Microsoft Office 2013 Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

hypnosec writes "The newly unveiled productivity suite from Microsoft, Office 2013, won't be running on older operating systems like Windows XP and Vista it has been revealed. Office 2013 is said to be only compatible with PCs, laptops or tablets that are running on the latest version of Windows i.e. either Windows 7 or not yet released Windows 8. According to a systems requirements page for Microsoft for Office 2013 customer preview, the Office 2010 successor is only compatible with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012. This was confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. Further the minimum requirements states that systems need to be equipped with at least a 1 GHz processor and should have 1 GB of RAM for 32-bit systems or 2 GB for 64-bit hardware. The minimum storage space that should be available is 3 GB along with a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card for users wanting hardware acceleration."

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. XP needs to be wiped out.

Re:Good

[HappyEngineer]

Good. XP needs to be wiped out.

Why? Do you just hate old software that works or did it run over your dog?

Re:Good

[symbolset]

Old software has bits that rust. They oxidize into AOL subscriptions. You don't want that.

Re:Good

[Sir_Sri]

A home user running xp doesn't care about office 2013, and a business user on XP would reasonably move to 7 before getting office 2013 anyway.

XP is approaching the end of life where you can say it 'works'. It has compatibility and security issues that will no longer get fixed, and as time goes on new software will rely on libraries and so on that just don't exist on XP (see the hardware acceleration on DX10 class hardware mentioned).

With linux these sorts of problems are simply solved by a free upgrade (which, like windows, comes with features you may not want and so on), but with MS they charge you money for it, but the core problem would still be there, you just don't get an excuse of 'oh but I can't afford Ubuntu 12 when I still have 10' the way you do with XP and 7.

That something 'works' is a moving target in the IT sector. Does it support flash? How about the latest version? Will it support HTML5 and whatever video encoding scheme your browser wants? Will anyone even want a browser without hardware acceleration in a year or two? Is there a new UI API that just doesn't exist on an old version? Etc. The world plods along, and eventually it's not practical to make your software for an old operating system, as relatively important companies start making that transition your computer will 'work' less and less, in the same way IE6 works but doesn't.

I'm not sure it's there yet, but XP clinging to life could start to cause issues as security and compatibility move past what is reasonably possible on XP.

Re:Good

[0ld_d0g]

IMO its not the users, its the developers. Because of a retarded default setup, XP allowed developers to ship code assuming the user will always run as root and Vista broke that. Developers are now forced to reduce the number of - Add Admin priveledges to this process token - UAC prompts which can be jarring to the end user experience. For that alone I think novice users should be moved away from XP as soon as possible. In the enterprise I think its not so bad since the software used can be carefully chosen and you can run XP as non-admin.

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

> (see the hardware acceleration on DX10 class hardware mentioned).
Nope, that is entirely a ploy by Microsoft to mov people off WinXP. There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it. How do I know this? well OpenGL will give you DX11 effects no matter what the operating system. But Microsoft had to find ways to move users clinging on to XP (and bring in more revenue even though users won't be doing much different with Win7 that they aren't doing with WinXP) and holding back newer versions of DirectX/Direct3D was one way of milking the cow. Unfortunately the vast bulk of Windows users don't know about that and have been played (again) by Microsoft (although, most won't care I suppose, but that is up to them - the point is that Microsoft gave them no choice for their own cashflow reasons, not technical ones as you allude to).

Once MS decided to abandon support for XP with newer DirectX versions I'm sure I gave them more technical flexibility in what they could do - but it was not technical limitations in XP that stop you having 'DirectX 11' style effects - like I said, OpenGL can do the same effects on Windows XP and many more operating systems - since OpenGL is no longer subject to the whims of any single company (unlike Microsoft and DirectX). Hence, I'm developing my modern jet combat simulator in OpenGL with GLSL shaders - just as the X-Plane developer famously did too: http://techhaze.com/2010/03/interview-with-x-plane-creator-austin-meyer/ read how chosing OpenGL over DirectX resulted in business opportunities that personally made him $US 3.5 million dollars in a few months when his OpenGL code was very easily ported to the iPad/iPhone unlike DirectX apps that are stuck on the Windows desktop [which is the whole reason Microsoft tricked developers into building workflows using DirectX, since MS knew this would make it hard for game developers to leave, which makes it hard for gamers to leave - it is all about the 'lock-in'].

Re:Good

[Khyber]

"XP is approaching the end of life where you can say it 'works'."

Yet earlier today I saw a person browsing 4chan on a 75MHz Pentium running Windows 95.

Ahem, what was your point? Looks like software even older than that is 'working' just fucking fine to me.

Re:Good

[mister2au]

I run Office Libre on Linux.

LibreOffice !

And for a lot of us who are power users or make a living using word-processors and spreadsheets, $200 every 3-5 years is a solid investment in quality 'tools'.

And, no, just because you open/save the format doesn't mean it has the same functionality ...

Re:Good

[symbolset]

The stepwise nature of the move-along is the issue here. Once you subscribe to the Office leash you are doomed to be led by it. Here boy. Heel. Sit. That's a good boy.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

> $US 3.5 million dollars

3.5 million US dollars dollars

Re:Good

[symbolset]

Are there still software houses that wrote apps for XP on launch? I thought Microsoft ate them all.

Re:Good

[xQx]

I worked at a school in the nt4 days.

I have adored UAC since it's release, because of exactly that reason - it forces developers to develop properly.

The amount of times I was on the phone to software companies who were flabbergasted that I wasn't running their software (and didn't see it as an acceptable solution to their software failures) as administrator.

It was just discraseful.

Thank you Microsoft for releasing vista. - Now mod me to hell for saying that!

Re:Good

[justforgetme]

That wasn't windows 95 it was the next iteration of kde ;-)

Re:Good

[jaymemaurice]

Is that what it is called now?!

Re:Good

[tehcyder]

Did you just call Excel a "quality tool"?

It's a good spreadsheet. It's not a full blown database, it's not capable of processing TB of data from the LHC in real time, it's not a scientific textbook publishing package. It's a spreadsheet.

I would be interested in what other spreadsheets have to offer that Excel doesn't. The one in LibreOffice is very similar to Excel. I've used GnuCalc and others which are basically lite versions of Excel and perfectly adequate, but if Excel is not a "quality tool" what is?

Re:Good

[jaymemaurice]

It's not about weather or not they can make the DX10 API work with XP, it's weather or not they want to spend the time to do so and deal with the steaming shit it will become- there could be things like the way memory is allocated or cpu-gpu tasks are scheduled in extensions to the kernel - though they could work around them them them have made XP DX10 not as compatible or efficient if it were a seperate addon without kernel changes. Sure, maybe they could have made those kernel changes and included in a service pack. And with no profit on a decade old OS. Then again the FreeBSD guys could have made UFS completely backwards compatible between BSD4 and 5 or Linux could still allow you to run the 2.2 kernel with the latest GLIBC compiled userland.

Your points about DirectX vs. OpenGL being multi platform are valid, but I have noticed not all OpenGL graphics drivers are compatible with all OpenGL applications. As for the DirectX lock in - the sad truth is many windows developers is they often need the handholding of the IDE and Microsoft environment to be any sort of sucessful. Without them, there would be far fewer. That lock-in is lower start-up cost to see a project through to its release.

Re:Good

[oobayly]

Unfortunately we have two pieces of software that we rely absolutely on which store user data in Program Files. I've tried informing them that there's no way in hell that they should be doing that, and that that is what %ALLUSERSPROFILE% is there for. Their response, "that's the way we've always done it, so live with it" <sigh>

Re:Good

[jaymemaurice]

Did you see this on 4chan?!

Why don't you double check - I remeber someone on 4chan telling me pressing <ALT>+<F4> will bring you to whatever you think about but I wasn't able to try because Arabic keyboards only have 3 <Fx> keys.

Re:Good

[asdf7890]

There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.

There are technical reasons for it not being easy to support though. The driver model for the graphics sub-system in XP is quite different, and there are differences in low-level memory management that mighh be significant too. Because DX is quite tightly coupled with those areas (whether this is a good thing is another discussion) it will be affected by such differences and may need different code paths to handle them and that extra jiggery-pokery would need aggressive testing. The time (and therefore cost) of supporting DX10+ on XP would most definitely not be trivial.

Re:Good

[tehcyder]

Will anyone even want a browser without hardware acceleration in a year or two?

Well, I will.

I know it's old-fashioned, but if I want to watch high quality video interspersed with high quality video ads, I'll stick to the TV.

Re:Good

[AngryDeuce]

Their suggestion to delete System32 worked great for speeding up my computer, too!

Re:Good

[jaymemaurice]

My laptop and Windows installation is metric. Do I delete System25?

Re:Good

[SpooForBrains]

You MAY be able to use directory junctions / NTFS simlinks to get round this issue.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

English is not a spelll-as-you-speak language.

And "spell" is spelled with only 2 l's, however you pronounce it...

Re:Good

[MitchDev]

Yes, but Microsoft can no longer gouge/rape/ripoff people who are wasting money on a new overpriced OS they don't need... Think of the poor spoiled MS drones... they need your money more than you do...

Re:Good

[Lonewolf666]

I'm working for a company that still requires at least XP SP2 compatibility in new applications, because they have systems with XP SP2 in the field. Since those are medical devices, upgrading them to SP3 would require a re-validation and management prefers to avoid that. Sometimes, even requests for Windows 2000 compatibility come up because some customer still use ancient models with Win2000...

 

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a book last year (http://amzn.com/1118024486 if you must know) and used MS Office to do it. I paid out for the license, and bought the software just for that one task. The publisher had a certain style format which made use of macros in MS Word. You couldn't use the word processor's "bold" or "italics" etc, everything had to be done using the styles defined by the publisher. Apparently the typesetters got the resultant XML and applied the house styles accordingly. Also, there were macros which knew exactly how much space a level 2 header, a chapter title, a footnote, etc, would take up, which is important in actually calculating page counts.

There was nothing inherently good about MS Office which made this the required platform, it was just that that was what they had written the macros for.

It would have been a *lot* easier for to have used OpenOffice.org natively, since the book was about Linux (or more generally Unix) but to use MS Office, I had to also have a virtual machine running on the same PC, for Windows and Office. This was an extra layer of unnecessary cruft, and wasn't required because MS Office was in any way better, it was only because of its monopoly position. At least I didn't have to dedicate 4 Gb of RAM to the virtual machine!

Re:Good

[Lonewolf666]

Nope, that is entirely a ploy by Microsoft to mov people off WinXP. There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.

One might also wonder what the need for hardware acceleration that cannot be satisfied with DX9 is there in an office suite ;-)
Based on that alone, I think the suspicions about Microsoft trying to pry users off XP are justified.

 

Re:Good

[silverhalide]

Excel for Windows is the only reason I even keep a Windows machine around. Excel for Mac is a steaming pile of crap, and Calc can't hold a candle to either. It just falls flat on its face if you ask it to do any data manipulation over several thousands rows or any reasonably complex calculations. I kept giving Calc a chance but gave up after too many crashes/lock-ups with modest spreadsheets (5-10Meg). Yes, it's fine for your "need to make a table quickly" or "process this simple form data" or as crappy project management tool, but anything else, forget it, especially when it comes to database connectivity and pivottables.

Re:Good

[mister2au]

your email is @member.fsf.org

The FSF advocates for free software ideals as outlined in the Free Software Definition, works for adoption of free software and free media formats, and organizes activist campaigns against threats to user freedom like Windows 7, Apple's iPhone and OS X, DRM on music, ebooks and movies, and software patents.

Uh huh ... I suspect your mind might already be made up but yeah MS Office is a quality suite of products for that price ...

Purchasing Excel once every 3 year upgrade cycle is equivalent to about 1 minute per week of productivity (at lets say $50/hr) - I can guarantee I would save 1 minute per hour (let alone per week) with any sort of serious Excel use

LIbreOffice is just fine for hacking around a few numbers at home (like doing your tax or budgeting or some random calcs) but just doesn't cut it for heavy usage

Re:Good

[RabidReindeer]

Old software has bits that rust. They oxidize into AOL subscriptions. You don't want that.

Yah. "If it aint' broke, don't fix it" doesn't apply to computers. Too often it gets broken for you.

Re:Good

[micheas]

What functionality are you talking about? Office Libre (And Open Office as well) does everything that M$ office does except crashing!

Oh, I don't know, the ability to find and replace carriage returns. (I know fix it myself, but the thing takes for ever to build.)

Re:Good

[jythie]

And that is why this upgrade cycle tends to annoy me. Optional software that gives you new tools if you need them I have no problems with... but upstream consumers (or document providers) who switch over to the tool and require other people to use it because of macro or file format issues... that annoys me.

So now if someone I need to work with (such as a customer or supplier) requires Office2013 I will need to not only buy a new OS, but new hardware to run it on. At least earlier versions I only had to upgrade the individual software package in order to work with their stupid documents....

Re:Good

[kikito]

> And for a lot of us who are power users

I hope you are wearing your Power Glove, power user.

Re:Good

[NormalVisual]

Office Libre (And Open Office as well) does everything that M$ office does except crashing!

The bug tracker for the product begs to differ. There are bugs in there that are more than a decade old.

Re:Good

[dwpro]

though as I almost stopped reading after you said you "adored" UAC (no hate for the idea, but not too hip on the implementation), I do like your creative spelling for disgraceful...might I suggest diss-crass-full? Or perhaps, 'deys-craze-full?

Re:Good

[JBMcB]

Or, if you are still running Excel 2003, you just download the compatibility pack for Office 2007/2010, and you can open and save documents in those formats.

Re:Good

[jbolden]

1) Integrated Business Intelligence
2) Easy user defined functions
3) Scripting
4) User roles and permission for people using the spreadsheet

etc..
 

Re:Good

[mcgrew]

What would a writer need that Oo or any other word processor lacks? Excel I see; it's head and shoulders above other spreadsheets, but a word processor is a word processor.

Re:Good

[Alter_3d]

Or, if you are still running Excel 2003, you just download the compatibility pack for Office 2007/2010, and you can open and save documents in those formats.

The compatibility pack also works with Office XP and 2000.

Re:Good

[Agent0013]

Excel for Windows is the only reason I even keep a Windows machine around. Excel for Mac is a steaming pile of crap, and Calc can't hold a candle to either. It just falls flat on its face if you ask it to do any data manipulation over several thousands rows or any reasonably complex calculations. I kept giving Calc a chance but gave up after too many crashes/lock-ups with modest spreadsheets (5-10Meg). Yes, it's fine for your "need to make a table quickly" or "process this simple form data" or as crappy project management tool, but anything else, forget it, especially when it comes to database connectivity and pivottables.

And I quit using Excel after having it corrupt the documents so they would no longer open and I had to use Open Office to fix them. Plus, Excel can't search through multiple sheets for a number, you have to switch to each sheet and do a new search. Why would such a bloated tool be missing such fundamental features? Besides, if you are using over several thousands of rows I would say you are using the wrong tool for the job.

Re:Good

[jythie]

True, though as others have pointed out, it is sometimes more then just being able to load/save documents. For instance the time sheets we have to fill out are set up using a newer version of Excel's macros, that even if you can load the file they don't quite work right. It could be said that they are simply poorly written, but at the end of the day they are the documents the people who pay our bills want time reported in.

Re:Good

[UnknownSoldier]

> I would be interested in what other spreadsheets have to offer that Excel doesn't.

* Free, as in source code, and in price.
* My data is not locked into proprietary formats.
* The fact that I can specify column widths in inches. (Not sure if the latest Excel has this.)
* Better importing / sorting of data.
* On-screen presentation matches 100% the Printed Output. i.e. Is not tied to the printer driver. (The *Same* Excel document printed on Win2000 and WinXP printed different to the *same* printer! WTF?)

OpenOffice is "good enough" for most normal users.

Re:Good

[Hatta]

if Excel is not a "quality tool" what is?

R

Re:Good

[e70838]

Sorry to contradict you. I am using ubuntu LTS and OpenOffice at home since years. I am using Word at work. OpenOffice crashes far more often than Word. I do not complain at all: OpenOffice has an excellent recovery of documents after crashing, I have never lost anything with OpenOffice. Word has also a recovery, but this does not work very well: it crashes again just after the recovery. I can not say for libre office, but OpenOffice crashes too often to deny it.

Re:Good

[avandesande]

Microsoft has publicly stated for some time now that Windows XP support will end 2014. Why would they release a new version of office that will only be supported for a year? And what business would be hot to immediately upgrade their version of office and still be on XP?

Please do a better job of supporting the 'ploy' by Microsoft.

Re:Good

[operagost]

You can take that right to the ATM machine.

Re:Good

[UnknownSoldier]

One of these options needs to be removed

* The fact that I can specify column widths in inches.

Excel 2011, Ver 14 can do this.

Re:Good

[jbolden]

Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Of course they do stuff for cashflow reasons like any other business. Microsoft released Vista Jan 2007. They should have stopped supporting any new features on XP no later than Jan 2009.

I think extraordinary generous in allowing people to maintain old OSes with current software and as a result have created end users that actually believe that OS upgrades aren't essentially mandatory. For the alternative I'd present Apple which has trained their users to upgrade, and their developers that once a new OS version hits they better be already prepared with compatible versions of their software. The result has been users get fast progress, developers get upgrade sales and Apple sells new systems at a good clip.

Re:Good

[mcgrew]

I'd say that Excel is the only quality tool Microsoft makes. I used Quattro and Lotus at work before they switched to all-MS, and it's head and shoulders above them (Haven't used Oo's spreadsheet, I have no use for a spreadsheet at home).

Have you ever even used a spreadsheet?

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

> Why would they release a new version of office that will only be supported for a year?
Because that is what people are using. The end of general support for WinXP does not mean products cannnot be made for it (or indeed that patches will no longer be made for it - you'll just have to pay to get specific things done).

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

Yes, but Appple upgrades are $40 (of my local dollars) not $400. You see Microsoft has been obscenely gouging for a long time - since there is no significant competition in the market and they collude with OEMs to keep it that way. It is not unreasonable for users to expect that software that can be trivially be made to run on their existing operating system be made to do so, since they already effectively paid for a very long period of support when they bought the overpriced operating system (in most cases they had no choice, they couldn't buy a machine without it). Now for a car analogy, if you had a 10 year old car why should you change to a new car just becase there are newer models out - at least in the car industry there is standardization and competition to prevent what Microsoft are doing (kinda like changing the fuel used so you have to change car).

Re:Good

[jbolden]

Microsoft is charging like $20 for the Windows 8 upgrade. For a full version OEM prices are below $100. Microsoft has driven almost everyone out of the OS business because their prices are so low. Back when there still was an x86 alternative operating system market SCO was around $600-1000, while workstation OSes cost more. I think there is a lot one can complain about with Microsoft, high prices no. Microsoft has a 35 year track record of driving prices down everywhere they go.

