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Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected
CWmike notes a review by Preston Gralla of the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 2010. "I review plenty of software packages throughout the course of a year, and it's rare that I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer. With Office 2010, which recently hit RTM status, it is one of those times. The main attraction, as far as I'm concerned, is the Outlook makeover that makes it far easier to cut through e-mail overload and keep up with your ever-expanding group of contacts on social networking sites. There's also an improved Ribbon that now works across all Office applications, and some very useful new PowerPoint tools for giving Internet-based presentations and handling video. Question is: Is Office 2010 good enough to stop the defection to Google Apps? Some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have, reports Robert Mitchell. The final version of Microsoft Office Web Apps, the Web-based version of Office, isn't yet available but is expected before summer."
yes but is it dead yet... Otherwise that would be too cruel, even considering it's only a MS product and not some sentient GNU software
the new trend in business intelligence is using Excel to manipulate data in a cube so the users don't bug the BI developers for new cubes
"There's also an improved Ribbon that now works across all Office applications"
I don't care, unless there's a "classic" menu mode I'll stay with OpenOffice or older MS Office versions. I know some people like the ribbon, but I really, really hate it.
...I can simply relate what things I believe and the things I hear from other CTO/CIOs regarding Google Apps and using Google Mail in a corporate environment. Everyone I know is adamantly against the idea. It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy. That's it, plain and simple.
The idea that our company would place our mail and documents, and the mail and documents of people communicating with us into the hands of another company who are not tightly bound by laws regarding retention and usage? Makes my skin crawl.
I wonder who the first company to be bought by Google will be using Google mail and apps while negotiations are ongoing? ;)
Thanks, but I'd rather only have to worry about the ISP, not the ISP and the Cloud. It's unfortunate because I have no interest in running mail servers, exchange servers, file servers, I just want to make software.
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That's all well and good, but they should be focusing on Outlook Web. Until Outlook Web works equally well on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer (on Windows, Linux, or Mac) I'm not really interested in their "upgrades."
Does Excel still have the WTF-like window management? (2 items show on the taskbar, 1 main window)
I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer. With Office 2010, which recently hit RTM status, it is one of those times.
It has been a while since I've used Office so maybe 2010 will be the first time I didn't have to install OpenOffice instead. However I'm willing to bet that if I had to use Office 2010 it would be one of those times that truly makes a difference in the way I use my computer, I've never used one for a door stop yet.
I don't know. Microsoft finally has some serious competition now, and they have to take care of the quality of their products. I like the ribbon in Office 2007: if it's even better in Office 2010 I will buy that software package for sure. OpenOffice is not all good, you know.
-- Cheers!
>some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have
We use Google Apps and we are thinking about moving away from it. First off, their customer service sucks, two you get occasional outages and extremely poor performance quite often and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Google Apps (spreadsheets, documents, etc) are usable only for non-professional things. Like documents shared within a work groups. Don't even think of using them for professional needs that will be used outside the company.
The contacts / calendar is nice. Especially if you have a Android phone where it syncs directly to it without having to hooking it up to your computer. (providing you aren't also trying to sync a normal (read personal) Gmail account. Gmail doesn't let you connect both a normal Gmail account and a Google Apps domain account at the same time (which REALLY SUCKS)
I've used Exchange and if managed properly, you can minimize your pain. Though we've also been looking into OpenXchange. It seems to have many pluses and some minuses also. (clunky interface)
I've been using the beta for awhile and I can say without a doubt that it's far better than Office 2003. The ribbon menus, in Word especially, are actually easier to use than the menus of 2003. And some of the other features, like auto-print preview, automatically showing what new formatting will look like, and the navigation sidebar, are actually useful. There are still some bugs, and the interface in Excel isn't as easy to get used to, but in general I'd say 2010 looks like it will be worth the price of the upgrade. I say this as someone who never got used to or liked 2007.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
FTA: "The File button, by the way, replaces the Office orb button from Office 2007, which Microsoft says thoroughly confused people -- many thought it was a piece of branding eye candy rather than a functional button."
Indeed. Now how much do their UI people get paid?
A threaded message view for email is an exciting new feature? Especially when it's threaded based on the subject line, rather than the MessageID header field. A bad implementation of a basic feature that has been around for a very long time in other mail clients.
Outlook 2010 is certainly better than previous iterations, but it's not that exciting. One of the better features (completely missed by the review), is the improved handling of interaction with processes using the Office Object Model.
Okay, it's 2010, He's going on about how everyone promises productivity enhancement and Outlook finally does it... this is going to be good. The new feature, that we've waited over a decade for, this will change everything... is.....
Thread-view for messages. Flat, by subject-line and date.
Did previous versions of Office really not have this?
Meanwhile: after months of people saying they couldn't switch to Thunderbird because they couldn't import their filters, and they NEEDED their filters, it turns out (after reviewing all the actual needs of everyone using Outlook) that the best solution for "email overload" was to unsubscribe them from a few feeds they NEEDED their filters to ignore for them.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
"As a CTO?" I am curious. If you don't mind me prying, what company's CTO selects a Slashdot username of "Assmasher"?
