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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.'"
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.
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?
Here come all the FSF FOSS shills to derail MS.
Not just FOSS "shills". Anyone with a lick of common sense will try to find their way out from under the thumb of an extortionist.
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
How do I embed an ActiveX object, with property bag, in an OpenDocument file?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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
You could start by not using an ActiveX object. Also, how is being able to embed executable code into a document a good thing?
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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.
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.
Also, how is being able to embed executable code into a document a good thing?
An entire generation of crackers built their careers on exploiting executable code in Office documents. If not for Microsoft, they'd be cooking fries at McDonald's.
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!
You are completely right!
unlike Linux where every app has its own look and feel ... this one will actually integrate well with the Windows 8 look.
That Windows 8 look and feel will be horribly out of place on XP, Vista, Windows 7.
Gee, what if apps were skinnable and people could make them look like whatever they want? And then they came with skins appropriate for the OS you want to run them on, and the UI presentation you prefer from previous versions. Wouldn't that be amazingly clever, innovative, forward thinking...
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
The "look" of an application is as relevant as what Ballmer had for breakfast. I do not care for it. What I want to see is good code behind the "look". Whoever cares about the look is likely to wear Armani suits and Gucci shoes (Or dreams about being able to afford them). I need good code that does not crash and keeps my data mine and not M$.
ODF has been supported since Office 2007 SP2. And Office 2013 specifically will support ODF 1.2, which means that spreadsheets with formulas will actually be portable between MS Office and LibreOffice.
Office document support on SkyDrive works with ODF, too.
You could start by not using an ActiveX object. Also, how is being able to embed executable code into a document a good thing?
Embedding an ActiveX object into a Word document does not embed any executable code. Rather, it embeds the data as an opaque blob (more or less; look up "OLE compound storage" for more), along with information about what app has created it, so that the editing service offered by that app can be embedded within Word editor. This is how Excel spreadsheets embedded into Word work, for example. You can embed other stuff, too - e.g. Adobe Reader offers a similar service for PDF, so you could have a PDF embedded into a Word file, and displayed in an embedded viewer within Word (though god knows why you'd want to).
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.
Gee, what if apps were skinnable and people could make them look like whatever they want?
This is hell at work. Change of shifts. Temps and volunteers. You need to have people who can sit down at any desk at any time and be productive,
These are all horrible, horrible things to do.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Do you also hate KDE when it does that kind of thing? KParts allows all that, same as ActiveX (though arguably somewhat better designed from a technical perspective).
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.
If you don't have both, good code and good looks, it's not a complete piece of software.
This isn't just a question of look and feel. There are different input methods for new versions of office and different GUI functionality. Windows 7 apps don't have to have a button which resized other controls for touch interface.
The look of an application is relevant when it affects the usability. My office provides MS Office 2010 on Windows 7. The default Windows 7 interface has low contrast between the windows and their borders. Consequently, I have a high error rate of clicking just outside the intended border and activating the wrong application. (Sure, whippersnapper, my eyes aren't what they used to be, but accessibility isn't just for the highly-disabled.) So I change to the legacy windows theme; works for me! But wait, MS Office 2010 refuses to change!
Of course. Skydrive is offering Sharepoint like services for people who don't have Sharepoint. If you do have Sharepoint...
What they are thinking is they need a GUI where size of buttons is adjustable. If you hit the touch input button the buttons can get bigger to work with touch vs. a stylus or mouse. Think about the complexity of a GUI with a layered menu system where the elements are variable sized.
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/
You need good code and a functional interface. Not a pice of "art" designed by a wannabe retard that thinks that is good because looks good. It is good when it works without crashing. Go and change your Armani suit and your Gucci shoes for jeans and t-shirt and write some code (If you can)
Skinnable apps allow for easy UI modifications. They have been around for a very long time. It allows users to completely revamp the user interface in any way imaginable, which makes UI changes quite easy and inspires groups of users to contribute ever-better UI design ideas. There is no good reason why Office can't be skinnable, and offer a variety of skins for users who prefer a legacy user interface, or a different one for different situations or whatever.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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."
