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First Look: Microsoft Office 2013
snydeq writes "Ever since the first beta editions of Windows 8 appeared, rumors have circulated over how Microsoft would revamp its other flagship consumer product, Office, to be all the more useful in the new OS. Would Office become touch-oriented and Metro-centric, to the exclusion of plain old Windows users? A first look at Office 2013 provides the short answer: No. 'Office 2013 has clearly been revised to work that much better in Windows 8 and on touch-centric devices, but the vast majority of its functionality remains in place. The changes made are mostly cosmetic — a way to bring the Metro look to Office for users of versions of Windows other than 8. Further, Office 2013 has been designed to integrate more closely with online storage and services (mainly Microsoft's), although those are thankfully optional and not mandatory.'"
are belong to us.
Really.. we're not as dumb as you think, chairboy.
Subscription model: HELL, No.
New look and feel means that the IT department has to give each user training on the new interface. Usually just because a couple of the managers refuse to spend a few minutes to "play" with it and learn it themselves.
It's funny that everytime I am asked to do Office training, 50% of the students are more skilled at Excel (acct. especially) and Outlook (admin asst. especially) than I am. So I am standing in front of a room baffeling the people that have no idea what a pivot table is, and looking like an idiot trying to explain it to the people that know it better than me.
although those are thankfully optional and not mandatory
One without the other would have been a disaster.
OpenDocument format or Die!
I'm still using Office 2003 at work, and will for the forseeable future. Microsoft still provides a compatibility pack to read and write docx. What reason is there to upgrade?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... the less I want.
Anyone else long for the days when a word processor was for editing formatted text, a spreadsheet for mathematical calculations, and an email client sent and received emails?
Easy integration with Skydrive sounds really cool until you think about this inside any organization which doesn't want its files stored on a public cloud. Can this be disabled across an enterprise install easily? Can it be switched to an organization's private cloud?
Microsoft is going to replace the hated "Ribbon" with a more-hated "Bow".
On the downside it will require untying to get at the menu item you want. On the bright side it will be configured as a Moebius strip, so if you don't find the menu item your looking for you can just keep clicking and you'll eventually get there.
I'm sure that he, along with other good staunch conservatives, would be unhappy with a Metro-centric interface, because it's only a short step from that to some sort of Cross-Platform interface, and from there it could end up completely Homogenous and involve multiple machines.
I am officially gone from
Arstechnica has a more comprehensive review.
Also they were kind enough to divide the new features by individual product. Word is here, so is excel, outlook, as well as powerpoint.
I just briefly went through them but the general improvements is that you can share documents with your coworkers with its cloud add ons as well as import and export your work documents with integrated skydrive from your work/home pcs. For individual programs, Excel has a new intellisense that works in cells so you can select commonly used names and formulas with a transparent window that wont obstruct your data. MS calls this ghosting. Outlook has Bing and map integration for directions and travel data as well as having a multiview pane so you do not have to close the calendar to view your todo list for example. Word, well I didn't see anything worthwhile except for some extra formatting options for brochures and other material and a souped up track it list where you can even do text messages in them for things like "Bob redo these figures - boss". Does this mean they are axing MS Publisher? They seem to be covering the same functionality. There is some other stuff that I will read later because it is detailed.
What is clear is this is surprisingly strongly aimed at corporations. MS is getting back to its strength as a groupware product that ties to corporate infrastructure.
The ones who still are holding on to IE 6/8, XP, and Office 2k3. College students or home users will not see that much improvement. Also Neowin mentioned MS is killing both Vista and XP support with Office 2013. This office suite is aimed to get those corporations dragging their feet with Windows 7.
http://saveie6.com/
Sure. Welcome to the 1980's. It is called a firewall
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It BURNS!
Like untreated BALLMER EXCRETIONS on NAKED RETINAS!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Now THAT'S productive. Because having to juggle Open Office, Office 2003 and 2007 aren't enough. Now we need a UI for an Office suite that purports to not require any physical input at all.
Still using Office 2000. I still don't see any reason to upgrade. It's Office, not heart surgery.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The only thing they need to do to improve office at this point is purge the blasphemy of the ribbon UI abomination and restore good pure drop down menu's to their righteous glory.
I'm wondering that they're thinking with the GUI... Applications go all-white, the rest (and dialog boxes, etc.) are color... Buttons and other controls are all "flat" now.
It would appear to me, that the GUI has devolved for the sake of simplicity - or something.
Wow. The Metro look is jarring when you first see it. The Office suite was never a model for great UI, but it certainly had somewhat of a visual "brand". At a glance you could always tell that you were using an Office product. Looking at the screenshots of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel without this brand is shocking. Excel might be the most shocking.