Actually, now that I think of in a broader sense of what internet industry you may belong to, I withdraw my question.
My work here is dung.
he's the Ass Masher!
since when do we care about M$ software?
What's wrong with slashdot?
PS: I'm not new here.
as long as Outlook continues to encourage top-posting and HTML formatted content, and discourage quoted reply trimming, it will still suck.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I hear from other CTO/CIOs that the clubhouse at the Belfrey does a particularly good cognac, and if you're a lifetime member they let you smoke indoors, regardless of the law.
In other words, there's a distinct stench of red snapper around here.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Of course not.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
It's a reference to D&D, apparently. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1592034&cid=31595704
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
- Microsoft finally has some serious competition now, and they have to take care of the quality of their products.
Well, it would have been nice if they had had that philosophy all along, Hopefully competition will bring out the best. I got burned out on Microsoft long ago. Open Office has it's challenges too, at least I can get involved in it's improvement.
My company has switched us over to Gmail from our exchange server. The client we used for our email, Pegasus, was a bear when it came to large files, and by large I mean 512kb plus. It would halt our computers till the file finished downloading. Due to the nature of my job in particular I receive larger files 3mb + on a fairly regular basis, for me using Pegasus was quite frustrating. The move over to gmail and google docs has been a delight. If I have a large file, I don't have to email it, just send a share request for others who need access to it. Over all I think it's a nice idea, but as mentioned, what happens when google sells out...
Here's hoping they've also fixed some of the inconsistencies in the ribbon as well - it's incredibly frustrating that you can adjust some formatting in one application but not in another - you'd think they share the same codebase. Are they just trying to protect us from having too much control over our documents?!
Until we can use Google Apps on an Airplane, we'll be sticking with Office for Mac for the foreseeable future. There are things I like about Google Apps, especially when you need to share a document for editing during a conference call. But the privacy problem renders that to anything you don't mind your competitors seeing. And with the advent of better screen sharing tools, it renders those needs fulfilled for us.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
FTA: "The File button, by the way, replaces the Office orb button from Office 2007, which Microsoft says thoroughly confused people -- many thought it was a piece of branding eye candy rather than a functional button."
Indeed. Now how much do their UI people get paid?
I hope they get paid well as Office 2007 was an overwhelmingly positive change. There's always the fact that many of Office's users are the kind of users that get confused by everything. There's a remedy for the button: "Guys and gals, that candy button is the File menu". There, damage done. There's no harm to make it more obvious in ver. 2010 either. Means they listen to feedback.
is that PowerPoint will now let me have separate presentations open in separate windows. It's about time.
No option to turn the ribbon off? Paying for addons to go back to menus doesn't count. As long as the ribbon is there, so I have to relearn the basic UI paradigm I've been using for years and which every other app uses, I'm not buying another version of office. 2003 is what I use and it's the last version I buy until this UI abomination is history.
Don't Google also need to improve their reliability and guarantee data integrity? People have lost their email in the past due to Gmail disasters, with no backups to recover it from.
It is their cash cow. We know that their Office monopoly is on decline, it is just a matter of time.
so.... they removed it completely? I jumped to open office when i spent months trying to use the ribbon. I was also tierd of people asking me in the Company "how do i save a file?" I still have no clue how to use ribbon.
I work in the IT group of a Fortune 100 company, and to be honest, I see little difference between using Gmail and other third-party companies. For example, we use Symantec as our mail filtering/virus scanning company. Every e-mail that comes to and goes from our company goes through servers located physically on their premises, and as far as we're concerned, it's a "black box" of a scanner--we don't know all the nitty-gritty details of what all they do when they're scanning our mail, we just know the end result. And it's a lot of mail--just the other day, our gateway crashed for a couple of hours, and they held over 14,000 e-mails for us while we worked on getting it back up.
Granted, I don't know what legal agreements we have in place with Symantec, but if you want to be paranoid, you could imagine all sorts of evil things they could be doing with all of that e-mail, and there are no telling what kind of sensitive information is being misclassified by the users and sent completely free and clear through their system.
At some point, though, unless you want to literally do everything in-house and never take advantage of the value-added services that third parties can provide, you have to suck it up and trust them not to screw you over. If nothing else, Google should know that all it would take is one major data loss or one gross breach of corporate privacy, and their Gmail service would pretty much be dead. Just as if we find out that Symantec has done something evil with our e-mail--even something that is legally allowed in the contracts--that their business would suffer a nasty hit.
At some point, the benefits of using a service like Gmail outweigh the risks that Google, a company with an excellent reputation, suddenly turns evil. As a CTO, your job isn't to sit around and dream up reasons why you'll never trust a third party; it is to assess those risks, reasonably compare them with the benefits, and decide whether it's worth it or not.
As a side note, I'm actually part of a large team of people who were recently outsourced by my former employer to a third-party IT services provider to handle all of the IT services for that former employer. So now, I'm on the direct opposite side of the coin that you're mentioning here. It's pretty well understood that if we do something to screw over my former employer--now our client--that it would not only cost us our careers, but likely cost all of our friends and coworkers their careers, too. We still have and require root access to almost every server and network device across the world. If you start dreaming up things that could happen in that situation without considering what you're getting in exchange for that risk, it seems on the surface a pretty stupid thing to do, but it's actually working really well.