Arguably that's why they've considered Linux such a severe threat because they couldn't beat it in a price war and Linux was able to gain ground in the server space, where Microsoft wasn't willing to cut prices enough to knock Linux out.

They also have an excellent record on long term support. They can't make the new Office run on older systems since they are moving things in the direction of Metro.

As for your car analogy, cars aren't really designed for 10 years either.

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

>Microsoft is charging like $20 for the Windows 8 upgrade.
That's because they want to move as many people onto Windows Marketplace as soon as they can. They've seen Apple lock folks in and want some of that action. This is pretty clearly a 'loss leader' move my Microsoft - and most people don't know and don't care about it - suckers.

Re:Good

[jbolden]

Whatever the motivation, the claim was Microsoft was charging $400 for an upgrade. That's false.

Re:Good

[Billly Gates]

No but there is a good economical reason not too and yes it is technical too.

If you redo the whole XP driver model (for free), then you need to have the hardware vendors update their 10 year old hardware (for free), you need to readd the same features in the Windows 7 kernel (for free). Just to make people who refuse to pay you. Does that make any business sense?

Besides if MS spent the tens of billions for people who wont pay you for it then you end up with Windows 7 anyway. Now older XP is no longer compatible with itself and ancient programs break and so on.

OpenGL is just a library. DirectX is an engine. You have any idea how much work that would entail when they already have a DirectX11 engine ready to go!

It is not malicious at all nor simple to add the features to existing XP users. Windows 7 has advanced document management and security for years that is perfect for cloud integration as you do not want confidential stuff on the internet nor to the wrong sets of people. We have not used them because of old XP users who refuse to leave.

Please it is holding us back right there with IE 6. The reason Windows 7 is not that hyped up in the office is no program takes advantage of its features due to XP support. Let it go and tell your boss to upgrade.

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

Not in my country.

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

> OpenGL is just a library. DirectX is an engine.
You don't program to these do you? [hint, I do] what a load of bollox. Your statement is so misguided as to be laughable.

> If you redo the whole XP driver model (for free)
Huh? another misconception that is so bad it nearly makes me dispair for your ignorance. The drivers do not need to be touched. The functionality needed is already in DirectX 9. It might take a particularly slow developer a week to add anti-aliasing support for graphics using a DX9 shader. It might take them another week or two to get hinting going and tested for text. Hell, the Free Software guys did nice font rendering for FreeType in their spare time without a (70 billion profit per year) big company backing them. Sun did this for three platforms and two graphics APIs (OpenGL and DirectX), although Adobe did help out to get the design and requirements right.

> Let it go and tell your boss to upgrade. Apart from my multiple game servers (on Win7) I did upgrade: to Ubuntu and now to MacOSX - where even the Rotten Apple would never try and trick you to upgrade with bullshit about their office suite needing 'DirectX11' capabilities (when OpenGL/DirectX 9 is perfectly adequate for accelerating 2D). The reason for Microsoft dropping support is not technical - unfortunately it seems you have very little technical knowledge about modern graphics APIs (not 'engines', that statement was so ridiculous it became sublime).

Re:Good

[toddestan]

With Vista and later, Windows should just silently redirect the writes and reads to Program Files to the VirtualStore in the user's profile, and the poorly written software won't be any wiser.

Re:Good

[Kalriath]

Excel 2011 is only available on Mac. Excel 2010 (Ver 14) can only specify column widths in some esoteric number which noone's entirely sure which measurement system it's in.

Re:Good

[Kalriath]

Microsoft is charging like $20 for the Windows 8 upgrade.

Only if you purchase a complete PC with Windows 7 pre-installed after a particular date. That's not charging $20 for the upgrade, no matter how you swing it.

Re:Good

[Kalriath]

I don't play World of Warcraft. Do I still need SysWoW64?

Re:Good

[jbolden]

So far the pricing announced is:

$15 for recent PC purchasers
$40 for anyone with XP on up, but they are bundling media center
$60 for anyone with XP on up who wants physical media unclear if you get media center

And at the least the $60 is going to be a retail cost so the street price should be quite a bit lower. None of these is remotely close to $400 which is what I was responding to.

Re:Good

[westyvw]

Bullshit. I made a living writing documents too, and Microsoft was not the one with good quality tools. Libre office was far better suited for large documents (3,000 or so pages), did better formatting, and had better integration with spreadsheets.
YOU may want to spend money on MS Office, but that doesnt mean it is any more of a "quality" tool then the free options.

Re:Good

[westyvw]

There you go again. Complete bulshit. I dont know how many times I have had to rely on LibreOffice to deal with the shortcomings of Excel. YOUR workflow and YOUR work may not fit into Calc, but that doesnt mean someone elses doesnt. I think I could save a minute per hour by simply not using excel due to the bloat.
For my workflow, excel does not integrate into word well enough. I also cant write (well technically I can, but I find it a pain) scripts that update the spreadsheets with out opening them. The column formatting is poor in excel, the worksheet management sucks. Calc hasintegration with external math tools like R and Numpy that just blow excel away. Excel and Word are cute tools that work for somne people, but I dont find them ready for real work.

To each their own, but dont make statements that are complete bullshit.

Re:Good

[cthulhu11]

Perhaps other spreadsheet applications offer 1) The ability to size a spreadsheet as needed, ie. if I need 10 lines, don't put in 60,000 blanks without letting me delete them or 2) Selection / cut / paste that works. Neither double-clicking to select a word nor triple-clicking to select an entire cell work in MS Excel from Office 2011. One has to click on a cell then move to the header area and click/drag to select. WTF?

Re:Good

[Phoghat]

In other news today, it was revealed that none of the parts that make up a 2013 Ford F150 pickup engine, are compatible with any Ford trucks built only 25 years ago. Film at 11

Re:Good

[randyleepublic]

Come on dude! If your not talking about rain and snow, it's "whether", OK?

Re:Good

[randyleepublic]

It's not about what others have the Excel doesn't. No, it's about what Excel has that none of the others do: VBA! VBA is the coolest ide ever. Not because it is anything or has anything that "programmers" like to one up with, but because it is the Swiss Army Knife of ides, that very often gets the job done and very quickly too.

Re:Good

[jaymemaurice]

yeah yeah I noticed soon as I hit the post button...

Re:Good

[drsmithy]

That's because they want to move as many people onto Windows Marketplace as soon as they can. They've seen Apple lock folks in and want some of that action. This is pretty clearly a 'loss leader' move my Microsoft - and most people don't know and don't care about it - suckers.

So when Apple does it, it's awesome, but when Microsoft does it, they're trawling for suckers ?

Check.

Re:Good

[SplashMyBandit]

> So when Apple does it, it's awesome, but when Microsoft does it, they're trawling for suckers ?
IMHO it is bad no matter who does it. I didn't make this judgement in my post, only stating that Apple do lock you in (well, the developers really, which means you indirectly) - which I personally feel is a very bad thing. Equivalently, Microsoft also want to adopt these same measures, controlling distribution of software "for your own good". There are some upsides to these kinds of app stores but there are also a lot of downsides (eg. Apple's abuse of licensing which has lead to censorship about things they don't like, eg legitimate apps that compete with their strategy). I think it would be better to have a certification program (test programs for malware) rather than a 'fascist' rigidly controlled and unquestionable app store system.

Re:Good

[drsmithy]

If/when either Apple or Microsoft make it impossible to install software that isn't on their respective App Stores, you'll have a point.

Re:Good

[Bacon Bits]

The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) or possibly Application Virtualization (App-V) should be able to handle the cases where you're required to deploy software that the developers refuse to write correctly. It also offers the benefit of buffering the rest of the system against the stupidity of what is almost certainly particularly badly written code. It only makes sense if you have to do it on a large scale (our POS system could do the ACT treatment, but it's not worth it for 20 machines) but it does work very well.

Beware, though, that the Marketdroids appear to have pre-empted the App-V name to include cloud-based services (because buzzwords, I guess) so you might have to dig a bit more to find the right information if you decide to go that route. Here's some links to get you started:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd562082(v=vs.85).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee461265(v=ws.10)

Re:Good

[spasm]

Or alternately, "Good, pointless office upgrades need to be wiped out".

Re:Good

[symbolset]

You had to be AC to post that, really?

Lol

[sentientbeing]

2 gig of RAM to type a letter

Re:Lol

[MightyMartian]

I wonder what the requirements for Notepad will be.

Re:Lol

[Mashiki]

Yeah, I just had to make sure here on that one. Open office... 27.3MB of ram in use with my largest technical letter open, which is 173 pages long. Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

256k to write a letter, 1.99gb to display that letter with the Metro interface.

Re:Lol

[MrEricSir]

And yet, it doesn't seem to do all that much more than the old WYSIWYG office apps that ran on DOS and used 2 megabytes of RAM.

MS Office is like the Madden games -- every couple years we fork over money for an updated version, but football itself didn't change in the interim.

Re:Lol

[Dadoo]

Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.

The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.

Re:Lol

[OttoErotic]

I think they use the same method our company does to set requirements: the specs of whatever desktop our dev director happens to have on his desk the day he signs off on the final build. "Seems to work fine for me on this one guys"

Re:Lol

[ThunderBird89]

Agreed. I still use 2003, that was the last one with a sane UI (I never could stomach the ribbon interface of 2010), and AFAIK, it actually has more features than 2010. And now that 2013 will be Metro-compatible, there will be no reason to upgrade there either. I view Metro as something that is kick-ass on a tablet (seriously, the best tablet UI I have ever seen), but on a PC, it is utterly and irrevocably broken.

Re:Lol

[multiben]

For simple documents, it's good. But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. It has excellent integration between other MS stuff like excel, project etc. I have seriously tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement and I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't quite cut it yet.

Re:Lol

[Mashiki]

Somewhere between 640k and hell.

Re:Lol

[GigaplexNZ]

Except it doesn't work with the Metro interface.

Re:Lol

[GigaplexNZ]

Other than some specific OneNote and Lync ports, I'm pretty sure that it is not compatible with Metro.

Re:Lol

[Greyfox]

Maybe now people will stop giving me heat about the memory footprint I have from using EMACS as my mail client.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're writing a document that complex, you probably shouldn't be using MS-office or libreoffice or any other WYSIWYG editor.

Re:Lol

[multiben]

I'm sorry, I can only see half of your reply. I can't see the bit where you suggest an alternative?

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

LaTex or something that allows you to separate the content from the presentation. It's something that tends to make things a lot easier if you decide later that you want different formatting or if you need a copy for two different audiences, but where the audiences can't for one reason or another use the same formatting. Like say if you're sending one copy to somebody that always uses a mobile phone.

Re:Lol

[Z34107]

It's not that bad. Word 2010 uses ~95 MB of memory for an 11,461 page document. I sincerely doubt Word 2013 is much worse.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

LaTeX.

Re:Lol

[Johann Lau]

How much for a sentence?

Re:Lol

[SuricouRaven]

It also lets you do a one-click publish of your document to your facebook account, or edit documents from Microsoft's cloud as easily as if they were local.

So, still nothing useful. MS is trying so hard to find new features to add, but the word processor was really perfected the day someone incorporated the first spellchecker.

Re:Lol

[DeathFromSomewhere]

A neckbear!? Sweet jesus tell me how I can get one of those.

Re:Lol

[Shompol]

My spouse and I use LibreOffice daily for serious stuff -- it is fast and reliable, even on a machine from 2001. There is nothing major to complain about, except for MS monopoly on doc and docx formats, but that is not really a LibreOffice's fault. We convert everything to Adobe PDF, and the documents are guaranteed to look exactly the same on all systems, unlike MS docs, which are always a line or two off when opened on another computer. Where a .doc/.ppt is needed we export to Office 2003, because docx export is seriously broken.

I did not bring this incompatibility with everything and everyone on our heads on purpose, but we run Ubuntu on all computers and installing MS Office would mean mucking around with Wine, not to mention finding my license keys, which got lost eons ago. What is shocking is that it turned out rather trivial to survive without MS Office, so I don't plan to ever need it in the future.

Re:Lol

[symbolset]

I admire you for having document processing needs far above those of common folk like me. Hopefully someday I might be so powerful and influential that I must succumb to the needs of Microsoft to get my work done.

Re:Lol

[im_thatoneguy]

The question though in this case isn't "what does it take to run office" so much as "what does it take to run any application in Windows 7 or Windows 8?"

Those system specs are nearly identical to Windows 7's system recommendations.

Essentially all the recommended system specs are saying is. "Your computer needs to run Windows 7, after that Office will be fine with whatever." If your OS is crapping out without any apps running (min OS specs) then you won't be running office smoothly either.

Re:Lol

[Zebai]

While I could care less for MS Word and could easily switch to just about any other document program Excel is a different game. The things I do with pivots, tables, and shared data between files/servers is a step beyond open office.

Re:Lol

[yuhong]

Yea, the minimum requirements listed include the RAM consumed by the OS.

Re:Lol

[LordLimecat]

Same as always. Take the amount of data being worked with, multiply it by two, and then lock up the entire machine.

Re:Lol

[yuhong]

Not true. Read the minimum requirements for Windows 7.

Re:Lol

[zaphod777]

Try Libre Office, this is one of the many improvements they have made.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

We convert everything to Adobe PDF, and the documents are guaranteed to look exactly the same on all systems, unlike MS docs, which are always a line or two off when opened on another computer.

That's not a feature. Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.

Also, I don't know what decade you're living in, but if you have the same paper size selected word documents don't seem to have that problem across computers. If you do have different paper sizes it's very much intentional. Whether you like it or not is certainly subjective, but MS could have long ago fixed paper size and margins etc. to the document, they've deliberately chosen to not do that because it's a pain in the arse when you work internationally.

Also, if you want to collaboratively edit a PDF you're pretty much on the hook for cash the same way you are with MS, so you're not really getting yourself much there.

Re:Lol

[annex1]

I wish I could mod you up. Take this hollow gesture as a poor substitute.

Re:Lol

[sjames]

People keep saying that, but I have yet to see a document not display properly except when MS gratuitously perturbs the format yet again to avoid inter-operating.

Re:Lol

[geminidomino]

I can write HTML and CSS by hand entirely too, but for most people that's really not a good plan.

Wow, could you have possibly chosen a WORSE example for your comparison? WYSIWYG html editors might be fine... no, they're still not... might be passable for making your dog's tumblr page or something, but woe betide the poor bastard who has to deal with it if you're dumb enough to use it for anything "serious."

Re:Lol

[SplashMyBandit]

Adobe make an entire suite of products (eg Acrobat et al) that are excellent for publishing. Word is slow an unreliable - at least that is my experience on my Mac with MS Office 2011. On that platform LibreOffice is much nicer to use [although lacking some of the nice default styles that Word has].

Re:Lol

[sjames]

It's where people who are smart enough to not consider flushing money down the toilet a recreational activity hang out.

Re:Lol

[Tough Love]

You have obviously never submitted a paper for publication.

Re:Lol

[Tough Love]

The things I do with pivots, tables, and shared data between files/servers is a step beyond open office.

I doubt that. What makes you think Libre Office does not support pivots, tables and database access perfectly well?

Re:Lol

[Seraphim_72]

Dumb ass, you *can* run private clouds. There will be Office 2013 for the desktop, even without a cloud.

Re:Lol

[shutdown -p now]

Open office... 27.3MB of ram in use with my largest technical letter open, which is 173 pages long. Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

I've just opened K&R "The C Programming Language" in Word 2013 - that's 235 pages; 57.1 megabytes of RAM used by winword.exe.

Re:Lol

[shutdown -p now]

LaTex or something that allows you to separate the content from the presentation. It's something that tends to make things a lot easier if you decide later that you want different formatting or if you need a copy for two different audiences, but where the audiences can't for one reason or another use the same formatting. Like say if you're sending one copy to somebody that always uses a mobile phone.

All modern WYSIWYG text processors have styles, which let you do the same.

Re:Lol

[Khyber]

LOL, you actually believe minimum requirements.

640 Megs of RAM (two 256 and a single 128 MB stick) on one 833MHz Pentium III machine, runs windows 7. Sure it takes about 4 minutes for boot up, but after that, it works fine.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Lyx. I did for my thesis in an area of theoretical physics and never once needed to type arcane commands in. Other people even remarked on how my equations looked 10 times better than for anyone else.

Re:Lol

[hairyfeet]

Riiiight, that is like suggesting the replacement for Excel is buying some cluster time at CERN. LaTeX is about the most user UNFRIENDLY software that has ever been designed, a piece of software that wears obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor, so far the ONLY ones I've ever seen use it are those writing their thesis in some tech area like engineering.

If you want to replace Office it has to be user friendly, not a royal PITA with a giant learning curve. This is why geeks don't understand why Linux never goes anywhere on the desktop, they don't mind fiddly ass CLI crap nor spending a weekend learning bash commands and can't understand the average user would rather spend the week at the DMV than deal with that shit. Make LaTeX as user friendly as MS Office and then no problem but as it is? A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than spend hours learning that mess, like actually writing what they needed a WYSIWYG word processor for in the first place!

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, LaTeX has one enormous advantage for collaborative work - you can put the document under source control and have multiple people editing it.

LaTeX has a a horrible learning curve, but I now wouldn't use anything else for anything serious - particularly if there is math included.

Re:Lol

[backwardMechanic]

Oh dear, you really don't get it. For any technical writing, LaTeX is just better than those office suites. If you write you document in an office suite, and then move it to LaTeX, you miss out on most of the benefit. Equations are one (no, the equation editor in MS Word is not sufficient). Automatic numbering of anything (equations, figures, sections, references, molecules, whatever), and references to them, is another. Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree LaTeX is horrible, it ubiquitous in academia (at least Math, Physics, Economics and CS), and probably responsible for millions of wasted hours.

Unfortunately for documents which need complex equations, there are not many other options. Scientific word and Lyx would probably save time, but they produce non-standard LaTeX. What the world really needs is a WYSIWYG editor that produces standard LaTeX and is compatible with the major packages. I looked into doing this myself, but the "rules" for converting LaTeX source to documents are pretty complex, so it would be a huge job.

Re:Lol

[1u3hr]

We convert everything to Adobe PDF, and the documents are guaranteed to look exactly the same on all systems, unlike MS docs, which are always a line or two off when opened on another computer.

That's not a feature. Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.

Acrobat has had an option "fit to page" in its printing dialogue for at least 10 years. It'll scale the page by a few percent. Exactly the same pagination. No problem unless you have some critically sized diagrams.