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
Gee, what if apps were skinnable and people could make them look like whatever they want?
This is hell at work. Change of shifts. Temps and volunteers. You need to have people who can sit down at any desk at any time and be productive,
At my last job, I did some tech support in addition to my "real" job. I had to help users with QuickBooks regularly, and we had 3 people sharing 2 jobs.
The simple ribbon bar across the top of the window in QuickBooks became a living hell as the three gals switched computers. "My QuickBooks isn't working", "I can't search [because the button is gone]" were just part of the endless nightmare. Only one of the three could handle a different interface (and it really wasn't that different). I cannot imagine the chaos that skins on top of Office would have created.
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?
this reverse snobbism is annoying. what's wrong with something that works and looks good? this is why most "normal" people think people like you are weird.
Don't you have multi user systems? Each user logs in and voila - its their preferred skin/theme. No fuss no muss.
If not , I'd hate to be help desk there "why is the desktop filled with icons in the shape of a penis?"
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
With shared office/reception computers nobody ever wants to log out and they become single user systems. When you force them to have seperate logins you then have to take care to keep the icons up to date so they are the same on all logins, and people keep logging into each others accounts and sending emails under other people's names anyway. As for the "start" menu, for some reason very few office workers know how to use it and I've had people halt work for half a day until I have time to come and put an icon for something on their desktop.
So to sum up, a different appearance will inspire many who have been using MS Windows for a decade+ to call for help and do nothing but bitch about it until somebody turns up. They may be multiuser systems but they get treated as single user systems. I only know one person that uses the SGI inspired "desktop switching" which is built to deal easily with this situation.
Microsoft is releasing this brand new product called "sharepoint".
Maybe, but you are talking about essentially multiple GUIs. The legacy interface have quite a few bitmaps, the new interfaces are all vector. The legacy interfaces are mouse driven with specific keyboard interfaces, the new ones accept touch. Sure I guess Microsoft could built two GUIs but this is more than "skins" in the classic sense of the same GUI (functionally) with just different look and feel.
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
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I take it you have that opinion about everything? No JavaScript in web pages? No images?
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.
Actually, the crackers would more likely be serving borscht at Donaldovich's
That's the old and insecure way of doing it. The up-to-date way these days is for 'everybody' (that is office suites, including newer versions of MS Office) is to embed XML instead (where the XML is then interpreted to perform the desired calculations). More open, more secure.
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Actually, most MS applications tend to have their own Look and Feel (WLM, MS Office, etc), while linux applications tend to integrate quite smoothly, since they all use a few toolkits which can easily be made to look alike.
Even non-MS software for microsoft tends to integrate better with the windows look and feel.
I cannot imagine the chaos that skins on top of Office would have created.
Since Office 2010 the ribbon has been fully editable. You can even save your ribbon from one machine and load it on another. One Excel "power user" could really cock it up for anyone else who shares the same computer.
Breakfast served all day!
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?
Don't ever use the words "Ballmer" and "naked" in the same sentence again.
/* No Comment */
It doesn't matter if you're embedding binary or XML, the point of the arrangement is two have two different apps work in concert to render and edit different parts of the documents using a standard protocol to communicate (so that any two apps can set up such a thing, not just a few pre-arranged combos).
You mean normal users? I realize this is something that is going to blow a lot of minds on /. but not everyone is interested in computers and most people don't care how they work. To most users it isn't a computer it is that box with that think on it that I click and get stuff done. You change that thing they click or move it and they will be really frustrated because they'll be forced to have to relearn things and they have absolutely no interest in learning about computers they just want to do accounting, order entry or whatever. It seems insane to us geeks but how many people really care to learn all about a car? All they care is that they turn the key and they step on the peddle as a wise man once said "Make it go, we are strong".
Actually it does matter, a lot, from a security perspective.
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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 ?
This is the most concise explanation for Windows I have ever read.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
HR usually are retards.
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.
This is not something a sane, knowledgeable person would ever choose to do, so what does it matter?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.