And when you really think about it, just about anything you could dream up a third-party provider doing to you, I could dream up much, much worse your own internal people, with even less motivation, doing to you.
Some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have, reports Robert Mitchell.
The last place I moved off Exchange to Gmail would probably not want to go back. You can still keep Outlook, if you think the email organizing tools are worth it, but most people just used the Gmail interface.
The real question is if the Office 2010 upgrade is compelling enough and cost effective enough to keep current users from jumping ship? My experience suggests it would have to be a near software miracle to make that happen. The cost savings of switching to Gmail are pretty significant.
Unfortunately MS doesn't have to worry about much of a threat from OpenOffice. I find their product gets more difficult to use with time instead of better. GoogleDocs is good enough for a lot of things but formatting options are limited. If OO was a home run product, then Office 2010 would be yesterday's news.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Yeah, every time I've ever tried to load my perfectly legitimate copy of Microsoft Office 2007 the Microsoft Outlook would never ever load up. Go to the Microsoft site, to all the forums and it's 'a known problem' - which never got fixed. I'm looking forward to the same degree of outstanding service with this next iteration of Microsoft Office! Something that loads up and takes up a lot of memory and still manages to provide less of a product than Open Office. Thanks Microsoft. More of the same please.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Until we can use Google Apps on an Airplane, we'll be sticking with Office for Mac for the foreseeable future.
I thought that if you installed Google Gears then you could use things like Docs in an airplane. They've dropped support for it currently but I think that it was designed to store your documents and mail locally and then when you were "working offline" in the browser Gears would kick in and provide you the same experience and then sync up once you were back online.
I also personally believe that airlines will soon begin to offer in flight wi-fi but right now it's just a few where I live.
My work here is dung.
FTA: "The File button, by the way, replaces the Office orb button from Office 2007, which Microsoft says thoroughly confused people -- many thought it was a piece of branding eye candy rather than a functional button."
Indeed. Now how much do their UI people get paid?
What do you mean? Microsoft Bob works for free.
LOL. Sorry, I'm CTO, Software Architect, and the lead developer for a company of less than 50 people. No rounds at Pebble Beach for me, I like beer (Warsteiner or Sam Adams Honey Wheat lately) and I drive a car that cost less than $30,000. CTO is my position because I was hired and report directly to the board, not the President, although I work with him closely. I get the work of both worlds, and the pay of only one ;).
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"rare that I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer."
Yeah, that was said about 2007 and it DID make a difference. It made a number of people i know finally dump MS and move to OO.
What are two words that cannot be used together?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Sounds a lot like the CTO who "only wants to know about technology, not marketing".
The fact is, that you don't understand either liability nor privacy. After all, it's not your area of expertise, as you admit yourself.
Because if you did understand them, you'd balance the risks and make your choice that way.
But since you know next to nothing about them, you simply say "I'm not going there", and that's the end of the discussion.
I'll give you points, though, for the fact that unlike most officers, you stay away from things you don't know. Even if learning those things is the ideal response, jumping in head first and then blaming everybody else is the typical - but worst - executive response to every new fad.
As soon as faster, nimbler competitors employ multidisciplinary CTO/Lawyer hybrids, you're toast.
Yes, the candy button is the file menu! Stupid people, how could you not get that without me telling you? What the fuck did you expect me to do, label it "File?"
Oh, I hadn't heard that Google had lost people's email. When was that?
The malware community is wringing their collective hands waiting to find vulnerabilities to exploit in a new Office release...
I don't see why most medium or small orgs need the headache of buying MS Office, being subject to software audits, being subject to semi-annual updates for features and new functionality they don't even use. It's money down the drain. Open Office is more than adequate for individuals, businesses and government in most circumstances and it's free. If necessary slap Thunderbird + Sunbird in with it. That's not to say OO is perfect by any stretch (some aspects of the UI are woeful) but it does get the job done and has it's own useful little built-in features such as being able to print straight to PDF.
The first hit I found in Google was 2006: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/29/1558211
Yeah, this would be a pretty big news story. I'm not saying that I'm 100% sure that Google has never lost an e-mail, but I'm inclined to think that as someone who keeps pretty good tabs on the tech industry, that would have made my radar. And the simple truth is that I remember absolutely nothing about this.
Without some kind of citation or proof, I'm going to assume that this claim is totally bogus. But by all means, please do prove me wrong.
Hmm, how many years to bring the rest of the menu buttons back? Fortunately there are free plugins that bring the old style menus back already. MS will go out of business without the support of other little companies fixing the bugs in their software on their behalf.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
That covers 99% of what anyone will ever use.
Have to say, Office 2010 does what it says on the tin, not perfectly, but better than anything else, with certain provisos...
Open Office is great, it does everything, until you start regularly exchanging data with companies that are based on MS Office.
Where MS Office has always excelled is in the actual office environment, multiples users working on the same files in collaboration, think lawyers offices, that sort of thing.