I'm in country that almost universally uses A4 paper. Yet most of the digital documents I get are sized "Letter" because that's the fucking default in Microsoft software and most people just accept that when installing. Also with American spelling (we use British) and American MDY date formats in speadsheets (again, we use a rational system) and that can seriously confuse your data.

Every time I install a a printer, I have to click about 5 times to change the default from "Letter" to A4, despite there only being ab A4 tray in the fucking printer, despite my "locale" being one that uses A4 paper. MS just assumes that if I speak English, I'm in America. Even the fucking timezone defaults to America.

So I need to deal with this crap very, very often.

Also, if you want to collaboratively edit a PDF you're pretty much on the hook for cash

No, plenty of free ways to do that, eg, FoxIt can add comments to any PDF and other markup.

MS could have long ago fixed paper size and margins etc. to the document, they've deliberately chosen to not do that because it's a pain in the arse when you work internationally.

Actually, MS are correct here. The document should reformat to fit the actual paper your printer uses. Office documents are about text, not pinpoint accuracy for layout. If that's what you want, use a DTP app, not an office app.

Re:Lol

[gutnor]

Lot of people do their website in WordPress or similar which contain a wysiwyg editor. Similarly, for large website, the information is created using a variety of tools, and not straight in HTML. Web designers use stuff like dreamweaver. Only web developer develop HTML by hand, and even then, they mostly design HTML shells and templates, with the real content pumped from the database or some other system.

Granted, the gp example is not the best, but there is a parallel: it is not the 90's and although the web forces everybody to use HTML and CSS to publish on the web, only the the tiny minority of the content producer will ever even look (or know) what HTML or CSS look like.

Re:Lol

[justforgetme]

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

Ohh, dear people please listen to this man! Please listen and give an end to the madness of the 2GB .doc file!

Re:Lol

[Maow]

Here we go again.. I'm sure I heard these same lame arguments when Windows 95 came out. Here we are 17 years on and MS is still winning and open source alternatives are still in the toilet.

MS is still winning, but LO/OO are hardly in the toilet. They are perfectly acceptable for ~95% of the tasks that ~95% of users perform.

For those that missed it the first 37 times, Joe Average doesn't mind paying for the latest toy with the latest shiny on it.

Problem is - many Joe Averages are pirating MS Office when they need not to.

No amount of gloating about your crappy 1% market share will change this. And I thought Slashdot is supposed to be where the smart people hang out....

If more people realized there was a highly functional alternative, things may well change for some of those users not locked into the MS ecosystem and not using that ~5% functionality not found in the LO/OO offerings.

Note that many of the 99% you refer to are there by inertia or lock-in, so yes, MS is "winning", but their customers are losing.

Smart people indeed... *sigh*

Re:Lol

[justforgetme]

Wasn't there a WYSIWYG editor that produced LaTeX and looked like a plain text processor?

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I just submitted my PhD thesis which I wrote using LaTeX. Two of my friends just submitted their thesis as well, written in MS Word. They probably spent half their time fixing incorrect figure numbers, footnotes and problems in the table of contents. And forget about adding an MS Word file to a versioning system in any meaningful way, or easily breaking up the document into smaller files.

What is more, I submitted my examination copy of the thesis in single-spaced format (to save paper). For the final copy one-half or double-spaced is required. In LaTeX this is as difficult as changing one line in the pre-amble of the document. In MS Word this is likely going to be a week of getting all the figures positioned "just right" again.

I can understand that people outside of comp sci aren't particularly taken to LaTeX, but I'd rather shoot myself than having to write my thesis in MS Word.

LaTeX is anything but past its expiry date, especially in academia. Properly used LaTeX will always produce superior typesetting than any office suite.

Re:Lol

[oobayly]

Seeing as it's Microsoft, they've probably removed it as it's bloat. After all they removed the telnet client from the default install to reduce space. Apparently it was also to improve security, conveniently forgetting that the client isn't the same as the server (which was never enabled by default anyway).

I found it's quicker to download PuTTY than to install all 200k of MS' telnet client. Now I just have a minute USB stick on my keyring that contains PuTTY, Notepad2 and a handful of other useful utilities.

Re:Lol

[serviscope_minor]

LaTeX is one of those things that has clung to life long past its expiry date.

No.

We still see it in academia a lot,

Almost everyone in academia has a mcahine capable or running Office. The rest have machines capable of running openoffice. Many universities are site-licensed with Office. Yet LaTeX persists because people in academia find that it fits their needs better.

and at this point the advice I give people is write your document in some sort of 'office' suite with a half assed effort at formatting, and then put it into LaTeX at the end (or paragraph by paragraph if you need things like equations for the content to make sense).

Then you're a total lunatic.

The office suites are poor editors, and they don't support version control in any meaningful manner. Yes, I have struggled through change tracking and document merging. Compared to writing a document with several co-authors at different locations and using something sane, like git, the tools you advocate are essentially non-functional.

It's much easier to check spelling/grammar,

Now I know you're making shit up. Even vim has spell checking built in these days. And I've never met a grammar checker which didn't suck.

have revisions made by other people (with comments and suggested corrections and so on), in one of the office suits than it is with LaTeX.

LaTeX doesn't do revisions. Those are much better served by a revision control system. I've used CVS, git, SVN, Darcs, Mercurial and possibly others. I've also worked with the versioning features of a word processor. Once you have more than 2 authors and/or the authors are working at the same time, you need a proper VCS. The half-asses word processor ones suck.

Anfd you know you can write comments in LaTeX, right?

office suites are so much better.

You have actually failed to give any coherent argument as to how.

And good luck getting something like ArXiv to work with a word processor.

Re:Lol

[Alex Belits]

A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than spend hours learning that mess, like actually writing what they needed a WYSIWYG word processor for in the first place!

A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than study medicine, like actually healing the sick through prayer and blood-letting.

Re:Lol

[serviscope_minor]

All modern WYSIWYG text processors have styles, which let you do the same

It gives you a poor approximation to the same.

And falls over when you want to add a custom element with some complexity, like a non-trivial macro in LaTeX.

Re:Lol

[jaymemaurice]

And outline view

Re:Lol

[bertok]

The memory requirement of Office includes operating system overhead and caters for extremely large documents. You know, like the stated memory requirements of every other piece of software out there. It's not like Microsoft seriously expects Office applications to regularly use 1 GB just to launch and edit a letter!

I just opened a 78 page, 14.5 MB Word DOCX technical document with the 64-bit edition of Word 2010, and it's using a whopping 36.3 MB of memory. Also, it used a grand total of 240 milliseconds of CPU time to load.

Clearly, it's a bloated pig of an app, and we should all go back to using edlin to save those precious bytes of RAM.

Re:Lol

[serviscope_minor]

Maybe now people will stop giving me heat about the memory footprint I have from using EMACS as my mail client.

Well, it was called Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping for a reason. ...

I guess it's still eight megs.

Re:Lol

[jaymemaurice]

With Word, and a database sorce (heck, Access works) you can quickly whip up a few teplates that take your data from a database so you can quickly print personalized coverletters/applications/letters/emails - throw in map-point and you can even automatically mark off the places you mailed them to on a map so that you can visit them and follow up with turn by turn directions and such. MS product integration was awesome (hopefully 2013 is not neutered)

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

Yeah, I just had to make sure here on that one. Open office... 27.3MB of ram in use with my largest technical letter open, which is 173 pages long. Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

Yes, and of course yorur computer is using no RAM whatsoever for the OS? You're running Linux (or whatever) on a 32MB RAM machine?

While I'm sure you're right that Windows uses more memory, it's silly to imply that it's 2GB instead of 27MB

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I have written a PhD thesis and two books with over 500 pages using various versions of MS Word. All of the above packed with tables, screenshots and technical diagrams. I never had even the slightest issue with Word. As much as I hate MS, I have to call BS bigtime!

Re:Lol

[asdf7890]

Unlike Vista, for the absolute basics (web browsing unless you are going to particularly complex web apps, text editing, file management, and not much else) Windows 7 is actually usable on 512Mb unless you have particularly slow drives (it will want to swap a good bit). I've seen it used on a netbook of that spec. I'd not recommend it, but it works.

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

I absolutely agree with you, but criticising LaTeX on slashdot is a bit like posting that the Pope's a paedophile on the Opus Dei chat forums.

Re:Lol

[Kjella]

Automatic numbering of anything (equations, figures, sections, references, molecules, whatever), and references to them, is another. Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.

Dude, we used those features when we wrote our master's thesis back in 2003 in MS Office and they work just fine. If the problem is that people don't know to use their tools, handing them a new one isn't going to solve anything. If I'd been writing it alone I'd probably have used LaTeX, so I'd say it's more like the people who know how use it in any tool and those who don't never will.

Re:Lol

[marcello_dl]

So, to recap the thread:
1 openoffice (i'd say libreoffice) does office work well
2 but not for complex documents
3 but for complex document office is not good either, you would be better off with latex
4 latex? we need simpler stuff
right, so GOTO 1

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

I can write HTML and CSS by hand entirely too, but for most people that's really not a good plan.

Wow, could you have possibly chosen a WORSE example for your comparison? WYSIWYG html editors might be fine... no, they're still not... might be passable for making your dog's tumblr page or something, but woe betide the poor bastard who has to deal with it if you're dumb enough to use it for anything "serious."

The whole point is that most people's word/document processing needs are much more equivalent to their dog's tumblr page than an academic textbook.

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

You have obviously never submitted a paper for publication.

Well, no, and nor have 99% of users.

No one's arguing that LaTeX isn't better for the preparation of academic papers than Word, merely that if you're writing normal home and business documents the effort of learning LaTeX isn't worth it when Word will do perfectly well.

Right tool for the right job.

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

And again, the point is: how many users are writing PhD physics theses or maths textbooks?

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

Ohh, dear people please listen to this man! Please listen and give an end to the madness of the 2GB .doc file!

The fact that your OS requires 2GB of RAM does not mean that any of your documents will be 2GB in size.

Re:Lol

[tehcyder]

Stop it, you're spoiling everyone's fun mocking Word for producing a 2GB "hello world" document.

Re:Lol

[MtViewGuy]

I'd almost agree except RAM is very dirt-cheap nowadays and even the current low-cost "dual-core Pentium" (essentially more or less a Core i3 CPU with only 1 MB of CPU cache) supports x86-64 instructions, so you could build a very inexpensive system with 4 GB RAM and 500 GB hard drive that runs Windows 7 and the new Office 2013 quite well indeed.

In fact, it's always been my opinion that how much RAM your system has is a huge component in how fast your system runs. Under Windows XP, I'd recommend at minimum 1 GB in 32-bit mode, and under Windows Vista/7, I'd recommend 4 GB RAM in 64-bit mode--that way, you get a lot less "memory paging" back and forth from the hard drive, resulting in much "snappier" performance.

Re:Lol

[arisvega]

suggest an alternative?

LaTeX -

Re:Lol

[gtall]

Never wrote a scientific paper have you? Or made a scientific presentation? I've used both PP and Latex with Beamer for slide shows. I can (a) spend all my time hunt and pecking for symbols and attempting to get the format looking something like a scientist is used to seeing, or (b) spend my time on the ideas and let Latex get the symbols and formatting correct. MS Word is similarly horrible for scientific documents.

I admit Latex and Tex aren't for most people because they do require you learn some fairly arcane syntax and possibly macro expansions, and to understand a bit about typesetting. However, once learned, Word and PP look like rinky-dink toys.

Re:Lol

[AmiMoJo]

Word does that to the extent that most people need. The "Styles" system is actually quite powerful and can do a lot of formatting, as well as tagging text so that it can be automatically indexed for contents pages or indices etc.

Re:Lol

[Chewy509]

Yes, it's called Lyx
http://www.lyx.org/

Re:Lol

[BevanFindlay]

I know, right!
Mod parent up ;-)

Actually, the sad truth is that's what Notepad would do with any large text documents. You laugh because your only other option would be to cry (or install a real text editor).

Re:Lol

[BevanFindlay]

The web isn't the only place where writing raw HTML+CSS is useful - take ebooks for example. I can tell you from first-hand experience that MS Word is a bad idea for writing an ebook if you want it to involve images. But, seeing as most of the main formats basically are HTML/CSS/XML based, writing by hand is much nicer, and if you hand someone a template and some simple instructions (this is a tag, this is an end tag, use this one for a link, etc), it's not difficult (again, first-hand experience with getting my wife to edit some of her own files).

Helps if you get to see the HTML colour too :-)

Re:Lol

[macshit]

For simple documents, it's good. But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. It has excellent integration between other MS stuff like excel, project etc. I have seriously tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement and I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't quite cut it yet.

Er, but for "serious stuff", MS office is also slow, flaky, and unreliable...

[Idiots at my work write their tech manuals in word ...argh..!]

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

"But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. "

I thought you were talking about Word.

Because it is flak and unreliable for serious stuff.

I'm talking 300-page proposals with styles, columns, over/underhangs, pictures/tables, cross-references, etc.

Daily crashes, necessitating manual versioning (blah-proposal01, blah-proposal02, etc.)

Had to use OpenOffice as a replacement.

Re:Lol

[Quince alPillan]

Unfortunately, I haven't seen a decent Word Processor that uses LaTex. I've seen wonderful LaTex programs that will allow someone who knows LaTex to very easily make documents (and by far is some of the best Open Source user-space programming I've seen), but I've not seen a LaTex Word Processor that will do things like...allow multiple line returns.

For someone who doesn't know LaTex and hasn't completely bought into the hype, getting into LaTex is actually pretty difficult. Trying to convince someone who doesn't know why the pain-in-the-ass word processor is better than Word or Open Office is even more difficult because the benefits don't outweigh the amount of effort it takes to learn it.

Re:Lol

[ceoyoyo]

I've tried a couple. They're all lacking features. Change tracking and reference management being big ones.

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

What? Really?

I haven't had to use LaTeX, but isn't it hierarchical, like many/most other markup languages?

A missing symbol or terminator somewhere, and the whole document is messed up.

Re:Lol

[BevanFindlay]

Not sure if you've been paying attention, but while certain areas (like office apps) are still strongly closed-sourced-dominated, open source has been slowly and steadily growing. Chrome is now getting bigger than IE in some places, not to mention Firefox and (webkit-based, so at least partly open) Safari; Android is a serious contender in the mobile market, and that's basically a specialised version of Linux. Open/LibreOffice too has increased it's market share significantly, and as mentioned by others, can do most of what most people need, so it's not hard to get people to use it.

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

I have no doubt LaTeX would be better for hardcore documents, but regarding the stuff you specifically mentioned:

Equations- OpenOffice Math seems good enough for light usage.

Number of stuff- Just because you haven't seen an office drone do this doesn't mean anything. The feature's there, and people do use it. Again, office drones don't use it because they don't know how, and they're just writing simple letters.

The way you really use OpenOffice (or Word, for that matter) is with styles and object fields (including numbering).

Re:Lol

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, actually, all the time. I have always been forbidden to use LaTex because supervisors want WYSIWYG and change tracking for editing. I see their point.

Word with proper use of cross references and styles works fine. You can type Tex into MathType for equations, or use LaTexIt (on a Mac). LaTexIt also works very nicely in PowerPoint or Keynote.

The only real problem with Word is that it's layout is buggy. Things don't stay where you put them. PowerPoint is a mess, but Keynote exports well enough for those backward conferences that don't support Macs.

Re:Lol

[ceoyoyo]

Strange. Everyone I know uses those features in Word for scientific writing. And equation editor is crap, but you can type LaTeX into MathType. Or MathML I believe.

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

>For the final copy one-half or double-spaced is required. In LaTeX this is as difficult as changing one line in the pre-amble of the document. In MS Word this is likely going to be a week of getting all the figures positioned "just right" again.

Look, I make fun of M$ all the time, too (check history). But there's no point to dissing them on stuff which isn't true. They should have set styles on all text, and then changed the styles (a 30 second job).

If your bros diddled with formatting, it's because they didn't take the time to learn it.

I can't say I can really blame them, either, because no one gives you books/manuals with software anymore.

I remember back in the day the Access manual was not only a great, well-written introduction to Access usage and programming, but it also taught you about normal form!

These days, you have to buy the "missing manual". Your friends didn't do that, and thought they were saving time. They weren't.

Learn to use the tool, and then you can criticize it. For example, Word doesn't have page styles; OpenOffice does.

Re:Lol

[BadgerRush]

LaTex is a very poor solution for separating content from the presentation. It is NOT a document definition language, it is a full programming language. Advocating the use of LaTex to write documents is like advocating that we stop using html/css on the web and instead create all web pages in pure Javascript: it is possible to separate content from the presentation, but it is far from the best solution

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

It's a great approximation (i.e., 20/80 solution).

What will a non-trivial macro do for you that a macro in Visual Basic or OpenOffice Basic won't? I'd guess the latter would cover 80% of the cases.

Re:Lol

[cawpin]

I still don't understand this. Is the ribbon interface fairly different? Yes, of course. Is it any harder to use than the menus? No, not even a little. It's all about learning where everything is and realizing that almost every function is 2 clicks or less away. It takes maybe a couple of days to find 95% of what you'll use. The benefits of Office 2007/2010 far outweigh any negatives. I use 2003 and 2007 on a daily basis and prefer 2007 by far.

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

The thing is, no one is really criticizing LaTeX. People are just reacting to those who have no idea that Word does styles.

If you can live with the crashes, and save your work often, you can even write a book in it. M$ used to, back when they actually gave you manuals with their software. ("This book was composed in Word for Windows 2.0 using Blah font and XYZ.")

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

This. If you're sending a completed document to somebody, why would you send it in an editable format?

Re:Lol

[slimjim8094]

I don't know why you seem to think that LaTeX is designed to compete with Office. In fact, they were written nearly simultaneously (about 1983).

Frankly, the cost of learning LaTeX (and there is one) was outweighed by the time I saved working on my first paper. Not even an engineering one with formulas - just a normal, cited research paper for a history class. It was only about 10 pages - not even that long - but not having to screw with my citations or formatting saved me more time than it took to learn. Plus, it's not a binary blob and thus you can actually put it in revision control, and not expect your document format to be change-tracking or collaborative or anything other than formatting. And you can write it in any text editor (I use a highlighting editor, specifically Emacs, but it's not necessary) and generate really gloriously good PDFs with a hyperlinked TOC, and clickable footnotes that take you right to the citation. Not to mention, it properly justifies the text so that it fills the whole page. With Word you have to jump through some hoops and it doesn't work quite right even then.

Re:Lol

[Iamthecheese]

well, your brain uses the equivalent of a hundred petaflops to compose it...

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

One thing I wish they would add is "reveal codes" (remember that from WordPerfect for DOS)?

There are a lot of times where "you can't get there from here". Your formatting is messed up, but you don't know exactly why.

Yeah, I know they have some variant of reveal codes, but I'd like something more.