It is kind of like they are trying to pull a reverse-Apple: Apple provides gradients, shadows, reflection, and texture. Maybe Windows decided that they lost that game (and, yeah, they did), so they decided to go for some minimalist UI that oddly seems somewhat inspired by Facebook.
... Microsoft are such idiots.
Let's make everything as drab, dull, white and washed out as possible, let's hide any sign that a button IS a button, and make our users guess and try to click on every word on the screen.
Epic fail.
I wonder what it's like working for the pricks responsible for this shit. I bet it's like Stalin's Russia in there, nobody is allowed to question 'The Party', and everybody has to pretend that this STUPID user interface is an improvement. Bloody idiots.
Get rid of the bloody Ribbon, bring back drop down menus, and stop messing about with the user interface. Sack the doofuses responsible for ever user interface change since Windows 7 and 'The Ribbon'. Did I mention they were latte-sipping IDIOTS?
One of the local authors I know was having problems with centering of HTML output, which we tracked down to the fact she was using IE, which nobody else used anymore.
Color me unimpressed. I'll wait until the Zune 3 ... um Windows Phone ... is released and then learn where they migrated stuff to.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Will this be the first office to have a good formatting engine in place. Features such as auto numbering, auto bullets and the rest, are they all going to work? I say this after fighting with office 2007 and 2010 today as the auto numbering system completely corrupted my document. Office doesn't need any more cosmetic updates, it doesn't need any more ribbons, any more hidden menus or any more flash. What office needs is to be redesigned at its core, features like its formatting system need to redesigned to work. Features like it's grammar and spell check engine need to be worked on, if Microsoft tries hard they might be able to release a document system as good or better then Libre Office, but I doubt it!
Considering they just announced this thing today, I doubt there will be anything official on group policies for a while. If I was a betting man I would say that there would be some mechanism to turn SkyDrive off. Maybe it would happen automatically when connected to a SharePoint server.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Is it just me, or does the interface as shown there look a LOT like Windows 1.0? What's old is new again I guess.
I just started to get used to the ribbon interface
As long as my colorful touch panel has MX cherry blue buckling spring switches, I'm ok with that. Oh, wait, that doesn't work? Never mind. I'll take the quaint keyboard, please.
Yep. MS mentioned it works for customers with CRM dynamics and its own azure providers of course. Skydrive is not bad for individual users to share documents at home.
If MS can provide AD support for groups to specify what gets on a cloud and what a user can take home this might be a killer feature. They are working on this according to the presentation but I do not know how implementable this is. It would certainly be a risk if it was on by default with no security but MS is locking down on sharing and locking things down starting a little with office 2010 and more on this one that uses Windows 7 DRM.
http://saveie6.com/
For those of us out here who, you know, do actual work and care about things like long-term document preservation, has Microsoft fixed its broken promises yet?
When it came out with the godawful OOXML format (e.g. something similar to, but not actually, docx) Microsoft claimed it would achieve adherence to the ISO OOXML "standard" in Office 2010. But did Microsoft actually follow through? No. Wait till 2013, they then said.
So what about 2013? Are they there yet? Or was it all just more hot air from this increasingly irrelevant and atmospheric Duke Nukem of a company?
For that matter, Microsoft promised better support for the real document format, ODF. So has that happened yet? In Office 2010, they made their silly sorta OOXML the default format, despite the scope of the ISO OOXML standard saying that OOXML is intended only to carry old documents forward, and is not the ISO standard for new documents. So has Microsoft now made ODF the default, or not?
As I recall, Microsoft claimed it couldn't make ODF the default back in Office 2007 because ODF 1.0/1.1 lacked certain spreadsheet formula functionality. The functionality is there in the 1.2 version of the ODF format now. So is Microsoft supporting it now? Are they making it the default format for new documents, as they should?
Who the hell cares if the chrome is missing from the borders of Office and the interface supposedly looks sleeker? How about some damned substance, Microsoft? Nah, I guess not. You're all "Surface," aren't you?
Because MS is almost totally balkanised. The OS group had a come to Jesus moment (facilitated by some visits from Their Owners) and came up with Metro / Win8 etc. The rest of the company is thinking "WTF?" So when it came time for the new Office, rather than implement The New Wave of MS OS garbage, they're sticking to the product plans that have been in place since the Clinton Administration. "Steady as she goes - the Office division will weather this storm... The OS team will get its telephony ass kicked by Apple. Apple's going to stop making serious computers, anyway, go back to developing for serious computers, and churn out the same old shite we've been peddling since the President of Sierra Leone, Valentine Strasser, was deposed by the chief of defence, Julius Bio. Then, we'll be back to the same old same old and own the world for another day."