Outlook 2010 wins the prize for "best e-mail client on windows" by default, Outlook kept evolving, and while 3 year old versions of Eudora or Pegasus are again fine for the single / home user, as soon as you get anywhere near that real world office environment, Outlook 2010 kills everything else stone dead.
Outlook 2010 is Mail / Calendar / Contacts / Tasks, all integrated, someone send you a Word.doc attachment, dude, previewed live and correctly within the Outlook application, all seamless productivity.
Took me all of 15 second to configure it to send text only emails and all the other usual conventions.
ABC Amber also do an excellent little app to export just about any mail or data format that you can imagine to Outlook format, well worth the 19 bucks to migrate a decades worth of Eudora mail archives in 30 minutes, complete with folder structures etc.
Summary.
MS Office 2010 is strictly optional if you're a home user.
MS Office 2010 is the only game in town in a commercial office environment, or for regular communication with one, such as you are going to get a divorce and spend lots of time sending stuff back and forth to your lawyer.
HTH etc
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
When I need a feature I'm still pecking around for it. The ribbon is supposed to identify features that I need and categorize it in a sane manner, but it just isn't the case. Just try in outlook: importing or exporting mail, adding additional exchange account views, finding actual email headers - you're in for a shock. Instead of a ribbon, why not a contextual search for features? Isn't that more in line with the new windows concept?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Not only are you correct, but HTML5's offline functionality is supposed to let them do the same thing without gears, which is why gears is being permitted to die.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, I see it, 60 users lost emails in December 2006.
As a former CIO, I disagree with your diagnosis of the issues. Many companies, both large and small, outsource services to companies with access to all manner of sensitive materials (e.g., documentation destruction, electronic reading rooms, business continuity services, AR, etc). The difference is how those services are implemented and the trust in the organizations, not so much the laws that specifically regulate their offerings or even the ability to sue them.
In my opinion, the problem with Google Apps is that they:
1) don't make many important explicit commitments (e.g., availability, security, retention policies, restoration times, etc)
2) provide very little visibility into their implementation
3) their low cost service model provides little room for day-to-day customer service (e.g., mailbox restore) and the confidence to know that you can rapidly escalate a problem should one arise (not to mention offline backup)
I say this because this implies the issue is not inherent to outsourcing email in principle. The outsource service model is the future for generally commoditized services like email. There are several offerings today that I believe are generally superior to in-house for most SMBs that want Exchange functionality and need good availability. I have recommended Rackspace's Hosted Exchange to a $60M (revenues) client of mine and a few others. I am generally quite pleased with it, though there are a few shortcomings that will prevent others from adopting it today (especially larger organizations).
The biggest issues with the various Hosted Exchange offerings (those I'm familiar with at least):
#1: Authentication cannot be readily shared with other services, i.e., the employees need to juggle yet one more set of credentials.
#2: Limited ability to use 3rd party software (e.g., VM, Fax, two-factor authentication systems, etc) unless it exclusively uses exposed interfaces (RPC/HTTP, IMAP, etc).
#3: Won't scale well with large companies (with multiple subsidiaries/operating companies) that need/want to use more advanced AD features.
That said, these companies will figure most of this stuff out gradually until all but the most conservative big companies concede that they are better off outsourcing it, i.e., that an outside company has the scale and expertise to do a better job at less cost and in a more capital friendly way. When real customization is required then in-house makes sense, but the reality is that many of these issues are fairly widely felt and can be addressed with more generalized solutions.
Don't Google offer an appliance for in-house use? Basically a rack mount server - plug in, config and away you go. Get the benefit of a web-based office suite with none of the security and legal concerns.
Of course that implies that you have full control over the server - I've never worked with one so I can't say if that's so.
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
Quite puzzled...
have you actually used office 2010? it is SO far ahead of office 2003, with completely different UI. Try it before demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge on the topic.
1. 32 and 64-bit versions of the software. Apparently this addresses various performance issues, but also means there is incompatibility with 32-bit versions of other office apps (and perhaps visual studio) on 64-bit OS.
2. MAK and KMS replace the use-anywhere, no activation open license key. Heh.
3. There are fewer editions of office this time around, missing Enterprise. I guess that is a good decision, but there should be fewer. Nevertheless Microsoft believes strongly in market segmentation.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Any chance they have fixed quoted-line prefixing for replies and added "Paste as Quotation" to Outlook? That alone would be worth an upgrade. Yes, I know about the "Prefix each line of the original message" option. And no, I don't care whether you like inline replies or not, just make it reasonably easy to use them, and give me the choice. Is this really so hard?
At the same time, there's nothing technologically speaking stopping them from storing all of our e-mails for whatever nefarious purpose they have in mind.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Gmail has much more robust datacenters, with multiple levels of redundancy and backups, than 99.9% of all companies out there. The odds of Gmail crashing and burning are orders of magnitude less than the odds of your own mail servers crashing and burning and losing all of your e-mail. That's kind of the point of having stuff "in the cloud" to begin with.