Re:Lol

[Hatta]

In which case, LibreOffice works just fine.

Re:Lol

[Tharkkun]

Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.

The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.

There's a reason why Oracle dumped it back to opensource and it's not because it's a great alternative. They evaluated it as an internal replacement for MS office and decided against it.

Re:Lol

[openfrog]

Oh dear, you really don't get it. For any technical writing, LaTeX is just better than those office suites.

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

Arrgh! Please let me forget my past!

It was a long time ago though, 1990... but still a painful memory.

Re:Lol

[xystren]

I completely agree with you on the ribbon interface - what a unintuitive piece of garbage. I also am still using 2003, and dread when I have to use the ribbon interface at school. I just have this thing about my menus staying static, and not being dynamic depending on where I happen to be focused/clicked on. I honestly have yet to see a compelling feature added since Office 95 that would justify an upgrade. Office 2003 just happen to be what was available at the time.

I know the ribbon fanboys are going to slam me on this - so fanboys, "Get off my damn lawn!"

Re:Lol

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

And yet, it doesn't seem to do all that much more than the old WYSIWYG office apps that ran on DOS and used 2 megabytes of RAM.

I was thinking the same thing. I switched from Word Perfect (DOS) to MS Word 2.0 (DOS) and read a pretty think book on the product. (yeah - I'm old enough to have used products that came with thick user manuals). I made heavy use of Style Sheets, and the Outline Editor. Those were the killer features of the product.

The Windows version is so easy to use that most people never take any time to get trained or even read a user manual. They miss out on most of what Word can do. So while MS keeps adding "features", the users don't do much beyond WordPad-with-spell-checking.

When I show people the Outline Editor, they are amazed at this "new" feature.

Re:Lol

[Chris Mattern]

The alternative is so well known he probably thought you already knew it. LaTeX, of course.

Re:Lol

[0123456]

If you want to replace Office it has to be user friendly, not a royal PITA with a giant learning curve.

Hang on. Are you suggesting that Word is user friendly? Because 'a royal PITA with a giant learning curve' is pretty much what I'd call it; particularly with the stupid 'ribbon' interface which never displays the things I actually want.

Re:Lol

[Cl1mh4224rd]

The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.

That really hasn't been my experience (with LibreOffice and a specific format, anyway).

For a project myself and a friend are working on, we needed to export data from an executable into a plain text spreadsheet format that allowed formatting (bold column headers, borders, etc.). He's running Microsoft Office 2010 and I'm running LibreOffice 3.5 (LO). The only format supported by both suites that seemed to fit the requirements was Excel 2003 XML (SpreadsheetML).

We quickly discovered a number of issues with LO's support for that format:

-- It's slow as hell opening the file, which contains less than 700 lines with 30-some columns.

-- If you format a column in LO and save the file, it writes out (potentially hundreds of) empty Row nodes to the file. If you then close and re-open this very same file in LO, you will be unable to save any changes; it will fail with a write error. If you open the file in Excel 2010 and save, Excel will collapse those empty rows into a single Row node spanning the same number of empty nodes LO wrote out. You will still be unable to save changes to this file in LO. Yes... LO writes out data that it can read but can't write back out a second time.

-- While LO supports things like Freeze Panes, it fails to export that information to the Excel 2003 XML file when saving.

LO uses a handful of XSLTs to import and export SpreadsheetML documents to and from it's internal format, so it's theoretically possible for me to fix these issues (except for the file open speed), but that would require a lot of research completely unrelated to the project I'm working on. In other words, a waste of my time.

Re:Lol

[jahudabudy]

Are you suggesting it requires 4 years of higher education, then 2-4 years residency to be able to use LaTeX? Or we should all just hire specialists to write our documents?

Re:Lol

[Hatta]

LaTeX is about the most user UNFRIENDLY software that has ever been designed

LaTeX is plenty user friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are.

Make LaTeX as user friendly as MS Office and then no problem but as it is?

By requiring people to upgrade their RAM and GPU just to edit documents? That's not really very friendly, is it?

A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than spend hours learning that mess

Spend hours up front to save days or weeks in the long run.

Re:Lol

[geminidomino]

Wordpress isn't the same thing. In that case, all the code is already done and the text in question is stored in a database of some sort. That's not what I mean here.

I'm talking about things like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, "Jack Mehoff's Easy Web Page Maker Lite(TM)," and, of course (and this one should be punishable by a slow, agonizing death) Word's "Export to/Save As HTML."

In the case of Dreamweaver you can almost expect it, since they're throwing vendor lock-in at you, albeit subtly (You CAN edit those files in an actual editor, provided you roll a successfull WILL save vs. mindcrash), but the lot of them produce some of the most fucked up markup I've ever had the misfortune of inheriting.

Re:Lol

[DeathFromSomewhere]

I'm actually surprised no one else has picked up on this. The requirements for Office 2013 happen to be roughly the same as the requirements for Windows 7/8. Chalk this one up to slashdot freaking out over nothing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7#Hardware_requirements

Re:Lol

[FithisUX]

Latex can be easy as LyX or TeXMacs (a good laternative for OpenOffice can be Lotus Symphony, I use it instead of LibreOffice on my Opensuse 12.1 x64)

Re:Lol

[ThunderBird89]

It is harder to use, for me. I want to be certain that whenever I move my mouse, the function under the pointer doesn't change. With 2003's static toolbars and menus, I can point to a place in the text, and without looking away, move my mouse and format it. With 2007/10, I understand they were trying to be helpful to have Word offer up the Tables ribbon when I click inside the table, but I'm still going to scream "Go F4 yourselves!" when I click inside the table, move my mouse to make the text bold and underlined, and I suddenly see my table doing a Dom Cobb as another table is inserted into the cell, because Word 'helpfully' offered up the table functions, and where ten milliseconds ago was the bold button, now it said "Insert table".
I also have a custom toolbar of functions I like to have at my disposal at all times: inserting footnotes, word counts, insert symbol, etc. My bibliography software (now deprecated, for the time being), RefWorks, also added a toolbar of its own. AFAIK, you can't do the same under the ribbon-interface.

Whenever possible, I try to use my own laptop, which has Win7 x64 running Office 2003. Sacrilege it may be, it's what works best for me.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

Several actually. In LaTeX. It depends what your biggest hurdles when writing are. If you have problems with the content of the writing then LaTeX is the enemy, if you have problems with the layout and formatting, LaTeX is your friend (assuming you can manage to use it).

Re:Lol

[KhabaLox]

Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.

Perhaps because Word and LaTeX are different tools suited to different tasks.

I have no experience with LaTeX, and only use Word for the simplest of documents, but it seems to me that LaTeX excels at creating academic or scientific papers at the cost of a slow learning curve, whereas Word excels at creating simpler documents with some basic features (such as TOCs). It doesn't sound practical to migrate an entire company to LaTeX if the majority of their use cases are memos and letters (perhaps the Bid Manager writing RFP responses would benefit from LaTeX, but if the rest of the organization supporting him is writing their portions in Word, well....). Likewise, it doesn't sound practical to have the Physics department at MIT or the CERN guys use Word.

It's not about one being better than the other, it's about using the right tool for the write job.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

Source control has it's advantages, but source control isn't nearly as good as the commenting tools you get in office. My Girlfriend/Office Mate is writing her PhD in LaTeX as we speak, with version control. Learning the LaTeX is easy, writing well is hard, and for that comments, spelling and grammar checkers, accepting and rejecting revisions etc. are so much better in some sort of office type product (or google docs).

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

I've written a thesis in LaTeX and a book in Word (because I was collaborating with two chinese guys, one of whom didn't know LaTeX). Word was *FAR* easier for the content.

Oh dear, you really don't get it. For any technical writing, LaTeX is just better than those office suites

This statement is straight out of the 1980's. Which, if you read the rest of my comment I straight up address. LaTeX is horrible for actually writing words and collaboratively editing those words. The best you can get is source control and revisioning, which is still way behind comments, tracking, linked notes, etc. that you can do with an office suite.

LaTeX has its advantages for final document style and preparation to be sure, I'm not exactly a huge fan of math type or the like, and I grant that doing equations in LaTeX is easier than in Word, but the actual writing part ugh.

Also, we didn't have any problems doing numbering automatically for the book in word, so I don't view that as a 'problem', it's a matter of knowing how to do it properly.

Re:Lol

[operagost]

Security standards like PCI DSS require removing unused software that could be used for network access.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

MS Word file to a versioning system in any meaningful way, or easily breaking up the document into smaller files.

you mean sharepoint?

I agree, you can't easily break the document up into smaller files. But that's sort of a bizarre requirement. I wrote one thesis in LaTeX and just wrote a book with two other people in Word (not entirely voluntarily). If you don't know how to use word, you're going to waste time on it, same thing with LaTeX.

And yes, LaTeX will be better for typesetting, but not for the actual text of the document. All of my writing is CS or physics, and the *writing* portion, where you are trying to convey information in words is better done in an office suite first, and then typeset however you want. That's what I said the first time.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

Yet LaTeX persists because people in academia find that it fits their needs better.

Only because some journals are still living in the 1980's. And these days, as I said, the actual writing of a document is best done in an office suite.

The office suites are poor editors, and they don't support version control in any meaningful manner. Yes, I have struggled through change tracking and document merging. Compared to writing a document with several co-authors at different locations and using something sane, like git, the tools you advocate are essentially non-functional.

Not knowing how to use the tools properly and then failing to be successful applies to anything. Thinking something can't be done because you don't know how to do it makes you the lunatic.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

You'd think that. But you try watching someone who's writing their PhD in physics in LaTeX who doesn't know the difference between then and than, or they're and their (or typo's one then then other), and so on, and you'll realize that little green squiggly line in Word makes a huge difference to readability.

My office mate/GF can do the maths fine, but she doesn't get language at all, and she doesn't get collaborative editing at all, and because she's using LaTeX her boss has a horrible time trying to explain to her what she's doing wrong within the document.

Re:Lol

[Sir_Sri]

I have written academic papers and even then, you're better off to do the draft in word and then typesetting in LaTeX. Some people, the ones who can write well on their first attempt, can go straight to LaTeX, but that's rare even in academia.

Re:Lol

[Compholio]

You could use LyX instead and get a nice WYSIWYMean editor.

Re:Lol

[Tough Love]

Lyx

Re:Lol

[hairyfeet]

Dude I'm in my 40s and have been working on computers since the Trash 80 was sold in stores and dealing with Windows since Win 3.x brought the fun of torturing people with Hot Dog Stand. I have always had a single motto, to rip off Tron Legacy "I fight for the users" and I call it like I see it.

Too many here treat software as a religion, like you have to "earn" the right to use a computer and frankly most of them would be tickled pink if computers went back to the days of 70s homebrew and wear obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor and I will ALWAYS stand against that horseshit as its nothing but losers wanting to feel elitist! They can't fucking stand the thought that the same machine they use could actually be of any value at all to Suzy the checkout girl and will go out of their way to make damned sure Suzy can't get any use out of it, and that is just elitist garbage.

Computers should be able to make everyone's life better, to make ALL our lives easier, and while there will always be specialized tools for complex jobs frankly writing a fucking letter shouldn't be placed on the same level as running a cluster at CERN, that's bullshit.

So don't worry about me, i'll always call it how I see it, I'll always fight for the users, and i'll always call out elitist bullshit and let the chips fall where they may.

Re:Lol

[oobayly]

Great, and what percentage of PCs with Windows are required to be PCI DSS compliant? I'd also [like to] believe that sysadmins configuring PCI DSS compliant machines would be using an image rather than configuring the machines individually.

Put simply, it's a bloody useful little utility for diagnosing network issues.

Re:Lol

[SuricouRaven]

I think reveal codes would go against Microsoft's basic philosophy: Computers that anyone can use without understanding the underlying technology. They built their empire, and massively expanded the entire industry, with that approach. It's a good approach to things too, so long as you have decent tech-support around for the unavoidable times when a problem can only be solved by someone who understands at a deeper level.

Re:Lol

[jbolden]

It catches the error.

Begin{abc}
Begin{def}
stuff
End{abc} throws an error with the line number

Re:Lol

[jbolden]

Object linking and embedding. I do that all the time between applications.

Re:Lol

[justforgetme]

No, I wasn't referring to those 2GB I was referring to people that actually produce 2GB big .doc documents.

Re:Lol

[jbolden]

Or what we've been discussing in the other thread. Balmer wants to change the culture of Microsoft users and get them used to more frequent and more rapid upgrades. With Cloud based Sharepoint (Microsost 365 & Skydrive) they have something truly compelling over the competition.

And they make some good points regarding Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU
http://www.whymicrosoft.com/en-us/pages/google-apps.aspx

Re:Lol

[Compaqt]

I think M$ has dumbed down computer usage.

I mean, back in the day, everyday run-of-the-mill secretaries knew all about what text command to enter to get WordPerfect to do X. And high-schoolers in typing class. And a lot of other people, too.

Now they have to have a ribbon because supposedly even pulldown menus are too hard.

Re:Lol

[Beat The Odds]

2 gig of RAM to type a letter

A 64 bit letter!

Re:Lol

[dAzED1]

I don't know about you, but I run ecommerce websites from my laptop that process credit card transactions on a very regular basis. I mean duh, who doesn't? (PCI = Payment Card Industry...)

Re:Lol

[caution live frogs]

Yet LaTeX persists because people in academia find that it fits their needs better.

People in certain fields of academia. I've worked with people in a lot of academic research fields - statistics, Alzheimer's research, behavioral neuroscience, energy expenditure, circadian biology, food science, etc. I've been employed at three major research universities and a government research facility. I haven't ever worked with anyone who used LaTeX. 99% use Word; the single exception I can think of prefers Pages. My colleagues include people who spend half their time in SPSS or R, and I do a reasonable amount of scripting to automate data file processing, but nobody I know has bothered with LaTeX. Comp sci and engineering folks might use LaTeX. But even leaving out social sciences, "academia" encompasses a whole lot more than comp sci and engineering. If you want to collaborate with anyone outside of the limited circle who use LaTeX, you're going to be using Word, or dealing with those who do.

Re:Lol

[ThunderBird89]

I'm only going to reply to one point, since the others require no response, other than a "Thank you, now I know more!".

I click inside the table, move my mouse to make the text bold and underlined, and I suddenly see my table doing a Dom Cobb as another table is inserted into the cell

I don't see how that is possible since the Table Design ribbon (which it changes to when you are inside a table) does not even remotely look similar to the Home ribbon (where formatting options are) and the functionality you describe (Insert Table) is only available on the Insert ribbon which you have to explicitly select, yourself, for it to be visible. Or are you seriously making the claim that you click on a 16x16px icon from muscle memory alone?

Okay, now you're just nitpicking. I started up Word 2010 just to get everything right, so let me make some corrections: instead of underlining the text, the same spot on the interface makes my table a snazzy blue-white color scheme from the simple black-white grid I started with. Better?
As for clicking a 16x16 icon without looking, are you seriously claiming I can't? Maybe not all the icons, but the ones I use most often, I can certainly locate relative to my focus, without actually looking at them. Therefore I wouldn't notice that the ribbons changed, and I'm now recoloring the table instead of formating the header. To do some nitpicking of my own, it's not so much a question of muscle memory but of proprioception (much like point shooting).

Re:Lol

[symbolset]

It takes a metric fuckton more than that to offend me. I've worked your post for what its worth and got my bit out of it. Please do give me another one to sharpen my wit against.

Re:Lol

[drsmithy]

Blue Screen WordPerfect was damn usable. Name one feature you use that wasn't in WP 5.1.

WYSIWYG

Re:Lol

[iamhassi]

Wow... never thought I would see the day where saying a M$ product was bad would be marked a TROLL on /.

Re:Lol

[hairyfeet]

Sadly you nailed it with regards to your second suggestion, which is why most FOSS and Linux in particular won't ever go anywhere. Try hanging on any Linux forum for any length of time and you'll find its been taken over by a large and vocal minority of users and devs that think computers should be the new priesthood, where you should have to "earn" the right to use the tools so they should be as obtuse and fiddly as possible to keep the "noobs" away. Their thinking is that if you aren't willing to invest weeks into a piece of software? Well then you don't "deserve" it.

If you want an example just ask this question and see how quickly they turn on you: Why is there no "find drivers" or "rollback drivers" buttons in Linux? Not only has Windows had those for over a decade now but at least the first one should be easy enough to do, simply have a universal repo for drivers in source code with automated build scripts. The user pushes the button, it checks the repo and if it finds a driver it downloads the code and runs the build script. So why doesn't Linux have this obviously useful feature?

Because it would be easier than doing forum hunts, that's why, and thus might make it easier for normal people. Ultimately this is why I gave up on Linux and FOSS, because talking with the ones that practically rule the community now they make it clear very quickly that if they could go back to computers being as big a PITA as the late 70s PCs they would be just fine with that. The thought that someone like Suzy the checkout girl could actually use the same thing they do just turns their stomach which is why the best tools you'll see for LaTeX will be no better feature wise than Notepad, it would mean users that don't "deserve" to use their precious tools could.

Re:Lol

[multiben]

I don't know, your wit is already razor sharp. I don't think I could handle another 'burn' like that.

Re:Lol

[symbolset]

In an ancient thread we might have a meaningful chat outside the issues of a potential audience that is long gone. Surely that's your intent. I do that often here. What's on your mind?

Re:Lol

[Alex Belits]

Yeah, because windows n00bs all ask about device drivers for iPhone accessories or insist on running Windows on their Sony TVs.

Give it up, hairyfeet. No matter how much do you post, you won't create an impression of legitimacy for Microsoft's talking points that you and your colleagues are spewing. We hate you. Everyone who knows what you, Microsoft astroturfers, are doing, hate you. We don't want your approval, we want you to fear us and hate us. And judging by the amount of Microsoft propaganda that is being posted around, there is plenty of hatred and fear among your masters. Thank you!

Re:Lol

[Alex Belits]

As I said, give it up, hairyfeet, you are not fooling anyone.

Re:Lol

[badkarmadayaccount]

Not enough: we don't have enough STEM students, remember?

Wait a second!

[masternerdguy]

Isn't that the amount of RAM that comes with their new tablet? If so, I wonder why they picked that number......

Re:Wait a second!

[c0lo]

I saw a Windows tablet at Staples the other day when I was picking up my Nexus 7. It's about twice as thick as any other tablet on display. I wonder why that is.

My guess: thermal insulation... you see, it's bad when the components overheat because of the strain Office 2013 put on them, but is worse when the customers suffer burns because of it.

Re:Wait a second!

[KidCeltic]

Maybe because it was a convertible...there are many such beasts running the currently-available Microsoft OSes. Surface looks to be a svelte little thing.

Re:Wait a second!