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Thanks for the decidedly noninflammatory headline and body. This could have easily been overblown, but it wasn't. For once, well done Slashdot.
Of course. Skydrive is offering Sharepoint like services for people who don't have Sharepoint. If you do have Sharepoint...
The submitter changed "Now Microsoft has whipped the drapes off the preview edition of Office 2013, providing the short answer to the above question: no. " to "A first look at Office 2013 provides the short answer: No." It changes the entire meaning. The rest is copy and paste.
From TFA:
"Ever since the first beta editions of Windows 8 appeared, rumors have circulated over how Microsoft would revamp its other flagship consumer product, Office, to be all the more useful in the new OS. Would Office become touch-oriented and Metro-centric, to the exclusion of plain old Windows users?
Now Microsoft has whipped the drapes off the preview edition of Office 2013, providing the short answer to the above question: no. Office 2013 has clearly been revised to work that much better in Windows 8 and on touch-centric devices, but the vast majority of its functionality remains in place. The changes made are mostly cosmetic -- a way to bring the Metro look to Office for users of versions of Windows other than 8. Further, Office 2013 has been designed to integrate more closely with online storage and services (mainly Microsoft's), although those are thankfully optional and not mandatory."
Wonder if the aforementioned, longstanding issue is fixed in Office 15 or not...?
Just happened to have to deal with it a few days earlier, and was reminded that it's still there (in Office 14). It's been reported for, >10-year I think...?
Ref: http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/calendar/changing-date-recurring-appointments/
Knowing Microsoft, probably. Enterprise support is one of their main strengths, and such features will likely be controllable through something like group policy.
The only caveat is that their security might be riddled with holes. Most of your users usually wouldn't know how to exploits those. But it probably helps to have some other security mechanisms in place, like firewall rules, to be safe.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
...even though floppies have been dead for a long time.
Pretty soon people are going to be unable to recongize what a floppy disk is, and what it even was in context of making a digital copy of a document!
Sometime in the future, if Microsoft decides you need to pay every month some money to have continued access to your own documents, you have to pay. You have just encrypted every thing you do in some third party's proprietary, closed system. Would you put all your document in a third party's safe no matter how much they guarantee you continued access?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Thanks Microsoft, now Windows sports the look of Windows 3.1 (Dos in a pretty clown suit)
From my understanding, storing documents with patient identifying information on the 3rd party mainframe...errr..THE CLOUD...would constitute a HIPAA violation, unless that 3rd party had some kind of agreement about privacy and the like. Anyone know if these cloud document storing solutions such as Skydrive, Google Docs, etc... are liable for HIPAA violations (which can be $10k in fines a pop, IIRC)?
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
Still using Office 97. It is paid for, and it WFM.
Microsoft is releasing this brand new product called "sharepoint".
How about patches against obvious security risks? Office was (and probably still is) riddled with vulnerable code that can be exploited by using a carefully crafted document that will be opened using Office by the target. Office 2003 will soon no longer be updated and I don't think it will take long for unpatched vulnerabilities to appear. Once you have no protection against malware, you can't open any document anybody sends you or that you find yourself on the internet. Not only that, but they'd probably find ways to hide the payload in such a way that you won't even know you're opening something with your vulnerable office until it's already loading, or if you already have the app open, you see the thing you just clicked opening in office.
You could be perfectly happy with 2003 features, but you will need the security updates in order for it to remain usable.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Rural conservatives may be a tad bothered by that
Table-ized A.I.
Well, I think this article needs a screenshot for Microsoft Office 2013!
Deleted Files by mistake but want to get them back? Files Recovery
ok the ability to read Russian, Greek, Arabic and Chinese mails is down to UTF and fonts
Microsoft STILL picks the wrong codepage and fails to install the correct fonts without managing the installer
don't even get me started on the stupid HTML it renders and NO it's not secure... they need to pick some standards and stick to them
did they pay attention to this ?
http://fixoutlook.org/
#fail as far as I can see !
regards
John Jones
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who else but an M$ astroturfer would make claims such as M$ office is superior to the free alternatives that are out there, Vista 7 is great, bing is superior to Google, ribbon is a rock solid interface, and the malware magnet Internet Exploiter is a top-class browser over free alternatives? Fact, anything M$ does and has done sucks because they are a monopolist. They were convicted of it once before and they need to be sued again, but instead of a slap on the wrist the courts need to revoke their corporate charter.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
MS says Sharepoint and "one link for all" (to be saved locally and attached to emails, with the formatting totally fucked)
Business as usual.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LaTeX. I don't need to re-learn it every few years. No ribbon. No Metro. No touch interface. I can use my own spell checker. Runs on Linux. Typesets camera-ready documents. Sure, it's quirky and confusing, but at least once you learn it, you don't have to re-learn it every few years. (As an added bonus, I can use Emacs to create documents, and its user interface hasn't changed in my lifetime.) I want to get work done, not re-learn the same thing every few years.