Second of all, what's to say that Symantec might not have some kind of bug in their software that, for example, randomly loses some small percentage of e-mails? Unless it was either a large number or a replicable issue, we'd probably be none the wiser, and if just the right e-mail got lost, it could have a major business impact. The point is, as I said before, any unlikely scenario you can dream up, I can dream up a counterexample that works in Gmail's favor.
So what do you use instead? If you use an ISP's POP account, your problem is no different. If you host your own mail server so that the mail is never stored on the Internet, then by definition that server has to have presence on the Internet, and again, the risk is still there. The only difference is that it's your personal responsibility for ensuring that the server is secure instead of Google's. Now, I'm not doubting your technical prowess, but even giving you the benefit of a doubt that you are personally smarter than the hundreds of PhDs working at Google that do nothing but this for a living, the vast majority of people and companies aren't. In other words, I'd trust Google to prevent people from hacking into my account more than I'd trust myself.
Oh and by the way, for corporate accounts, Google doesn't use those silly security questions to let you reset your password. If you lose it, you'll have to get one of the managers of your corporate Gmail accounts to reset it for you. The specific vector of attack you mentioned is a non-issue.
Do you also run your own ISP, with complete control over the communication chain once a packet hits the country in which you live? Because if you don't, then even if you run your own mail server, you are still at pretty high risk of your e-mail being intercepted and read. And even if you do, then I have to point out that even if you run your own mail server, you are storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy. Who do you think is in a better position to protect your privacy if the police go busting down doors, a HUGE multinational company protecting its reputation and with significant pull in the international political community, or you, Joe Schmo, little more than a meat shield between that oppressive government and your precious e-mail server?
I'll say it yet again, because it bears repeating. Any evil thing you can dream up that Google may do with your e-mail, I can dream up something else that someone else in the chain can do with your e-mail. As long as we're thinking up unlikely scenarios such as Google giving access to your e-mail to the government without any kind of due process or your knowledge and consent, what's to stop government spies from simply breaking into you house whil
It cool, many of us in this economy are playing the roll of the everyman. I just got thrown into a professional computer forensics training just because the boss wanted inhouse capabilities, I get a cert and to learn new things, and more responsibility. Plus, everyone knows you're a /.er first and the job comes second (chronologically, not in importance lol)
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
No, they announced they will drop support, but not until HTML5 storage support is in, which is already supported by Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4, Google Chrome 4, and Opera 10.50.
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Yeah, just like no one understands that the candy button in the Windows7 taskbar is the 'Start' button without it being labelled 'Start'. Oh wait... I agree that it was really confusing, but I think it was also an understandable mistake -- I'm surprised it didn't show up in usability testing but maybe it was just a missing task (or the people in the usability study were trying to impress)
Oh, I hadn't heard that Google had lost people's email. When was that?
Duh...you didn't get the email about it.
when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Regardless of anything else, I just have never seen any reason to keep secure, mission critical data in another companies data center. Especially email with all of its legal implications.
SaaS (or cloud or whatever buzzword you want to use) has its place. Spam filtering is a great example. Economies of scale, easy setup, reduced internal overhead. The data that flows through is not stored in any meaningful fashion.
But as soon as you are talking about storing data, you lose me. So many issues, so little time.
Hmm, how many years to bring the rest of the menu buttons back?
Haha, exactly what I thought, so... in Office 2013 Microsoft will provide the new and exciting (bleeding edge) "Edit" button, which will put all the commands related to the edition of your document in ONE place! (instead of having them mixed in that huge toolbar called the ribbon).
Then by 2016 you will get the "Insert" button! yay! it has never been easier to insert pictures, movies or objects from other programs (with the new name for OLE).
I hope I live to see the "Help" button implemented... along with the revolutionary "agent" helper to make it super easy to get help while writing your documents... who knows, it may even be an animated character like mmmh an office supply or an animal.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
"I hope they get paid well as Office 2007 was an overwhelmingly positive change. There's always the fact that many of Office's users are the kind of users that get confused by everything."
Look, buddy. The insinuation that easily-confused users are the problem is not correct. I program and I'm a scientist. I'm used to investigating new ideas and considering the possibilities that might be available to explain something. I like things certain ways, sure, but I'm open to exploring options if they might work better. I've used various incarnations of Office and its component applications since Windows 3.1 days. I'm not an inexperienced user.
*I* spend a few minutes saying "Where the !#%!% is the file menu?" before I figured it out too. That bit of random eye candy is functional? Who would have thought? It was a bad UI decision.
"Means they listen to feedback."
What it suggests to me is that when they were in the beta for Office 2007 they either didn't have any feedback, the people who analyzed the feedback they received were a bunch of incompetent idiots, they were too timid to voice the obvious results of an obscure interface to the marketing division (The "Orb of Confusion" will be confusing to people), or they didn't care (branding was more important). They didn't even offer a "classic menu" mode, which was foolish. There's obviously demand for it given the existence of third-party add-ons that bring back the regular menus, and when the "listening to feedback" in Office 2010 involves partly rolling back the interface to previous versions (shades of the experience with eventually eliminating "Clippy") then perhaps the original decision wasn't so good in the first place.
have you tried working with tables, for example
Yup, daily. Drives me mad...for extra insanity points of course, you can always try pasting a table from Excel/Access, (for most 'Office' users the logical place to store tabular data, especially numeric), into Word or PPT.
it's incredibly frustrating that you can adjust some formatting in one application
Indeed. Want to highlight some text in PPT, like you can do very easily in Word? SOL...