[symbolset]

They need the extra thickness for the patent licenses.

Re:Wait a second!

[Tough Love]

Surface looks to be a svelte little thing.

It's hard to say, because nobody was actually allowed to try it.

Re:Wait a second!

[hairyfeet]

If its like the one I saw they are using some lame ass CPUs in them which means they need extra room to get the heat out through pipes and fans. why hasn't anybody put one of the AMD C or E series chips into a tablet? Those are nice chips, full 1080P video through HDMI thanks to the Radeon GPU and pretty low on battery suckage. I have one of the E350 netbooks and I get around 6 hours playing 720P and more if I'm just surfing and don't need bluetooth. It seems like it'd be perfect for a tablet and would let you run all your X86 programs, add a transformer style keyboard with extra battery and you'd have a tablet that turns into an all day laptop with full X86 compatibility, sounds sweet to me.

As for TFA...damn, can Ballmer and Sinofsky torpedo this company a little more? Why don't they just send a page to the XP and Vista users offering Libre Office or Google docs while they are at it? Between fracturing IE all to hell, followed by keeping many games on DX9 because they refused to backport to XP, to making sure all those Vista users (Yeah i know the number is dropping but there is still millions of them and they ARE supported until 2017 as far as EOL goes) won't buy their Office suite I swear MSFT couldn't be run any worse if the team leads were picked by Cook over at Apple. Its like watching the PHB at Dilbert just bumble a company straight into the ground.

Re:Wait a second!

[justforgetme]

The only function the microsoft tablet has atm is an internet Explorer logo that animates when you touch it.
What exactly was it that you wanted to try?

Re:Wait a second!

[justforgetme]

BTW that was a pre beta of the tablet.
And somebody yesterday complained that Firefox OS was looking laggy which doesn't even have hardware specs yet...

Re:Wait a second!

[tehcyder]

I saw a Windows tablet at Staples the other day when I was picking up my Nexus 7. It's about twice as thick as any other tablet on display. I wonder why that is.

Maybe it's got a proper battery inside?

Re:Wait a second!

[RabidReindeer]

They need the extra thickness for the patent licenses.

They should look at how Apple insulates, then.

Oh wait, Apple patented that.

Re:Wait a second!

[Compaqt]

Good point. Someone at M$ thought this whole thing was a great way to get people to move to Windows 7 or 8.

But that only works if people have no options whatsoever.

It's so nice being able to work up in a startup without any legacy Excel spreadsheets with macros tying you in to the MS ecosystem. Without that tie-in, you're free to have an all Linux environment from the get-go. If you never went the Windows route, you don't know or care what you're supposed to be missing.

Re:Wait a second!

[digitalsolo]

So just a substantial heatsink then?

Re:Wait a second!

[hairyfeet]

Sorry friend but for a good 90%+ of the population Linux is not an option, because 1.-It wears obtuse and fiddly as badges of honor, 2.-Torvalds will never allow an API as long as he has a pulse, so drivers WILL break with every update, 3.-Too many treat FOSS as a religion and WANT the drivers to break because they are "Teh evil binary blobs ZOMG!" when the FOSS drivers break just as much, and 4.-The entire system is doomed because a small group will NEVER be able to properly QA and QC the amount of code in your average distro, much less the repos which are a mess of half baked crap.

You might want to read these articles, the first of which is actually written by one of the devs at Red Hat, which shows frankly why Linux hasn't gone anywhere on the desktop and frankly won't. the current design just doesn't work and the egos involved simply won't allow change, nor will the religious zealotry, so things simply stagnate. Its sad, but MSFT could put out lousy OSes for the next 3 versions and people will just stick with the last good one, no matter how creaky it gets, rather than deal with Linux. See how many are running XP rather than take Linux for free as a good example.

Let me get this straight

[Tough Love]

Let me get this straight. Microsoft, with 93 thousand employees can't manage to make their main software product compatible with previous versions of its operating system, while the Document Foundation with, um, zero employees can? Did I get that straight?

Re:Let me get this straight

[statusbar]

No, that is incorrect. They are perfectly capable.

They have no business reason to support people who do not purchase the new operating system.

Re:Let me get this straight

[foniksonik]

Nobody complains that the new Chevy Volt isn't compatible with their set of tools they bought just last year to work on cars.

Nobody complains that the HE dishwasher they bought wont except regular dishwashing crystals.

Nobody complains that the new bike they bought can't use all the old tires they have from the last bike.

Nobody complains that the HD TV they bought doesn't have RCA cable inputs.

Why is that? Face it people, progress happens and sometimes you've got to let go of the old and invest in the new.

Luckily there is eBay and Craigslist where you can sell your old stuff to someone who can't afford the new shiny yet. Give them a break and sell it to them.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Garble Snarky]

Exactly what progress have they made in the office application field that justifies this argument?

Re:Let me get this straight

[masternerdguy]

But but but TEH RIBBON!

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about support? (You did.) I would think that Microsoft's business is to sell their word processor to whoever they can. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm mystified.

Then you don't know much about business. Believe it or not, not every customer is worth the time or trouble.

In this case, somebody in Microsoft's Cost Accounting or whatever they call it section worked out how much it would cost to support older OSes. Then calculated how many sales they'd expect to get.

It might have been profitable, but was it profitable enough? Perhaps not.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Tough Love]

They have no business reason to support people who do not purchase the new operating system.

Actually, they do. Microsoft might wish to avoid being prosecuted for a Clayton Act Violation. (Tying.)

Re:Let me get this straight

[socceroos]

I can explain it to you, but I think you already know.

They will not support OS versions prior to Win 7 for two real reasons (one of which is a major one):
> They don't want to deal with a new set of bugs / support (however this is a very minor reason given immediate gains)
> Vendor lock-in. You do everything in Office, you want the latest Office, but oh-lookey-here, first you'll need to buy this, this 'n this before you can use the newest Office. More money in their pockets and more lock-in for the future.

Re:Let me get this straight

[wisty]

So ... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."

A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.

Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a bit like the Apple users, but with an overgrown soul patch).

Re:Let me get this straight

[Seraphim_72]

Many,
            Pivot Tables to name one. One click charting. HUGE spreadsheets.

I am not even an MS apologist, but even I can see that.

Re:Let me get this straight

[xs650]

If Orifice 2013 got rid of the ribbon I would consider getting it to replace my little used Orifice 2010. Until then i will continue to use Libre Office.

Re:Let me get this straight

[socceroos]

I'd still happily bitch to anyone about proprietary document formats - not because I used Linux in the 00's though, but because its illogical to support them.

Re:Let me get this straight

[sjames]

Nobody complains that the new Chevy Volt isn't compatible with their set of tools they bought just last year to work on cars.

Actually they would complain bitterly and use plenty of expletives. I haven't heard of any incompatibilities.

Nobody complains that the HE dishwasher they bought wont except regular dishwashing crystals.

Probably because HS detergents cost the same as regular and it's an expendable resource. If it cost them a few hundred extra dollars, they'd complain loudly.

Nobody complains that the new bike they bought can't use all the old tires they have from the last bike.

Probably because the new bike came with tires. Of course, they usually CAN use the same ones if it's the same type of bike. Nobody wants to use 10 speed racing tires off road.

Nobody complains that the HD TV they bought doesn't have RCA cable inputs.

Mine has RCA inputs. It added HDMI and VGA. What's to complain about?

Luckily there is eBay and Craigslist where you can sell your old stuff to someone who can't afford the new shiny yet. Give them a break and sell it to them.

MS claims that Windows is non-transferable. You guessed it, people have complained.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shutdown -p now]

Let me get this straight. Microsoft, with 93 thousand employees can't manage to make their main software product compatible with previous versions of its operating system, while the Document Foundation with, um, zero employees can? Did I get that straight?

It's not about "can", it's about not wanting to.

Similarly, I don't see many apps that are written against Gtk 1.2 in Linux land these days. Why is that? I mean, surely it ain't all that hard, and if you do it, it'll run on ten year old Linux distros!

Re:Let me get this straight

[tombeard]

Try a HUGE spreadsheet. Do a filter and then copy/paste the results. Then learn how to program for real.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Bert64]

Aside from a few niche areas, support contracts generally aren't as valuable as you seem to think...
The vast majority of organisations i've been to pay ridiculous sums for the software and still don't get any support... Those that do pay extra for support never seem to use it, or if they do they still don't get a satisfactory response.. In most cases the "support" seems to be no better than what your own IT department provides and just allows them to slack off instead of doing what they're supposed to.

And if you're talking about business requirements, what ever happened to second sourcing and business continuity? Buying a product and associated support which is only available from a single supplier is not good business sense, what if the product is discontinued or the supplier goes under?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Bert64]

People hate change, even when that change brings benefits. That's also one of the main factors deterring adoption of linux.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Bert64]

There are a few very important differences:

You can run GTK2 (or even 3) on your 10yr old linux.

Upgrading to a current version of linux won't cost you anything.

The system is modular, so you can upgrade the components you need while leaving the others at their original outdated versions if you so desire.

Re:Let me get this straight

[RabidReindeer]

Exactly what progress have they made in the office application field that justifies this argument?

From what I can tell, something wonderful must have been going on in Excel.

But I don't know, since I'm not an Excel geek. When it comes to word processing, I do complex technical documents and the only improvement that was made since Office 97 that I found useful was that they got rid of Clippy.

Re:Let me get this straight

[tepples]

People hate change, even when that change brings benefits.

People change from a land line + dumbphone to a smartphone. How does that overcome people's hatred of change?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Tharkkun]

So ... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."

A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.

Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a bit like the Apple users, but with an overgrown soul patch).

Most orgs wil be jumping on Win7/8 sooner than you think. With XP losing official support now after 12 years companies will be forced to migrate or risk getting compromised due to a unpatched security risk.

Re:Let me get this straight

[nabsltd]

I see things like this a lot; what exactly do you have against the ribbon?/quote>

For casual or new users, the ribbon is likely an easier interface.

For power users or users very experienced with the old menu structure (it's basics are unchanged for nearly 20 years), the ribbon is a nightmare. Offering users a choice of interface would have been the logical thing for Microsoft to do, but because of forced lock-in (like that described in TFA), MS doesn't have to care about existing users all that much.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Hatta]

Parent post said "what progress have they made in the office application field", not "what features have they added to office".

And still, pivot tables were invented by Lotus in the early 90s. One click charting is about as innovative as one click ordering. And the size of your spreadsheet should never have been limited by anything except your available RAM in the first place.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shutdown -p now]

I would suspect that, if you install Gtk3 on a 10 year old distro, the amount of dependencies that'll also need upgrading is such that, by the end of the process, you'll end up with something much newer. Something that would, in effect, be largely equivalent to a recent Ubuntu install with a few minor outdated pieces.

And yes, this is more or less what you mean by "system is modular", I think. And yes, Windows is not particularly modular (more so now, definitely very little when it was XP). Even so I suspect you could technically do the same thing with XP, it's likely more a question of having to support it - modularity or not, every distinct set of binaries is effectively a new QA and support target. Would you, personally, be willing to support a contraption of a 10 year old Linux with Gtk3? Especially when you don't get a single extra cent for that?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Tough Love]

Oh you again. The self styled Unix expert. I suppose you don't know about Unix library versioning. Ancient GTK programs just work on modern Linux systems because the GTK library is versioned... the newest version of the library also contains all the old, deprecated interfaces and they just work. Pretty hard concept for a Windows guy to understand I know.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shutdown -p now]

Oh you again. The self styled Unix expert.

I never called myself a Unix expert, but thanks for the compliment.

Ancient GTK programs just work on modern Linux systems because the GTK library is versioned...

What relevance does this have to my post? I wasn't talking about running ancient Gtk programs on modern Linux distros. I was talking about Linux developers today not keen on targeting ancient Gtk versions just so that their programs would run on ancient distros. Which is not dissimilar from Microsoft not targeting ancient Windows API level just so that their programs would run on XP.

Ancient GTK programs just work on modern Linux systems because the GTK library is versioned ... the newest version of the library also contains all the old, deprecated interfaces and they just work.

Gtk does not "contain all the old deprecated interfaces and they just work". Gtk 2.x, for example. was not only binary incompatible with Gtk 1.2, it was incompatible on API (source) level as well. Similarly, Gtk 3.x is neither source nor binary compatible with Gtk 2.x. If you want to run a Gtk 1.2 app on a modern distro with Gtk 3, you will need to find and install Gtk 1.2 on it.

I suspect the "versioning" you refer to is the ability to have several versions of a shared library with the same name in Unix. Windows has that, too, with WinSxS, albeit implemented in a different and more convoluted way. Of course, either way, it doesn't have any relevance to Gtk, because Gtk libraries actually include version number as part of the soname - e.g. libgtk-3.so is for Gtk 3, and libgtk-1.2.so is for Gtk 1.2 - and so they don't actually rely on the OS shared library versioning. IIRC, they don't even use it - check the .so file names for Gtk on your system, it'll probably be .so.0.

The way ancient Gtk programs work on modern Linux distros is by you installing the relevant version of Gtk, or by statically linking or otherwise bundling them with the application.

Pretty hard concept for a Windows guy to understand I know.

Quite ironic, given that Windows actually does have "newest version of the library also contains all the old, deprecated interfaces and they just work" - which is why you can run, say, the original Diablo from 16 years ago (which used DirectX 2.0) on Win7.

Re:Let me get this straight

[xs650]

Yes, but the topic at hand was the ribbon, not changes that bring benefits.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Tough Love]

GTK is an exception where the devs do such a crappy planning job that it actually makes sense to roll an entirely new library each release. Just for you, I went back and found an old Potato binary of gzilla from 1999. Libraries I had to install: gzilla, libgtk1, libjpegg6a, xlib6g. Libraries used by gzilla that I didn't have to install because they are properly versioned at the symbol level: libgdk, libglib, libXi, libXext, libX11, libm, libc, ld-linux, libxcb, libdl, libXau, libXdmcp. Note that libc is one of those that didn't need to be installed, which should tell you something. Same with libX11.

So now a gzilla binary from 1999 is running on my Linux workstation that is current as of, oh, 3 hours ago. And you can pretty much expect your success rate to run around the same 100% for whatever other dusty old binaries there are sitting in that ancient Potato repository. So... wise guy. Respond.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shutdown -p now]

So now a gzilla binary from 1999 is running on my Linux workstation that is current as of, oh, 3 hours ago. And you can pretty much expect your success rate to run around the same 100% for whatever other dusty old binaries there are sitting in that ancient Potato repository. So... wise guy. Respond.

*sigh* Once again. The point being discussed was not whether an old Gtk app will run on a modern Linux distro. The question was, why Linux developers today don't code against Gtk 1.2 so that their apps could run on an old Linux distro, but for some reason go for Gtk 3 instead. Because that's the rough equivalent of wanting Microsoft to code against XP APIs and disregard anything that was added in Vista and later in 2012, and similar reasons apply in both cases. This has nothing to do with library versioning for obvious reasons (unless you have some means of travelling back in time to ensure perfect forward compatibility).

I'd ask you if you even read the thread you're posting to, but in this case it would definitely be a rhetorical question since your comment started it, and that comment said "can't make their main software product compatible with previous versions of its operating system". To which I have replied, and gave some technical reasons explaining why. Your follow-up comments, meanwhile, have been completely inconsequential so far. Are you just trolling?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Tough Love]

that comment said "can't make their main software product compatible with previous versions of its operating system". To which I have replied, and gave some technical reasons explaining why.

You are obviously full of your usual diversionary crap and bluster, given that we on Linux regularly accomplish that which you claim is impossible on Windows.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shutdown -p now]

Please go ahead and provide instructions on how to install and run LibreOffice 3.4.0 on Warty Warthog.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Tough Love]

Please go ahead and provide instructions on how to install and run LibreOffice 3.4.0 on Warty Warthog.

Seriously? There are multiple ways to do it. One obvious (to a guru) way is: start with a chroot. As the interested student, you should be able to figure out the rest.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shutdown -p now]

If you install the whole new userspace in a chroot, it's not really the same OS anymore. Unless you're of the persuasion that Ubuntu running inside chroot on an Android phone is somehow Android.

Big deal.

[macbeth66]

I moved to Open Office a while ago and never looked back. Bloody stupid Office ribbons and xxxX files types. Only use it for job and they pay for it, so no skin off my nose.

Re:Big deal.

[countach74]

This is probably true for a lot of us. I know it is me. :)

Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[mister2au]

Seems most corporates skip every alternate version and I'd suggest for the most part this is will be bypassed as well

Mainly cosmestic upgrades although a few things like better PDF handling and better BI integration are nice even if not must haves - they just ease the input not the actual operations.

Smartest thing Microsft could do is open up the file formats a little more and throw some improved compression algorithms at the file format - currently it is a fairly poor (speed oriented) ZIP implementation ... Smaller, easier to distribute files would at least be a compelling reason to upgrade for me (and other I presume) and a new file format will force upgrades.

My 2 cents worth ...

Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[quadrox]

Well, if you start out wanting a product without knowing how good it is, you are an idiot indeed. But if you read about the product before purchase and then figure out that it's not something you want to spend money on, then what are you complaining about? Seriously?

Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[foniksonik]

Makes you wonder if there isn't a strategy in there somewhere.

Windows 7: Corporate
Windows 8: Beta testing new stuff on Home users
Windows 9: Corporate

Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[SuricouRaven]

Vista too was home-user focused. Perhaps a relic - until XP, they did have two completly seperate windows lines for home (95/98/me) and business (nt/2k).

Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[mister2au]

Good call I reckon

The common corporate setup of Office '03/XP or Office '10/Win7 probably becomes Office '15/Win9

New home setup becomes Office '13 + Win8

Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[Robert Zenz]

You mean they branched Vista of ME? That would explain *everything*!

Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway.

[jbolden]

Why would they want to make it easier for you to distribute files outside of the SharePoint / Skydrive system? If anything distribution is likely to get much more tightly tied to their enterprise offerings in the next decade.

OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[BenJeremy]

From all indications, Office 2013 is just more metro UI devolution insanity from Microsoft.

Corporate IT will not have a problem skipping this upgrade cycle, and will be richer for it. No upgraded licenses to pay for to Microsoft, no new training required for users, and everybody is happier (except for the Microsoft people, of course).

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[Tough Love]

Corporate IT will not have a problem skipping this upgrade cycle, and will be richer for it.

Especially if they install LibreOffice on their existing machines. Get a few more years out of the hardware too.

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[yuhong]

Office just uses the Metro visual style. The ribbon hasn't changed in basic operation since 2007 unless you ask for the touch mode.

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[Anonymous Coward]

Most corps have SA so they already get it even if they don't install it

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[L4t3r4lu5]

I've actually been given the green light to try and make our apps work on WINE in Linux because of the Metro. interface. We either upgrade to Windows 7 and do it after then, or I get the apps working and we do it sooner. Either way, MS is dead here.