What's funny is that every few years, a new Office version comes out and the reaction is always the same. No one needs the new features. Most people don't need much more than Microsoft Works plus the ability to add page breaks. Why wouldn't the few power users who actually typset documents use something like LaTeX?
In the age of rapidly deployable LAMP solutions tailored specifically to your business, people still use 'office software'? The only time I use a word processor is for my resume, or for the time I made a rental agreement for my brother to sign. One off stuff every few years. Spreadsheets, same deal.
I think companies are hiring the wrong type of IT folks if we are still centering running a business on word processors and spreadsheets rather than wikis and databases. That there are still versions with new 'features' being added would be comical if it weren't so sad. For example, since everyone was using spreadsheets as databases, Excel now tries to behave like a spreadsheet.
Then there's the ribbon...
Maybe it is just me... But looking at the flattened UI, it reminds me of Windows 3.1... We are going full circle, aren't we?
Until the mobile users with laptops leave the site and hook into a hotel room wifi.
Logic dictates that this would be part of the GPO for the domain, but I would not be surprised if MS omitted a way to turn that feature off on purpose.
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to install a free pirate copy, it's huge and it always slowed down the whole system once installed somehow (maybe just my biased interpretation and some self fulfilling prophecy but still that's how it felt)
if its just for letters and simple calc i think openoffice does the job just as well, on both windows and linux
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Office 2013 users will no longer be able to edit documents using the keyboard and mouse. Instead, using Microsoft's new Text Predictive Algorithm, the document will be displayed and sent to the intended recipients for the user in it's final form without user interaction. Micro$oft will base it's prediction of the user's intended document on browsing history, social network posts, current news events, daily specials at a variety of fine internet retailers, and a list of other proprietary sources of data. Micro$oft guarantees 100% accuracy in its predictions as to the user's intent. The TP algorithm is the latest attempt to completely remove user input from MS products. CEO Steve Balmer is quoted as saying "By denying user input to the application, we can completely insure the product is 100% stable. Unpredictable user inputs have always been an issue with Office, so with this release, we felt it necessary to completely remove the end-user from the equation."
This will be meshed with Windows 8's improved interface that will completely disregard user input. When the user attempts to interact with their laptop, tablet, or other Windows 8 device, the colorful screen will be replaced by a black screen until the user ceases attempts to interact with the device.
All seriousness aside, this was not stolen from Onion or any other source. This is a product of my own snarkiness based upon a news report that MS will be integrating "Social Media" into their Office 2013 product, an Idea I find to be completely silly (idiocy along the lines of designing an automobile with "flower arranging" in mind) and for those who don't get it---IT'S A JOKE!
With Office 2013, one will be able to post to Facebook, instant message and call via Skype and a host of other non-office functions---but it won't draft a letter or tabulate a spreadsheet one iota better than it currently does. In Fact, in all likelihood, the normal office functions will suffer as the product attempts to integrate social media posts, instant messages, silly cat pictures, and phone calls. All I REALLY ask for from Microsoft Office that they've not successfully done yet is actually have a grammar and style assistant written by someone who actually grew up SPEAKING the LANGUAGE instead of sending some low-bidding Chinese programmers a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and saying “Make it do THIS!"
I should have said HR usually deliberately act like retards - lazyness and a lack of attention to detail is a good enough simulation of a lack of intelligence and produces the same long string of fuckups with no sign of any sort of learning ability. Take away their facebook and they still find other useless ways to waste time.
no doubt that office 2013 is one of the best product of microsoft ever. direct link given below:
32bit
http://care.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/4/7/1/4712B4E1-4DD9-4468-B8A4-507D7F988B1F/professionalplus_en-us_x86.exe?lcid=1033
64bit
http://care.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/4/7/1/4712B4E1-4DD9-4468-B8A4-507D7F988B1F/professionalplus_en-us_x64.exe?lcid=1033
some important features about office 2013
http://www.techstalks.com/office-2013-best-features/