Of course, you can do it in 'presentation' mode, (F5) using the pen : (Ctrl+P then select highlighter). But that's not persistent, unless you save your annotations...which is 'all or nothing')
No, the rack-mount server is only for in-house search. If you want the email, docs and spreadsheet - that's in Google's data centre.
I thought it was "branding eye candy" when I first used Office 2007 myself. I looked and looked for the equivalent of the File menu, then clicked the button when I couldn't think of any other solution.
Perhaps his first name is Cosmo...
"It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy. That's it, plain and simple." That just doesn't fly. The number of companies outsourcing their Exchange services and more importantly administrative rights and functions to servers to foreign corporations in countries that have little or no protective laws makes this assertion difficult to believe. In the commercial world, you would purchase a real business support agreement with Google to use Google Apps which would be just as binding as any other outsourcing contract, And IMHO much safer than some of these offshore outsourcing people.
...I can simply relate what things I believe and the things I hear from other CTO/CIOs regarding Google Apps and using Google Mail in a corporate environment. Everyone I know is adamantly against the idea. It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy.
This is an important lesson for some of us geeks. We would like to think that the best technology will always win on its own merits, but the reality is that products are often selected for other reasons.
I thought the same thing when I read the summary. Some large enterprises are seriously considering moving to GMail? Like who? As a sys admin I would be not at all comfortable using Gmail for my company's email, calendaring and contacts; for most of the same reasons you describe.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
"Strict is a subset of Transitional that does not include legacy features – this makes it theoretically easier for a new implementer to support."
"Transitional is intended to preserve the fidelity of existing binary documents."
"We will support Strict no later than Office “15.” (the one after Office 2010)."
"Although the conformance clause says that Transitional “should not” be used for new documents, we have decided that the needs of customers, combined with the realities of the current document format ecosystem (most existing implementations are Transitional, recent major changes to the Strict namespaces), make Transitional the right choice." (i.e. we'll make sure that no one else will ever be able to implement "Transitional". And we can't implement Strict ourselves, despite our noise, so our "standard" is non-existant, as there aren't and never will be any reference implementations.
"Our primary consideration was simple: the needs of our customers. Our customers place a very high value on compatibility and interoperability, because they often need to allow people to collaborate across multiple versions of Office.
OK, Microsoft, so where's my 2003 service pack, so my little company can continue to read office docs created by 2010 ? Oh , that's right, by "customers" you mean "people who will pay us money in the future", not "those who have already paid us".
At last but not least, what fucking use is it if Office 2010 can READ Strict documents, if no one, not even Microsoft, can actually WRITE them? What a goddamn colossal waste of time. Colour me unsurprised....
"Assmasher" could also be atoms smasher abbreviated. So he either designs tokamaks or mashes asses (so, probably an actor).
You would be surprised (hopefully) by how many CIOs base their decisions entirely upon the dollar amounts involved. You'd also be surprised by how many CIOs spend most of their time at work looking for their next position. ;)
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I think you're suffering from Oslo syndrome my friend. You need to get out there more and experience other office suites. See what you think when you aren't forced to use the stupid ribbon any more.
Oh yeah, and for a Microsoftie to say "...open your mind a tiny bit...", well, it's very funny at least.
Also IE and the a lot of things else.
You know... the Only reason People used Windows was because of the apps (no serious games for Linux other than a selected few) and lock-in.
Now that games are becomming multi-platform and Steam and Source are comming to the Mac (and Linux! It somewhat runs already!) there will be no reason anyone would still use Windows.
And suddenly I can't for the life of me figure out why people defend MS and Windows and say it's so muc h more awesome... :S
Here be signatures
I hope it will be better than what they got until now. I built an application that creates an Excel sheet using the specs available (OOXML). In the sheet there are hyperlinks to other locations in the document. Now it works when you initially open it. But when you save it (even without making changes), close Excel and open it back up, all the links will be broken. If you just save it, it continues working (Excel doesn't reload the now broken document) until you exit Excel.
There are some other issues related to layout and the spec not being fully open which prevents me from implementing certain features (the features are either not documented or the documented feature doesn't work if implemented the 'correct' way - there is off course no way to figure out how Excel actually implements those features).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I feel sorry for heem. To be stuck being identified as a 10 year old for the rest of his life! I'm on my third...
Trying to write OOXML according to the spec and have it working in MS Office? Wow man, I don't envy your job.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Office 2010 will be a HUGE improvement for Mac users as it will include Outlook at last! Few people know the pain we suffer from Entourage, probably the world's worst email client. My company uses Exchange and I have to use Outlook to be able to share calendars and use meeting invites. I hate Outlook, but it is a business tool I have to use. Unfortunately, I have to have a Windows VM running in VMware Fusion all the time to be able to use it. What a waste of resources. Office 2010 for Mac ETA Christmas 2010.