Big problem for MS is that I work in education; We have no money and aging hardware as the norm. If Linux works here, they stand to lose BIG.

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[jaseuk]

Can I save you some time? You will suffer from the "one app" problem. One app will not work on Wine or Linux. This will be deemed critical by the educator. You will end up flipping back machines one by one to Microsoft. Even if you have an acceptable level of compatibility today, this can yet become an issue when new software is purchased (or pirated knowing the education sector)

I've had similar experiences with Terminal Services (VDI Version 0) on a Microsoft Platform or Linux on a government desktop. It's tempting to apply the 80:20 rule, but in this situation you'll find everyone has a different 80%.

Jason

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[jbolden]

Its not meant for enterprise desktops. Microsoft is worried about the consumer market and related technologies. For the corporate market they have really compelling enterprise features in their server offerings like Dynamics and most of them haven't completed the migration to 7 yet.

Microsoft's phone strategy has failed and they are rapidly losing market share.
Microsoft's tablet strategy has failed and they are becoming a niche vendor in tablets.
Consumers are starting to replace home PC with tablets and phones

That's what they need to counter.

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[jbolden]

If you have no money what do they stand to lose? Low margin, low paying customers?

Re:OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF

[caution live frogs]

I work in a US government facility. Today I got a message telling us we need to take some training for the upcoming transition to Windows 7 and Office 2010. We've been stuck on WinXP / IE7 forever precisely because they were scared of Vista, and that delayed the move to 7. I've already been told that they have zero interest in implementing Windows 8. By the time our IT people upgrade again, MS will be releasing Office 16.

What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's going to come out very near the EOL for XP, nobody uses Vista (especially nobody who's going to actually upgrade Office from whatever came on their PC), and you can't find a PC with Windows 7 that has less than 1-2 GB of RAM.

Plus, it's not like you can't get your hands on the last, what, five versions of Office or so? I'm still running Office 2003 on Windows 7 because I haven't felt like buying the upgrade. I could still run that on Windows 2000 if I wanted to.

DirectX?

[Globe199]

Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX? a 3D spreadsheet maybe? Maybe a really awesome animated book report?

Re:DirectX?

[Jeeeb]

From the linked page:

A graphics processor helps increase the performance of certain features, such as drawing tables in Excel 2013 Preview or transitions, animations, and video integration in PowerPoint 2013 Preview. Use of a graphics processor with Office 2013 Preview requires a Microsoft DirectX 10-compliant graphics processor that has 64 MB of video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007. Most computers that are available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceeds this standard. However, if you or your users do not have a graphics processor, you can still run Office 2013 Preview.

Also it would seem the requirements are rounded to the nearest 0.5gb and probably are for extremely heavy usage cases.

Re:DirectX?

[yuhong]

Yea, PowerPoint for example uses a lot of animations that can be hardware accelerated. Note that these can fallback to software emulation if necessary but it does require the API functions be available to simplify the code.

Re:DirectX?

[Tough Love]

Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX? a 3D spreadsheet maybe? Maybe a really awesome animated book report?

Clippy3D.

Re:DirectX?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the embedded flight simulator

Re:DirectX?

[Billly Gates]

Excel 2013 uses ghosting and transperancies. Fonts are hardware accelerated too with DirectX10 and 11 which is not supported in XP. It gives an experience like your andriod or iPhone where you move the text on the screen and it is smooth like butter.

Office doesn't do that now because not all of it is accelerated. Office 2013 will make it like an Andriod or IOS device. Nice too for presentations in groups

Re:DirectX?

[jader3rd]

Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX?

Offload certain calculations to the GPU. Office applications are used to crunch big numbers.

Re:DirectX?

[im_thatoneguy]

It's because they had to rewrite the UI to deliver a high framerate with almost no latency. (No seriously.) And it actually is rational. When you're scrolling in something for instance with a mouse wheel it just moves in increments and you don't detect any lag. If however you attempt to scroll through a list with your finger and it trails behind a half second it will feel sluggish and weird. There are a number of phone and tablet apps I've used that have this lag and it's really annoying. If they want to deliver a good touch experience--using hardware acceleration is a sensible route.

Re:DirectX?

[Sc4Freak]

I'm sorry to have to ask this, but are you retarded? Honestly.

Hardware acceleration means that the drawing/animations/etc are done faster, more efficiently, and with lower power. And if you don't have hardware acceleration available, it falls back to software. There is not a single conceivable case in which you would prefer software over hardware-accelerated rendering - if it's available the hardware does the same thing, except faster and more efficiently. If you prefer to do everything in software, feel free to rip the graphics card from your PC and go back to your P-133.

Re:DirectX?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Clippy3D.

The Reckoning.

Re:DirectX?

[SplashMyBandit]

Alpha-blending, gradients and fonts can all be hardware accelerated by 2D accelerated cards (for example, Java2D does this for all Java drawing since JVM 1.6.0 u10 years ago). These are not 3D operations. No, the reason Microsoft are doing this is to move people off XP when those folks don't actually need to for functionality. Please don't confuse 2D acceleration with 3D acceleration (it is ridiculous!).

Re:DirectX?

[SplashMyBandit]

You are speculating. GPGPU computing is not very well suited to spreadsheet computation since the overhead of moving data between the CPU and GPU is fairly expensive for spreadsheet type problems, and in-fact is very badly suited to the GPU since spreadsheet cells depend on other cells, and must be evaluated in order, which goes against the whole SIMD premise of most GPU shader programs.

Re:DirectX?

[shutdown -p now]

Who said anything about 3D operations? DirectX also includes 2D APIs (Direct2D these days), and modern graphics cards will happily do both.

Re:DirectX?

[mister2au]

You, sir, are a visionary ... I applaud you !!

Re:DirectX?

[SplashMyBandit]

Yes, but you don't need DirectX 11 to do the 2D operations do you? This was my point (countering the poster before me) - the tying of Office to newer versions of DirectX (and hence, newer versions of Windows) are not due to technical reasons but are instead due to Microsoft's own reasons (hence, twisting the arms of its customers and effectively shaking those customers down for more cash - which is not actually mandated by *technical* cosiderations).

That's the second time I've had to correct you in the last 24-hours. That's cool, but I'm a little surprised as I rate your knowledge higher than that. You might want to read the previous posts a little more clearly next time before you post.

Re:DirectX?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the MSDN documentation: "This topic introduces Direct2D, a new 2-D graphics API for Windows 7".

If you want to do accelerated 2D on Windows you have a choice. Target Direct2D, which accelerates pretty much every drawing operation and has ongoing support. Or target DirectDraw where the acceleration is much less good and the API is officially deprecated (recent versions of the SDK won't build DirectDraw applications, it is basically dead).

Direct2D makes heavy use of the new features (shader support especially) in the latest versions of DirectX. To support Direct2D on Windows XP would require back-porting the latest DirectX, which in turn relies on new device drivers that won't run on XP.

You might feel that MS has plenty of money and they should back-port Direct2D (and DirectX and the driver model) to Windows XP anyway but that decision was made a long time ago.

Office could target both APIs, but that's doubling your work, increasing your bug count and likely hurting performance. No developer is going to bother.

It's not about the capabilities of the graphics card or confusing 2D and 3D. It's about APIs.

Re:DirectX?

[Ash-Fox]

Need direct x 10, no?

Re:DirectX?

[Smauler]

the tying of Office to newer versions of DirectX (and hence, newer versions of Windows)

I'm running Vista with DirectX 11 now - it's an official release from Microsoft. DirectX 10 is standard on Vista. Whatever makes the new Office incompatible with Vista, it's not DirectX.

Re:DirectX?

[MtViewGuy]

I believe that the Intel HD 3000 and HD 4000 graphics chipsets found on laptops and some desktops built in the last few years meet the spec you mentioned, so they could do the effects in the new versions of Powerpoint and Excel.

Re:DirectX?

[Tharkkun]

Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX? a 3D spreadsheet maybe? Maybe a really awesome animated book report?

Anything you can offload to an idle graphics processor is a good thing.

Re:DirectX?

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, but you don't need DirectX 11 to do the 2D operations do you?

It depends on how much you're willing to do yourself. Direct2D is a high-level API for hardware-accelerated 2D operations (vector primitives etc), but is only available for Vista & 7, not XP. There's no equivalent in XP that comes with the platform. GDI offers hardware accelerated primitives also, but they're much more limited (e.g. no antialiasing), and it's a real pain to combine it with a DirectX surface.

So, it's as I said: it's not a hard technical requirement, but it's certainly much easier from a technical perspective to draw the line at Vista due to the slew of new APIs it introduced that do make life easier. Why 7 and not Vista is a better question.

Re:DirectX?

[SuricouRaven]

There is a very conceivable case in which you would prefer software: If you wish to run on platforms which may not have the hardware, or the software to make use of that hardware. In the case of office apps, the power savings from hardware acceleration of graphics would be too small to be concerned with, and performance ceases to be an issue once you are already able to render at rates beyond human perception using software.

Re:DirectX?

[rrohbeck]

WTF?
I don't detect any lag when I scroll with the mouse wheel or the scrollbar.
Neither on my Xubuntu system (Bulldozer CPU, cheapo GT430 card) nor on 32-bin Windows XP on a 1.6GHz Pentium M laptop.
Only when the old laptop runs out of memory and starts paging there's any delay.

Re:DirectX?

[SplashMyBandit]

> It depends on how much you're willing to do yourself.
Well, Microsoft has never felt compelled to use the public APIs when squeezing performance out of their core products. Office is a big enough product that whatever needed to be done would be done. I think again that you are making the assumption that the reason for not doing this is technical. There are a lot of non-technical reasons they could have used in the decision - moving people of WinXP is one of them - it is not technically necessary but it suits their purposes.

Of course ant fellow shader writer knows that anti-aliasing is a very straightforward operation to implement, and DirectX 9 shaders are more than adequate for the task. Sun was able to do this for all operations in Java2D for three platforms and two graphics APIs (OpenGL and DirectX) despite not making the 70 billion a year that Microsoft does. Hell, in the OpenGL fixed-function pipeline you can do supersamping with a single line of code, and the multitude of anti-aliasing shaders are not tricky. Note that other operating systems manage to do hardware anti-aliasing with no significant problem and have done so for very many years.

> Why 7 and not Vista is a better question.
Vista does GDI in software is a possible reason, although I'd be surprised if the Office team are worried about that. Note that WinXP does GDI in hardware (as does Win7). This is still not a relevant *technical* reason to force the vast mass of WinXP users to buy a new operating system when they buy Office.

Re:DirectX?

[shutdown -p now]

There's certainly more than just a technical angle to it, but trust me that it certainly is easier to say "fuck XP" and only support Vista/7 for a multitude of reasons, and I don't just mean graphics. There was a slew of new APIs in Vista, and many are kinda handy (for a simple example, Windows has only got true condition variables in Vista). In many cases you can do something equivalent (though often slower) on XP if you roll your own, but then you actually need to spend time and resources on that - no matter how trivial, it's still time wasted on code reviews and QA and on maintaining that code later on. It's much easier to just take, say, D2D and DWrite, and get all the usual 2D primitives with all bells and whistles (like gradients) for free.

TL;DR version: targeting XP is always possible, but it's almost never free from a technical perspective. So that cost has to be balanced against the benefits of doing so. And, yes, marketing also plays into that decision, of course - just as it does everywhere else. But purely as a programmer, I am glad that the product I'm working on does not have to support XP regardless of why marketing thinks it's a good idea - it makes my life that much simpler.

Re:DirectX?

[SplashMyBandit]

Lol, first article on BBC News today "Microsoft makes its first ever loss "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18917906

It was obvious this was coming (I periodically check MS' quarterly financials). Microsoft need money, fast. They have to find a way to move the happy users off WinXP and get more revenue.

Mate, I hear you - ditching old operating systems and software is always easier for developers. In the ideal world we'd only have to support the latest and greatest stuff. However, Microsoft overcharges for the O/S (meaning the price is high and set arbitrarily without regard to any market forces) and people expect support until 2014.

> It's much easier to just take, say, D2D and DWrite, and get all the usual 2D primitives with all bells and whistles (like gradients) for free.
Actually, it is easier to take Java and have Oracle (and Apple, for a little while longer) and the Open Source Hordes do the QA of that - and then your stuff is hardware accelerated without you (as an application developer) having to lift a finger. Even if the O/S changes, or the driver model changes then your source still doesn't change. Proper abstraction was something Microsoft never got (eg. I remember them years ago contorting aspects of their system so that they'd get a 5% speed improvement on a 386 but it was an abomination that hampered their later versions of Windows - designing like this is madness, yet publicly they seem to prize such backward short-term thinking as kinda 'heroic').

Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[hcs_$reboot]

Fine, have neither XP nor Vista. No mention of Ubuntu 12.04... meaning that's compatible probably?

Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[gmuslera]

The box says "Windows 7 or better", so it should run in Ubuntu and MacOSX

Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[quadrox]

Ubuntu seems to be doing their best to take the worst "features" of windows, macOs and linux and combine them into something worse than any of them. Ugh. If I look back from 2007 to now, I can only shake my head in disbelief.

I've since moved on to arch linux and am happier for it.

Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[hcs_$reboot]

Oh, that was a joke...

Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[DerPflanz]

I've since moved on to arch linux and am happier for it.

That's the beauty of open source in general and Linux in particular. You have the choice.

I am a happy Ubuntu user and the Unity interface grew on me, it isn't in my way so it is useable for me (in fact I like it now more than the standard Gnome interface with the antiquated menubar; haven't really used Gnome Shell yet).

Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[kikito]

> Ugh. If I look back from 2007 to now, I can only shake my head in disbelief.
> I've since moved on to arch linux and am happier for it.

I think it says something about arch linux that you were able to move to it just by shaking your head. What sort of user interface did you use?

Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista

[rrohbeck]

Only if you use Unity.

Piracy?

[xyzzyman]

Vista not being compatible is suprising to me, but XP support being dropped is acceptable. Who still running XP would actually be paying for Office 2013?

Re:Piracy?

[Doctor_Jest]

I wonder why Vista (which is Windows 7 with more annoying prompts) is excluded? Not being awake enough to check google, when was the last time Microsoft went only 1 version back for an Office Suite?

Anyone willing to spend money on Office 2013 and try to run it on XP is a masochist... :) Keep them away from credit cards... or they'll try.

Re:Piracy?

[yuhong]

Office 2003 and 2007 both support only the current version of Windows and only one version back (for 2007 this is XP and Vista, for 2003 this is 2000 and XP).

Re:Piracy?

[Billly Gates]

Vista not being compatible is suprising to me, but XP support being dropped is acceptable. Who still running XP would actually be paying for Office 2013?

Oh please. XP is going to turn 11 when that thing comes out. It is time to move on and it is rediculous to keep supporting it. It is not a simple matter of a recompile either. Businesses will stop using it if no one writes software just like we still would be using IE 6 if Google didn't refuse to support it for docs and youtube. Then afterwards facebook and others chimed in and poof the users went away kicking and screaming but upgraded to Firefox or IE 7 or later.

Same is true with XP. XP can't do HTML 5 in IE9 because it can't do the hardware acceleration.Also it can't support h.264 due to the lack of DRM and hidef in the driver level. Because of that the office365 features will not work fully for remote features. The GPU graphics can't be done. The malware protection and group and document management DRM can not be done for the cloud integration etc.

Exchange 2003 is not as cloud friendly nor as flexible as later versions to support the groupware integration of Outlook 2013 either.

Besides making XP Vista-lite and enabling users to keep from upgrading and ruining the stability and maturity of the OS it is time to let it go. There are more modern implementaitons already called Windows 7 and 8.

Re:Piracy?

[armanox]

Adding to your list - Office XP was the last version to run on Windows ME.

Re:Piracy?

[yuhong]

both support the current version of Windows

Correction.

Re:Piracy?

[Smauler]

Did you even read the comment that you quoted?

Re:Piracy?

[dehole]

Exactly. We don't buy a computer to play with the Operating System, we buy it to get things done. Whichever OS lets you do that best without getting in the way is the winner. For me, that is Windows XP. Simple, fast, predictable.

Re:Piracy?

[0123456]

Oh please. XP is going to turn 11 when that thing comes out. It is time to move on and it is rediculous to keep supporting it.

XP was still for sale a couple of years ago.

It is not a simple matter of a recompile either. Businesses will stop using it if no one writes software just like we still would be using IE 6 if Google didn't refuse to support it for docs and youtube.

So you think business will rush out to buy new PCs so they can run a new version of Office? Uh, no. Most will continue running the old version of Office on XP and look at other alternatives for the future.

XP can't do HTML 5 in IE9 because it can't do the hardware acceleration.Also it can't support h.264 due to the lack of DRM and hidef in the driver level. Because of that the office365 features will not work fully for remote features. The GPU graphics can't be done. The malware protection and group and document management DRM can not be done for the cloud integration etc.

Says 'can't' when means 'won't'. Nothing is preventing Microsoft from supporting those things on XP.

Re:Piracy?

[rrohbeck]

Yup. It's called planned obsolescence.
Corporate IT will really love this idea. Not.
The vast majority of our company still runs XP (except for the few who have upgraded to Linux) and there's little reason to upgrade as long as the hardware holds together.
So: Ain't happening.

You have to let go of the past eventually

[Quila]

Newer applications are going to want to leverage features found in the newer operating systems.

Most OS X programs require Tiger from 2005, or at least Jaguar from 2002. Quite a few already require at least Leopard from 2007.

Re:You have to let go of the past eventually

[Tough Love]

Newer applications are going to want to leverage features found in the newer operating systems.

Oh right. Like keyboards, screens, mice, monitors. Innovative features like that.

Re:You have to let go of the past eventually

[real-modo]

> Most OS X programs ....

This.

Ballmer seems to have decided that Microsoft needs to slavishly imitate Apple. Apple's way is the one and only way to prosperity, seems to be the reasoning.

This is truly bizarre. MS and Apple don't have the same markets or channels, the same supply chain, the same products or the same motivations. But Microsoft thinks it can succeed by ignoring backward compatibility, alienating hardware vendors, alienating its resellers, alienating its direct customers (IT departments), and alienating _their_ customers (office workers) with a third UI change in three versions.

The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (released by the death of its owner, I guess) seems to have coalesced around Ballmer. I was particularly impressed by his comment that the impending launch of Windows 8 "feels like 1995". Wow. Just ... wow.

I'm seriously wondering these days whether Microsoft will make it through 2022 as an independent company.

