown that the percentage of people who liked the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 was in the mid to high 80s while the percentage who found it "significantly more difficult" to use was 2.4%.

I find that hard to believe. 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. The majority of people have Office 2003 put on instead, only those who are reluctant to change software on their computers leave it on.

Re:ribbons

[Freetardo Jones]

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.

Re:ribbons

[je ne sais quoi]

Well it's a good thing that your incredulity doesn't override statistical evidence.

You want statistical evidence? Look here, from a survey of Excel users from May, 2009:

Month in and month out, the respondents have said that Excel's Ribbon has reduced their productivity by an average of about 20%. And users with a negative opinion of the Ribbon estimate that it's reduced their productivity by about 35%.

They found that 36% of advanced and 29% of intermediate users "hate or dislike" the ribbons, which vastly outweighs the people who "love or like" the ribbons at 20 and 24%, respectively.

How 'about them apples?

Re:ribbons

[dedazo]

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.

Good Enough

[Archangel Michael]

Microsoft has long been promoting "good enough" approach to things. It isn't the most secure ... it is good enough. It isn't the most robust ... it is good enough. It isn't the most productive ... it is good enough.

This is the Achilles heal of Microsoft. With Windows XP and Office since 2000 or even 2003, has been "good enough". I can't think of ANYTHING Microsoft can offer in Win 7 or Office 2010 that I would actually use. And changing how things work, just for the sake of changing how they work, is counter productive.

In early 2003 I made the statement that 2008 was going to be the first sign of Microsoft's demise as tech leader. The Storm has hit, and is now ravaging Microsoft. Google is building Chrome OS (which I would assume is tied to Android ... somewhere), Open Office is very usable, Wine is getting to the point of being solid, Linux is appearing on desktops, Webservices, mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) etc.

You can see the panic at Microsoft in their web services division, from the search engines changes to Live and now to Bing. You can see the panic in the OS and Office with the huge changes in the UI to cover up that really nothing has changed since 2000.

Microsoft is suffering from the "good enough" syndrome. Everything they have made for the last 6 or 8 years is "good enough" and when Vista comes along and changes things just to change things, people buck against it. You'll see more of the same with Office.

I honestly think one of the reasons Gates left, was because he saw the writing on the wall, and got out while the getting was good.

But...still not fixed

[tomax7]

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?

Re:A lot of effort and money

[Shados]

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.

Re:Not again!

[DeadChobi]

So what you're saying is that when a company makes changes to something it is bad, but when it refuses to change things it is bad. I thought that Microsoft wasn't making enough changes to its software to keep up with other innovations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody has ever attempted to create an interface like the Ribbon before in an office suite. So when Microsoft comes up with something new, suddenly it's not okay to be running for the new.

This community constantly rails against how Microsoft has aped other OS vendors to try to make their products better, and then rails against Microsoft trying to innovate in their own software. It's like every post is a new punch bowl filled with red kool-aid stupid. Could we please get past the 1990's Microsoft vs. Linux attitude and admit that it's possible for one arm of a company to do bad things while another arm of the company does good things? Not everything boils down to a "good vs. evil" essential conflict.

Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone

[TheTrollToll]

Its aggravating that IT people who go to Slashdot are so afraid of learning new (possibly more intuitive and simple) ways of using software.

Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone

[oodaloop]

My apologies. I didn't realize I strayed onto your lawn. I will promptly remove myself forthwith. Good day, sir!

Three Reasons to Hate the Ribbon

[Nom du Keyboard]

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?

Re:Memo to Microsoft: Leave it alone

[maxume]

Yes, I do expect Word 2003 to work on Windows 8 and 9.

Microsoft's support for binary backwards compatibility is generally better than Linux support for source backwards compatibility (the source has the advantage that you can fix it after it has been broken, but in practical terms, a Windows binary from 1995 is more likely to work on Vista than an unedited open source program from 1995 is to directly compile on Ubuntu 8.04).

And really, I don't have any trouble upgrading software (I tend to believe that the hundreds of thousands of dollars Microsoft spends on usability testing is probably productive) or keeping track of install media for expensive software (To test this, I just eyeballed my Windows 95 CD that came with the computer I purchased in 1997).