On the other hand, it does support ODF, so who cares about OOXML, anyway?
It stands for "Release to Manufacturing". Code is "gold" and in the hands of duplicator buereau for creation of shiny discs.
GOOGLE? GMAIL? Don't make me laugh. This is "campus mail" and a piss-poor corporate solution for any of the scenarios for collaboration and application integration scenarios, now commonplace in medium and big enterprise.
The applications a legal depatment, or a corporate marketing division would need are able to integrate with Outlook or a Notes client. GMail is a joke. How do you tie in a company's VOIP system, and unite it with scheduling/calendaring? How do you, in fact, do any integration between Google "application" and on-premise or third-party hosted services?
Suckage. Take your Google and come back later - when you have an acceptable SLA. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I've never understood that argument. I see that my documents are safer on the web on Google Servers then they are bouncing around on my laptop in the back of my car. I doubt that Google ever allows employees to take home backup tapes like the State of Ohio did until they were stolen
I really think laptops with important data on them are more of a threat to privacy then Google will ever be.
The more-or-less finished ODF 1.2 already, or is that too much to ask? They have employees on the technical committee that produces it, so...
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
They have employees on the technical committee that produces it, so...
So... if Dr. Phil is right and future behaviour can be predicted by look at past behaviour, it's not looking good. Remember Microsoft is also part of the W3C group that develops HTML.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I would expect ODF 1.2 to be supported when it's actually finished (i.e. there is a final standard), without any "more or less" involved.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bet the fuckers still don't allow for a distinct count within pivot tables, no matter that this has been a glaring omission ever since they introduced the damn things. But they'll have gobs ginchy keen bullshit that brings nothing to the table in this version, you betcha!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
But MS made it downright *IMPOSSIBLE* to reply selectively to quoted parts of an e-mail. I think it used to work in 2003, but in Outlook 2007 you can no longer do it. You MUST put 100% of your reply at the top, no matter how much you want to reply to a quote of the original (well you can copy/paste and reply to your own "pasted quote" but it is retarded).
Bullcrap, I did it about 10 minutes ago in Outlook 2007.
Pay attention because this is a really, really complicated procedure:
1) Click Reply
2) Position your cursor at the end of the line you want to reply to
3) Press Enter
4) Type your reply
That was pretty fucking hard, wasn't it, you complete retard?
Comment of the year
"There's also an improved Ribbon..." - contradiction in terms.
All ur datamining are belong to L4t3r4lu5.
Each day I find a new reason to hate Microsoft. Yesterday it was because Outlook hides the true email addresses and substitutes it's best guess of the person's name. So if I correspond with 10 people named "Joe" with 10 different email addresses, Outlook will display "Joe" for all of them. Arhg!
But having said that, I have installed Microsoft Office 2010 Beta and I love it. It works really well and has lots of little features that work really intuitively. For example, I hit control-A and it auto-selects the table around my position CORRECTLY. It figures out where the table boundaries are and it always gets it right (so far). I hit control-A a second time and it selects-all (the whole worksheet). But the killer feature for me is collaboratively working on spreadsheets over the web. I use this feature every day. It's why I installed Office 2010. Excel is worlds better than Google sheets.
So today I love Microsoft.
Don't worry Slashdot, I'm sure I'll find a reason to hate them again tomorrow.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
*Dreadfully slow graph rendering in Excel 2007 if you do anything other than default axis settings. (On operations that are instantaneous in 2003)
*After 2 decades, you'd think they'd figure out that if a "-" is followed by unparsable text, it is "text" and not a "formula". They could, you know, use the same algorithm they already use for all other cell input to determine this.
*A real clipboard behavior for simple copy/paste in Excel. Again, you'd think they'd figure out how to keep one copy of something in a buffer while you edit something else. Clarisworks 2.0 from 1990 does this correctly. It's the only program I know that doesn't have this most basic of features.
*get rid of the stupid window-in-a-window scheme they had since windows 3.1 (or earlier?). It never made sense to me and makes working with multiple programs a bitch.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
My company LEGALLY can't use could computing.
Due to the confidentiality requirements, we can't have our client communications on a 3rd party server.
And I know we are not the only industry in this confidentiality bind.
MSFT/GOOG need to offer on-site servers we can buy and have control of.
Plus, GOOG is primarily interested in data mining for ads. We cannot let them do that (not "will not", legally "cannot"). So, I don't see an incentive for them to offer servers.
Have to agree, if I were a Fortune 500 company I would use Google mail and apps pretty much about the same time that the Earth froze over. The legal consequences alone are astounding in their repercussions. How do you enforce data retention policies intended to keep documents as long as legally required but not one second longer? Respond to legal discovery? Freeze mailboxes relevant to a specific legal action in order to preserve evidence, while not locking out the user who needs to get his *current* emails? Locate all documents containing references to the words "Acme Inc.", without individually logging onto every user's Google account? Do you understand just how many discovery subpoenas the typical Fortune 500 company receives in the course of a day, and what the repercussions are for not being able to respond to them? Then there's privacy, which will be a huge issue with major healthcare companies and banking institutions who may find that customer privacy laws basically prohibit them from outsourcing any data that may contain any customer-identifiable data (and how would you enforce "no customer-identifiable data" in email, which by definition may be used to communicate with customers?), etc. Frankly, if I were a major company or in a health care field, I'd outsource my email to Google, well, never. That said, it decidedly makes sense for small businesses to use Google Apps rather than Microsoft "We eat your emails!" Exchange. My own employer does so. But we aren't getting sued every day like, say, Google (heh)...