Re:You have to let go of the past eventually

[Quila]

But Microsoft thinks it can succeed by ignoring backward compatibility

Microsoft succeeded because of backwards compatibility. You could run DOS on Windows, 16-bit Windows on 32-bit Windows, etc. With the exception of system utilities, which are OS-specific, I only know a few esoteric apps made for Windows 95 that won't run on Windows 7 (for example, a certain SCSI-based RIP solution that wouldn't even run on Windows 98).

But that backwards compatibility brings with it a lot of baggage. Apple chooses to ditch this baggage after some number of years. Microsoft is doing it now too, and that means the software will probably be more solid. There's a lot of resources and added complexity that goes into making a modern large software suite fully compatible with an 11 year-old OS.

alienating _their_ customers (office workers) with a third UI change in three versions.

That's a different issue completely, not backwards compatibility, but simply having no idea how they want to do a UI.

Why not Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the kernel for Vista was very similar to that used in windows 7 [url]{http://www.pcworld.com/article/153624/under_the_hood_windows_7_is_vistas_twin.html}[/url]. so why wouldn't Office 2013 not work in Vista; this seems strange to me. Does anyone have a thought as why this is the case? Not that Vista is some great OS or anything it just seems weird.

I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but...

[NervousNerd]

I can see why they'd drop support for XP, being that it's 11 years old now and that it's been succeeded by 3 versions now? But Vista? Really? Vista and 7 are very, very similar. They even back ported some of the 7 stuff to Vista around the time 7 was released with the "platform update". This is a marketing reason, not a technical reason

Ho hum

[sylvandb]

I am a little bit surprised that Vista will not be supported. I expect Vista just never had the market penetration to be worth the aggravation.

But really, who cares? Open Office (actually I prefer Libre Office since 3.5 came out) does everything I need, and everything everyone else I know needs. The only reason for Microsoft Office is cross compatibility with other MS Office users but it has been a few years since Open Office failed me in that regard. And even then, the sender did not actually need anything that Open Office didn't do. They used MS Office "just because."

Re:Ho hum

[Maow]

I am a little bit surprised that Vista will not be supported. I expect Vista just never had the market penetration to be worth the aggravation.

I haven't looked into it much, but my understanding is that Windows 7 is just Vista SP2 (or 3). I have 2 computers here that came with Vista (now running only Ubuntu), and Win 7 in a Virtual Box, and I cannot see a difference, especially in the network connectivity area where I'm sometimes condemned to fiddle settings. That's an area that is atrocious and needs rework, IMHO.

So it's likely for the same reason as not supporting XP - force an OS upgrade on suckers^W customers.

But really, who cares? Open Office (actually I prefer Libre Office since 3.5 came out) does everything I need, and everything everyone else I know needs. The only reason for Microsoft Office is cross compatibility with other MS Office users but it has been a few years since Open Office failed me in that regard. And even then, the sender did not actually need anything that Open Office didn't do. They used MS Office "just because."

100% in agreement there.

Although, come to think of it, I recently send a 1-page ODT file with 3 images in it (and nothing else) to someone with MS Office 2007 (I think) and it coughed and sputtered opening the document (in a completely open format), and when it "fixed" the thing, it got the z-order wrong so the print-out was 1/3 useless. But I fully blame MS for that, though I probably should've sent a PDF instead, I wanted it to be editable if necessary.

LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[Qubit]

I'd suggest that people run a more modern operating system than Win XP, but LibreOffice will even run on Windows 2000!

LibreOffice system requirements:

- Microsoft Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4 or higher), XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8;
- Pentium-compatible PC (Pentium III, Athlon or more-recent system recommended);
- 256 Mb RAM (512 Mb RAM recommended);

Re:LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[devent]

The only reason to drop Windows XP is that there are no more security updates. But that is not really a priority for home users. Besides updates, what is Windows 7 offering for a home user and why should he/she buy a new version of Windows for her old computer? There is nothing worthwhile in Windows 7, except the eye candy which nobody cares for.

If the computer is offline or is used with an up-to-date firewall, anti-virus program and up-to-date firefox, I see no reason to suggest to use a more recent Windows version. There is also no reason to pay 50Euro.

With a Linux it's a different story. An up-to-date Linux offering better hardware support, up-to-date versions of applications, also it's free (no cost) for the user to upgrade.

Re:LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[Guppy06]

The technical differences between 2000 and XP are much like the technical differences between Vista and 7: slim to none.

Only Microsoft can write apps that work on one but refuse to work on the other.

Re:LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[sootman]

My ideal office machine:
- Windows 2000
- Office 97
- Just don't use it to browse the Web.
A clean install of W2K on a 1 GHz PIII with 256-512 MB RAM runs like a Swiss watch.

Re:LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[Fri13]

[quote]With a Linux it's a different story. An up-to-date Linux offering better hardware support, up-to-date versions of applications, also it's free (no cost) for the user to upgrade.[/quote]

So far Linux has had best hardware support (from legacy to modern ones) so it isn't reason to upgrade if already everything works (same for NT and XNU operating systems). Latest applications is good thing, at least change to do the update as new formats are needed for new features and new formats usually needs new version, so having latest application possible to be installed is huge bonus. Thats why I don't recommend any other than 6 month or rolling release distributions (so all long term supported are out) because you can not usually get latest applications packaged and distributed (at least officially) and when running 2-5 year old system, it comes harder to work with others.

(of course, if you don't need to share files between others and new features, there is no reason to upgrade).

Re:LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[Qubit]

(of course, if you don't need to share files between others and new features, there is no reason to upgrade).

Don't forget #3) and you don't need tech support.

One thing that's ghastly to try to support is random old versions of software running on random old operating sytems running on random old hardware. You know, the machines that are probably stuck to the table because their little rubber feet have started to disintegrate in the heat, and that have a 1/4" of dust gracefully coating all of the surfaces that don't get touched in the normal operation of the machine.

I know how painful it can be for some people to adjust to new things -- especially new (if only slightly changed) interfaces on a new screen, using a new keyboard, and a new OS. They just want their stuff to work like it used to, and we have to explain to them why there isn't an open-apple key anymore, or why they can't store their documents on 3-1/2" floppies because none of the presentation machines has a floppy drive.

And for the applications, we'd really prefer to have them finding the same bugs (or different bugs) on LO 3.5 rather than WordPerfect 5.1, not only because I don't think I can get someone to patch WP5.1 for love or money (well, maybe a lot of money), but also because there are a lot of other people breaking the same things on LO 3.5, so its much more likely that a given bug will get fixed quickly -- or already has a fix pushed to master.

Re:LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs

[Billly Gates]

My ideal office machine:
- Windows 2000
- Office 97
- Just don't use it to browse the Web.
A clean install of W2K on a 1 GHz PIII with 256-512 MB RAM runs like a Swiss watch.

... until someone sends you something in a docx format and you need to use a hotmail or gmail account with a modern web browser outside of IE 6 since support is rapidly dying for hotmail.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[yuhong]

There are even software vendors that drop official support for Vista but keep XP support. Adobe Photoshop CS6 for example. In most case there is nothing stopping the software from running on Vista but the vendor don't want the additional support costs.

I agree

[slashmydots]

I also agree with Microsoft's drive to do everything they can to invalidate and kill Vista.
*Note - this post's chronometer may be inaccurate to a degree of + or - 5 years.

Incompatible with Exchange 2003 too

[Billly Gates]

It turns out that is not even patched nor supported either and businesses have no idea and still run it.

One part of me says businesses will simply not use it and it will fail. The other side thinks it is about time they moved on and we stopped catering to decade old technology and could see some progress. Web developers would be thrilled and could offer gradients and cool animations reserved only for the IPhone if we didn't cateer to ancient versions of IE anymore.

Re:Incompatible with Exchange 2003 too

[yuhong]

That is under extended support and still patched till April 2014 like XP.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[Billly Gates]

Vista is over 5 years old. That is ancient in computer terms. XP changed our perception recently and was the oddball. Vista does not offer DirectX11 GPU nor the DRM and document protection of Windows 7 for the sharing features of Sky Drive Pro. (Sky Drive Pro is a rumor at this point from screenshots but many theorize it supports groups and what can be moved to the cloud).

Re:Better

[Anonymous Coward]

I, on the other hand, will be using only spotted owl feather quills and writing with ink made from the blood of baby pandas. It is more expensive, but the medium is, as you know, the message.

Re:VIM

[masternerdguy]

Actually VIM is supported on Windows now too. http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc

Re:VIM

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Maybe my vim-fu is weak but remind me how I can check my email and schedule a meeting with vim? Other then writing a shell script to wipe the drive and install windows/office of course.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[humanrev]

Vista is over 5 years old.

It's not like Vista has been standing still over those years. Throw the latest service pack on and it has the same code base (effectively) as Windows 7.

If there are truly some features that Windows 7 has that haven't been back-ported to Vista (like perhaps the that document protection stuff you mentioned), then sure, maybe just have that functionality unavailable when running on Vista. But you can't tell me with a straight face that the ENTER of Office 2013 is incompatible with Vista.

Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[socceroos]

To be entirely honest, who cares which company is the biggest douchebag. In the end all of them are douchebags. Its either 'choose your poison' or 'use FOSS and sacrifice a bit of functionality'.

Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[pipedwho]

How so? I'm using the latest iWork on both Snow Leopard and Lion based machines. I expect it to still work when Mountain Lion is released too.

I guess I won't be upgrading then

[WaffleMonster]

Why would they go there with vista/win2k8? Seems excessive considering new version is only incrementally better than Office 2010.

  What realistically is the value prop to the end-user to upgrade? Being annoyed with ugly ass metro styling and "cloud" shit?

Sounds like a good way to loose out on office revenue.

Idiots. And you call yourself technical!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelieveable.

Printing "1 gig of RAM for a 32 bit machine and 2 gigs for 64" is common.

This does not say Office will require 1 gig for itself, no, it says what your machine needs to run good with it. For a recent machine that can run a modern version of anything, those requirments are pretty typical for anything. I bet if you wanted to run some lame, old game in Dosbox, you'd need 1 GB for a Win32- and 2 GB for a Win64 machine.

Everyone who replied in the same manner as the parent in this "lol" thread should feel ashamed.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[WiiVault]

Welcome to the more intense forced migration by MS after their unexpectedly well made and uncharacteristically blunder-free XP release that they are having trouble killing.The fact that customers haven't felt the desperate or willingness to take a leap of faith to escape is a rare compliment to the engineers and shows that underneath the out of touch managers, and brain dead Uncle Fester CEO there is actually some real talent, but against actually empowering those people with every release is against the core principle of overpromising and under delivering which has sold billions of PCs and is the devil's pact that binds OEM to MS in way where neither has to explain why your new PC kind of sucks, and always promises a bright future with distant upgrades at which point most people just replace their PC and the cycle starts over again. Meanwhile MS would do just fine if they let the smart people they hire run the show, instead of Bean Counter Ballmer who is the epitome of the guys who is willing to knowingly ship crap, because unlike anybody with a brain who has dealt with the smart people MS often hires, he honestly can't imagine that shipping consistant decent software is possible and might even redeem the image of his company. People like Ballmer think they just because they have not an ounce of innovation or foresight, that new concepts are just flukes and pixie dust to be kept locked away and dolled out only in case the software ends up more displeasing than his accountants had predicted. Smart companies know innovation breeds innovation, and lends to even better new hires and partners. All of that scares the shit out of a man whose only real talent is dismissing the next big thing years before he attempts to emulate it forgetting that unlike on the desktop, you can't just sell something well below your capabilities and say" tough shit , but hey the next version will fix all that"

Re:Who the fuck uses Office?

[jones_supa]

And, usually, that's just to read shitty fucking documents that marketing or HR fucktards have drawn up.

You must love your workplace. :)

Computers

[MicroSlut]

Gosh darn it all, I purchased a USB device but my 486 DX2 66 doesn't have a USB port, so I purchased a USB card so I could use my USB device and wouldn't you know it the USB card is PCI and I only have ISA slots. Then I puchased one of these new fangled LCD displays but my Trident video card couldn't push 1440x900 so I purchased a NVidia graphics card and wouldn't you know it the graphics card is PCIe and I don't even have an AGP slot! Then I purchased the new Office 2013 and put in my CD-ROM and wouldn't you know that Office 2013 is on a DVD! Sumabitch.

Re:Computers

[SplashMyBandit]

Your analogy is incorrect. The correct analogy would be if your 'USB' device was no longer able to work on your machine because your software vendor decided not to support it anymore and supported only Thunderbolt. Now there is no technical reason for this change (since MS Offiice can have effects accelerated using a 2D accelerator and advanced 3D effects to DirectX11 level are completely unnecessary for office productivity type work) but the software vender was experiencing a bit of a cash crunch so they throught they'd drop support for your perfectly capable platform just cause they wanted to get you to cough up.

Is this the position you are trying to defend?

Re:Computers

[RogerWilco]

Your 486 DX2 66 should have at least VESA Localbus. You can get videocards like the ATI Mach64 which should support 1440x900 just fine.

I know there are few 486's that had PCI so I can understand your USB problem. There are also IDE DVD drives so you should be able to get that sorted.

Running anything beyond Win XP on a 486 might be a real struggle though, so I think that's where your attempt to install Office 2013 will fail for sure.

My dad still uses a 486 DX4-100 with 48 MB RAM, 4 GB disk and ATI Mach 64 video. He runs Windows 2000 quite well on that. He runs 1280x1024 at full colour. I think the video card has 4 MB memory.

I call his machine "the 486 on steroids" and I'm surprised how well it still works.

Re:Computers

[yuhong]

The XP and later kernels has a hard block for 486s as they depends on the CMPXCHG8B instruction.

Re:Computers

[zlives]

it would be more likel if usb 1.1 support was dropped by usb 3.0 drivers

Go

[no-body]

Buy it all - or not, and shut up!

Nothing new here...

What, if there was a war and nobody came...

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[WaffleMonster]

Vista is over 5 years old. That is ancient in computer terms.

Who cares? Why should people spend their money upgrading when they have no reason to? To make Microsoft happy?

You don't see any other software vendors saying windows 7 only. They actually value their paying customers.

Vista does not offer DirectX11 GPU

Whats this got to do with office?

nor the DRM and document protection of Windows 7 for the sharing features of Sky Drive Pro.

This is really great. Windows 7 has more DRM. Let me run out and upgrade right away.

I Guess Elegant Programming Is Out the Window...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear John,
Since I need 2 GB of RAM to write this letter, I

And that's how specs should be done

[Sycraft-fu]

It is stupid to relate just what the program needs. That doesn't tell an average user anything. If a program said "Requires 10MB of RAM, 50MB optimal," people would be confused, and might try it on ultra low spec systems. It should spec in terms of what the whole system, with OS and all, should have to run well.

For example a number of modern games recommend 4GB of RAM. Now they are all 32-bit apps and anyone who knows about the Windows memory model knows this means they won't be designed to use more than 2GB of RAM themselves under normal circumstances. So why the recommendation then? Well they are counting on using most of that 2GB, so they want to make sure there's plenty left over for the OS, virus scanner, IM, Steam, and other things people might have running. The program itself may only need 2GB allocated to it to run ideally, but it won't get 2GB of memory unless the system has a good bit more.

So makes sense to me you do things like Office in the same way. Also it makes sense to not be stingy on recommendations. Something I always hated back in the day was games that were under on their recommendations. They'd say something like "386 20MHz 1MB minimum, 486 25MHz 2MB recommended, 486 33MHz 2MB optimal." Now to me "optimal" means "runs really well cranked up" and "minimum" means "minimum to run reasonable." However what they really mean was "minimum to run the program at all, you can't really play at this level," and optimal meant "Runs reasonably well with this but you'll need a good bit more to crank it up. Said game would need like a 486 50MHz and 4MB to really run properly.

Well we shouldn't do that. It should be spec'd in terms of a reasonable usable minimum, and a recommended that is actually good performance. Well, for 64-bit 7 I'd say 2GB is a realistic minimum. With that, you can run the OS and an app or two reasonably well.

It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days. I have 16GB in my laptop just because why not? It bumped the cost hardly at all over 8GB.

Re:And that's how specs should be done

[Vyse of Arcadia]

It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days. I have 16GB in my laptop just because why not? It bumped the cost hardly at all over 8GB.

On the other hand, I don't have 16GB of RAM because with 4GB of RAM I almost never hit swap space. Hell, my netbook has 2GB of RAM, and I still hit swap space very infrequently. (And I run KDE! No lightweight WM trickery here.)

I've been wondering for a while now what it is people do that they need so much RAM. And don't say gaming. I play loads of games on my 4GB box.

Re:And that's how specs should be done

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Now they are all 32-bit apps and anyone who knows about the Windows memory model knows this means they won't be designed to use more than 2GB of RAM themselves under normal circumstances.

I haven't played current-release games in years (prefer retro) but thinking back to when my games were current, I would've been deeply frustrated if I'd waited for months or years to try a game because my computer didn't meet the "required" specs, only to learn that the publisher overstated them rather than letting me see the minimum/recommended stats so I could make minor changes (like not running a virus scanner, IM, web browser, etc.) to play it reasonably.

Something I always hated back in the day was games that were under on their recommendations. They'd say something like "386 20MHz 1MB minimum, 486 25MHz 2MB recommended, 486 33MHz 2MB optimal." Now to me "optimal" means "runs really well cranked up" and "minimum" means "minimum to run reasonable." However what they really mean was "minimum to run the program at all, you can't really play at this level," and optimal meant "Runs reasonably well with this but you'll need a good bit more to crank it up."

It seemed pretty clear to everyone else that "minimum" was meant literally, so that we had the choice of playing a game at a slow pace (which rarely caused problems, at least on the games I played), using a tiny mouse driver to have every last k available, or making other changes/sacrifices to quality. Similarly, "recommended" pretty clearly referred to the specs required to use all of the game's multimedia capabilities (highest resolution, stereo sound effects, extra visual/sound effects like rain, etc.) while still having smooth gameplay. Of course, often to get the best experience that particular computer could offer, a person had to be fairly good at modifying autoexec.bat & config.sys, so maybe you just weren't very good at that.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[dingen]

It doesn't matter when Vista was released, what's important is when new computers were for sale with Vista pre-installed. Just a little over 2 years ago you could still find something like that in stores regularly. People who bought such a machine can't install the latest MS Office now.

I dunno

[Sycraft-fu]

I can see two sides.

On the one hand it does sound marketing based on account of the fact that 7 and Vista are similar so you are right, little technical difference.

On the other hand it still requires support. If you officially support it you have to go and test everything on another two platforms (32-bit and 64-bit). This means regression testing on all the patches and all that jazz with it. It adds a non-trivial cost. Given that Vista never achieved much market penetration and most Vista users went to 7 when it came out, I can see just thinking it isn't worth the money and hassle to support it.