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Sounds like our CTO and he's clueless too.
For me, personally, there is at least one huge benefit in Office 2010:
It is now possible to have multiple Power Point windows open side-by-side at the same time. I work as a trainer and it has been a pain that you had to switch between presentations in the same window as you were editing them in the previous versions.
Sadly, we're using Lotus Notes in our company, so I can't comment on the differences in Outlook, but other applications haven't changed that significantly for me.
So wait... conversation view which has been around since office 2003 still sucks worse than gmail? Thats really the only improvement I see here. Please spaghetti monster, give my company the strength to go gdocs!
We've been using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) since its launch last year. All the advantages of managing our own infrastructure without any of the disadvantages of actually managing it.
For mail, the synchronisation between the Exchange server and Outlook clients using AJAX is simply the best for in office, online and on the road, offline mail management from different client machines.
The help and support is 24/7 with impressive turnaround of incidents.
Basically we just need a government (Russia??) to say, enough is enough and make them dump some money of OpenOffice.
I've never understood the people who praise KDE for doing absolutely batty things with their UI because they're "innovating", but when Microsoft does something a bit different they proceed to excrete a brick because they're "messing with established ui standards".
Because it is 2 different context. People experimenting with KDE since the KDE 4.0 "Technical preview" release are people who don't mind change are open to cool things, etc. Linux is an OS which is also targeting people who like to experiment new stuff. KDE is targeted for them and they are happy with it.
MS-Office users are a completely different group. The KDE-Lovers don't use it and have moved to OpenOffice.org, KOffice or whatever since very long. Among the people still using MS-Office and refusing to change to anything else, are people who are completely used to its interface down to a spinal-reflex level. They are those who refuse to even try OpenOffice.org, because its interface isn't a pixel-perfect copy of MS-Office XP or 2003. And if they are outraged because of the UI differences between MSO 2003 and OOo, just imagine their reaction when Microsoft slaps a ribon interface on their face.
(In fact, every time I hear someone pointing out that OOo is too different from MSO and too much an effort to re-learn its interface, I like to point out the huge differences introduced with ribbons by microsoft : Even if you stick to MSO you're not graranteed to have a constant interface.)
But well, back to youre wonderings : it's too different populations. That's why they are noisy when encountering opposite situation.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy.
I know I repeat this thing each time someone is outraged about e-mail privacy, but remember the mantra :
***AN E-MAIL IS AS SECURE AS A POSTCARD***
i.e.: just like any one handling your post card (postman, post-office worker, etc.) can accidentally see its content, any server, gateway, filter, etc. handling your e-mail will see its content.
Any point along the chain through which an e-mail went before reaching your inbox can access the content of your "precious e-mail".
And don't let things like "STARTLS", "IMAPS", "SMPTS", etc. (or "HTTPS" for a web app) fool you : They only protect the link between you and the server you're contacting. (i.e.: if you're surfing the web over an open WiFi hotspot in a cybercafé, it avoids hacker listening to your mails as they are transmitted in the clear) There's no guarantee about what happens on the server itself or between any other node along the path to your recipient.
The only way to ensure *REAL* privacy is to use end-to-end encryption. As in: the author encrypts the message with PGP/GPG (or something alike) on his/her laptop before sending the e-mail, and the recipient un-encrypts it on the other side, locally on the machine where the mail client is running.
Anything else is just a post card.
I wonder who the first company to be bought by Google will be using Google mail and apps while negotiations are ongoing? ;)
Whichever company discusses mission-critical information which should remain highly restricted, while using something as secure as a post-card, does - in my opinion - deserve anything bad that happens to them.
You want to discuss business-oriented highly confidential stuff ? Well sure, go ahead, but encrypt your communication. Or discuss it only face-to-face. But just forget plain e-Mail, plain chat, plain VoIP, etc. Please stop thinking that encryption is only for terrorists and paedophiles. Encryption is for anyone having to discuss anything sensitive which shouldn't be openly public.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
and all of your corporate documents being stored there as well.
Well, if said critical corporate documents are encrypted, as I suggested, they are not more useful to any 3rd without the keys, as a pile of data straight from /dev/urandom.
your post cards all being stored at the Post Office and you can get a look at them if you wish
Except that all those post-cards are written by a Navajo-speaker writing using an Enigma machine* :-P
So we both could look at them, but they won't make any sense to us.
*: Yes, I know that modern computers can break Enigma at an incredibly fast speed.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
-- that's the one where they've lost the menus and things you need to make it work, isn't it? Came out about 3 years ago and prompted me to start to carry a memory stick with OpenOffice on it, in case I had to do office-type work at work.
Call me when they've got a usable user interface.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"