Remember that for MS support can't mean "Will probably run but might have problems or break shit we haven't tested it." Support has to mean full support and testing.

So I can't say what it was and it may have been purely marketing, but I can see a valid reason as well.

Re:I dunno

[Bert64]

For MS, "support" has always meant "Will probably run but might have problems or break shit"... Windows has always been well known for being buggy, so much so that people have actually got used to bugs and kludgy workarounds as if they were normal.
It's so bad infact, that MS have given the whole industry a reputation for being unreliable and insecure... Ask the average guy on the street his perception of computers, and that's all down to MS.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[SplashMyBandit]

Bro, have you seen Microsoft's financials? Yes they are still very profitable but the 'growth' is looking dangerously like it will go backwards - and MS are completely unable to compete with Apple and Google in the important spaces those company cover. They need to ditch Vista support to get revenue quickly. Funny to think of Microsoft as needing cash quickly to make their financial statements look better but that is exactly what it looks like. Plus, they really, really want people to move to Windows 8 where Microsoft's marketplace can get some good lock-in on customers and developers.

Upgrades? What are those?

[SlashDev]

What is this compatibility thing all about anyway? Who cares? Most people who use word processors don't upgrade their software or OS to that matter. People don't upgrade, they buy a new PC with a newly installed OS. That's my opinion and observations.

Re:Upgrades? What are those?

[rrohbeck]

I already look forward to all the people who'll send docs in any newfangled format and get the reply "Sorry, I can't open that, could you resend?"

Re:Upgrades? What are those?

[Billly Gates]

I will look forward to that day.

I want to see XP DEAD. This issue you described is what caused progress back in the 1990s as no one wanted to be viewed as incompetent and behind the times. XP should not be around anymore except for special pieces of equipment.

still using Office 2000... no point in newer...

[neurocutie]

Most folks at our institution (including myself) are still using Office 2000 and get annoyed with any .DOCX files that we get.

Honestly, although I have access to newer versions of Office, I don't see the point. Not a single thing I want from a newer version of Office, and the bloating hardware requirements makes it that much easier to just say NO...

most folks still sending out .DOC files as well, only those with no clue are saving Word files as .DOCX.

Re:still using Office 2000... no point in newer...

[dave1791]

So I guess valuing the (usually) smaller size of the archived xml marks me as clueless then.

Actually, from my perspective, there have been significant improvements in every version of Office. Then again, I'm also someone who writes a lot of VBA macros and the occasional c# .net plugin.

Re:still using Office 2000... no point in newer...

[tehcyder]

only those with no clue are saving Word files as .DOCX.

I thought the new docx/xlsx files were quite a bit smaller than the old doc/cls formats? So it would be entirely reasonable to use the new default format for saving files.

Re:still using Office 2000... no point in newer...

[Torin Darkflight]

I agree, there's truly no point in upgrading. Microsoft has a free compatibility pack that you can download and install which allows older versions of Office (2000 and higher) to be able to open and save DOCX, XLSX and so forth. I had Office 2000 with the compatibility pack, it met 100% of my needs without any problems whatsoever. I even got it to work on Windows 7 when Microsoft claimed it was incompatible (The ONLY problem I noted was that the stupid paperclip was pink whenever it popped up, but who uses that thing anyway?). I would still be using Office 2000, had my workplace not made upgrading to 2010 mandatory. I hate, hate, HATE the Ribbon.

Re:still using Office 2000... no point in newer...

[bengoerz]

Large Excel files in .xlsx are notably smaller. I use them all the time for intraoffice purposes, since I know everyone here has compatibility.

Re:still using Office 2000... no point in newer...

[Billly Gates]

That says a lot about your company if you can't read what everyone else uses.

Until last year I always sent my resume or any other file with the older compatibility mode. As of March 2011 I changed. I figured if they did not a more up to date system to handle it then it says a lot about the company that I do not want to be involved in.

I hope your company does not do business to business sales. Your reputation is everything and even if I did save my resume in compatiblity format what is to say it will even look right on your computer? Probably HR will throw it in the trash anyway lol.

There are so many formatting bugs and other problems in all versions of Office but they are worse when you go back further. VBA and other excel functions are castrated at the version you use.

Re:VIM

[spauldo]

Ah, you want emacs then.

Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[Taco Cowboy]

Who would have thought that word processing needs 1GB of RAM?
 
Especially from the "640k ought to be enough for anybody" company !

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[Higgs Bosun]

And (optionally I think) a DirectX 10 graphics card. I think that's even more implausible than the 1GB RAM. Did they port Office to WPF or something?

Yeahyeah I know, Direct 2D, fancy hardware accelerated text, etc. It's still kind of funny needing a GPU for documents.

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[BevanFindlay]

Actually, PowerPoint. For years (actually, I can honestly say decades now*), I've shaken my head at the terrible transitions and effects in PowerPoint, so getting something vaguely nice-looking in their presentation software is probably a good thing.

* Early 90's I saw a presentation program called "Scala" on the Amiga that had some really beautiful effects etc; it ended up morphing into something else on a different platform, but ever since then, I've cringed at nearly all the PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen.

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[youn]

man, I miss the days when office fit in ~40 floppy disks... was a pain to install but did the job

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[jbolden]

640K? That was far too much for just Word Perfect. And WordStar ran well on 32K of RAM.

But then again: WordStar didn't have
Object linking and embedding
Complex versioning
Multiple style sheets (or even any style sheets)
multiple control types

The old word processors have as much in common with the new ones as shoes do with airplanes.

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[postbigbang]

I'll take that argument:

1) OLE, while clever, was also fairly proprietary for a while. The SmallTalk drag and drop metaphor was done more accurately elsewhere. Cool nonetheless

2) Complex versioning is very nice, but unfortunately, lack of metatagging meant that group use-- where complex versioning really pays off, was absent for a lonnnnng time.

3) Style sheets are cool, but they're just stock templates. Call them that, and WordStar users made many of them to use with varying printers, RIPs. etc. No, the graphics weren't WYSIWYG. Pity. Oh, 32K. I get it.

4) Multiple control types? What is this feature that you claim?

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[avandesande]

Specs are for Windows 7 eyecandy.

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[jbolden]

What argument are you taking? If you agree these new technologies exist, even if they are proprietary of in some other ways less than ideal then that explains the additional memory CPU load.

As for complex versioning not paying off, I don't disagree. The implementation is almost good enough to be useful, but you still have to be careful. That's not a good state of affairs and I still think this should used less. That being said though it is heavily used and it is a complex feature.

As for multiple control types office suites have different permissions on who can do what to which aspects. So for example someone can change data but not change the format. They can add sections but not remove. You see this more in Excel where someone can change data but not formulas. That is both a good feature and useful.

In general I think a lot of the complaints really root from (as usual) Microsoft's lack of direction. Were they to tie Office much more closely to SharePoint they could do a much better job on these features but that would require them either having a SharePoint like service for Home/Small-business (i.e. where Skydrive / Micrsoft 365 seem to be going) unless they were willing to abandon those markets which right now they are loath to do. I suspect the next decade will be one where Office start to improve massively.

But regardless of whether it does or doesn't. I think the shoes to airplanes analogy is apt.

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[postbigbang]

Ah. You meant contextually absorbing data types/objects.

I used Rubenstein's WordStar when it was very, very small. Wrote seven books+ on it. I watched the WYSIWIGs emerge, and how Microsoft tried to make Word WYSIWIG, then make it work across vast platforms. WordPerfect was attempting the same thing. Windowing managers changed everything. That's where the first real round of bloat came-- not just accommodating mindless and endless printer drivers, and even mice drivers.

When the race was on, WordPerfect started resting on their laurels while Microsoft chugged ahead. The feature war started, and everyone wanted to make a desktop publishing app in word processing clothing. Document generation became "Office suites that had a modicum of interoperability, just like Lotus tried to achieve with Symphony.

Bloat and competitive armies of feature sets caused highly sophisticated apps where only a tiny majority needed the feature sets-- cool as they might be.

My applause was for the lowly text editor, as the final product has become different for different people. We print less than ever before, because we electronically transmit docs. Might be an email of a PDF or doc/rtf/whatever file. Could be a web post. Might be part of a web static page, or whatever. The targets aren't paper and emulating pre-press anymore.

People still make apps with MS Office. They use OLE(2) DCOM, and all varieties of kludges to do some fairly sophisticated stuff. They always will. As a newer generation knows Java from high school, the denominator of skill is brought up from the bottom. Sharepoint, while very clever, doesn't fill the need that it should, but it's a whole money-making subculture that has value and makes people nominally more productive.

I'm not sure "the cloud" is the answer, because the telcos and carriers-- the transport-- are as evil as politics on a good day. The metering banter is coming around again and transport metering will kill cloud like a hot summer day.

Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

[jbolden]

I agree the WYSIWYG move was a mistake. WYSIWYM should have become more dominant than it is. A huge amount of the whole document management and unstructured data problem is trying to deal with the problems of WYSIWYG being used when WYSIWYM would fit better.

As for desktop publishing and word processing... well yeah. The 80s were the era where typesetting and layout moved from a separate process to being integrated into authoring. That wasn't WordPerfect's fault, that was the user demand.

Don't care

[zrbyte]

I'm not planning on using it.

Re:Don't care

[Nineteen-Delta]

Me neither. XP and office 2003 is what I started with. Served fine up until now. - In the old days, a mouthful of berries and your hand on a cave wall would suffice. Now that we've learned to write, MS want you to have a construction company build a monstrous erection in order for you to blow juice over your hand and onto the wall beyond..... Madness!

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[aztracker1]

after their unexpectedly well made and uncharacteristically blunder-free XP release

You didn't run XP before SP1 did you?

Re:You poor sap

[Jeeeb]

That and authors and solicitors and technical documentation writers, patent writers, translators .etc. also use the word processor as their primary tool. Since he/she mentions spreadsheets as well he could also be involved in "small-data" data-modeling, office administration or similar. Just because you lack the imagination to see otherwise doesn't mean he/she is stuck in a low level job. Although even if he/she was there would be no need to be an offensive ass about it. Typists and secretaries play a necessary role in society.

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[account_deleted]

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Shoot self in foot and then to top it off:

[Vskye]

Complain about lost profits.

Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[igb]

Nonsense. iWork runs on 10.4 on a PPC machine.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[dunkelfalke]

Who cares? Why should people spend their money upgrading when they have no reason to? To make Microsoft happy?

Frankly, I don't see your problem.

If they chose to upgrade to Office 2013 they are making Microsoft happy anyway and might as well upgrade to Windows 7.

If they don't want to spend the money to upgrade the operating system, why upgrade the office software in first place? It is even more expensive and the old one works just fine.

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[account_deleted]

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Yes, Good

[RoLi]

But not because "XP needs to be wiped out", but because that will be the great chance for LibreOffice and the odt Format.

I'm using it.

[Gumbercules!!]

I have been running the Office 2013 preview release on my work PC for a good 6 hours now (so I therefore assume myself to be an authority on this matter) and I quite like it.

Re:You poor sap

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said 'primary tool.' Though that would be a good description for you.

Monopolist forcing an upgrade

[flyingfsck]

MS is using their monopoly to force the whole world to upgrade again. If you run a business and a partner sends you a document in the latest fscking MS Office format, then you have little choice about the matter.

Re:You poor sap

[mwvdlee]

I suppose you communicate via hand written notes on parchment?

I suppose you write your replies in a wordprocessor before copy&pasting it to Slashdot?

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[RoLi]

5 years was ancient in the 1990s, but in the 2010s it's rather "good enough" for anything that is commonly done with MS Office.

... and they want to compete in tablets ?

[Taco Cowboy]

And ... a DirectX 10 graphics card. I think that's even more implausible than the 1GB RAM. Did they port Office to WPF or something?

Yeahyeah I know, Direct 2D, fancy hardware accelerated text, etc. It's still kind of funny needing a GPU for documents.

 
Everything Microsoft produce this days are bloatwares which are bloated to the max
 
With bloatware like these how the hell they can survive in the tablet / smartphone platforms, where the CPU/GPU/RAM specs are much MUCH lower than that of the desktop ?

Re:... and they want to compete in tablets ?

[DeathFromSomewhere]

You realize that moving graphics calculations to a processor that specializes in graphics calculations is in fact an optimization? You will be hard pressed to find a computer built today that doesn't have DX10 level hardware, might as well use it.

Re:... and they want to compete in tablets ?

[krakelohm]

A Microsoft article is no place for logic and reason, be gone with your bad self!

Re:... and they want to compete in tablets ?

[drsmithy]

With bloatware like these how the hell they can survive in the tablet / smartphone platforms, where the CPU/GPU/RAM specs are much MUCH lower than that of the desktop ?

Same way Mercedes manage to survive in the sports car market even though they also make vans.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[stifler9999]

In his 3D rendered, Dx10, AAx16, Isotropic filtered, semi-transparent, texture mapped goodness.

Re:You poor sap

[dbIII]

I thought real technical writers turned up their nose at things such as MS Word anyway?

bloat

[JustNiz]

So office now needs at least 2GB or ram, 3GB of HD, a DX-10 comptible video card, yet it still has pretty much exactly the same functionality as office 95.

Microsoft Office 95 required a 386DX or higher CPU, and either Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows NT 3.51. 8 MB of RAM & 55 MB of hard disk space for the 'typical' install.

Re:bloat

[Billly Gates]

But you didn't have whinners slamming it for not supporting Windows 3.0 and DOS when Word 3 for DOS 5 works just fine bla bla bla. Wordperfect for DOS back then only required 128k of ram. Why upgrade to that horrible bloat of Office 95 etc.

Office 95 required a computer made within 1.5 years of release! Windows 95 and NT 4 were just coming out and brand new. Sure people had 386s that were 6 years old then but did not have the 8 megs of ram and that much hard drive space.

I think bashing MS for Office 2013 for requiring 2 gigs of ram and Windows 7 or later is what every computer made past October 2009 which is almost 3 years ago shows MS is cooling the upgrade trendmill if anything.

Re:Get thee to a bookery!

[dbIII]

Yep, and it's just as correct because it's been signed with that spelling as well!

Getting a bit tired of this

[Peter Simpson]

Ho, hum. Another forced upgrade from a dying company.

Seriously, though, I recently read a post that claimed "Office functionality has peaked". It's true, you can only have so many features in a word processor before you're adding "fluff"; and when you finish adding all the fluff you can think of, then you start to rearrange the UI. After "ribbon", there's not much left. And you still need to maintain or increase your revenue contribution. This means selling copies of a new version, because everyone on the planet who needs a word processor already has a copy of Word.

So, for no good reason other than revenue flow (which is probably a very good reason), we have yet another forced upgrade. Ho, hum.

Side note:

[The MAZZTer]

You cannot customize the installation directory, it must be installed to the same drive as Windows.

The root\vfs directory must be on that volume, otherwise Office will refuse to start (something about how it does its Virtual File System stuff... there are overrides in there for common Windows directories.

You can use NTFS junctions to redirect root\office15 though, which contains about 50% of the used bytes. root\vfs still requires about 1.3gb though.

Tiddy Bear

[tepples]

If you want a neck bear, you can probably modify a Tiddy Bear.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[Compaqt]

The funniest thing is "DirectX 10-compatible graphics card for users wanting hardware acceleration." Say what?

You need hardware acceleration to write a memo? Or enter numbers into a spreadsheet?

Is that for Clippy?

I don't know if we can really complain. I mean, with Gnome/Ubuntu requiring 3D for the basic desktop environment anymore.

But still.

If 16 GB will even fit

[tepples]

It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days.

Provided your machine is new enough and physically large enough to accept such modules. My two-year-old 10" laptop, for example, won't take more than 2 GB according to crucial.com.

Re:If 16 GB will even fit

[macshit]

It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days.

Provided your machine is new enough and physically large enough to accept such modules. My two-year-old 10" laptop, for example, won't take more than 2 GB according to crucial.com.

Yeah, assuming your machine can be upgraded (many laptops, for instance, are not so flexible in this respect..) it's not so much the price as it is the annoyance of actually doing it.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[brokeninside]

From the iWork home page, ``iWork for Mac works with any Mac running OS X v10.6.6 or later.'' The most recent version of OS X is 10.8. On the one hand, this is more or less comparable to what Microsoft is doing which was your main point. On the other hand, it's certainly not the case that ``Apple's iWork already limits you to the latest OS.'' The most recent version of iWork runs on the latest release (Mountain Lion, 10.8) and the last two major releases (Lion and Snow Leopard which are 10.7 and 10.6 respectively).

Which converter?

[tepples]

If your shitty external device still uses RCA outputs, then go get a convertor.

Which converter do you recommend for standard-definition sources such as Wii, retro gaming (2nd to 6th generation consoles), VHS (I can think of a few films that haven't been rereleased on DVD), or pay TV in plans below the cable company's cheapest HD plan?

Re:theses

[mrt_2394871]

I wrote my thesis in Word (97, I think). There's a Master Document option so each chapter was its own individual file; equations used the default equation editor, and headings and table/figure numbering (and the tables of content, figures & tables) all used the standard Word facilities.
That said, all my figures were created elsewhere, and imported as EMFs (for vector graphics) or PNGs; and I used Endnote for the reference handling.
Since then, I've used Word's own referencing system. This turns out to be adequate if you:

1. only write in a linear fashion, or
2. never add cross-references, or
3. don't care about [14] cropping up before [5]

People still use RCA inputs for SD sources

[tepples]

Nobody complains that the HD TV they bought doesn't have RCA cable inputs.

I don't see how you arrived at that conclusion. It appears to assume that nobody is a fan of Wii or retro gaming, nobody watches films that haven't been rereleased on DVD over the past fifteen years, and that people always buy a BD player ($100) with every TV and upgrade their pay TV subscription to HD service ($200 more per year) the day they get the new TV. A TV with no backward-compatible composite or analog component video inputs isn't a TV at all; it's a computer monitor.

New OS, old HW

[tepples]

Quite a few [applications for Mac OS X] already require at least Leopard from 2007.

But how many do you expect to require Mountain Lion, which can't even be installed on 2008 Macs? I'm told the version of Xcode that targets iOS 6 will likely be among them.

Re:New OS, old HW

[jbolden]

As someone who's been with OSX since 10.1. Generally around 1 year after an OS version comes out you start seeing applications that require that version of the OS. By about 2 years, around the time you would be 2 versions behind most software packages have undergone an upgrade that requires the new system. So I'd say that by July 2013 you'll start seeing lots of 10.8 only software; and by Jan 2015 the vast majority of software vendors will have dropped Lion support except for offering a place to download the old version.

It is a much much faster cycle than the Microsoft cycle.

1920x1080 vs. 1600x1200 is 8%

[tepples]

framebuffer resolutions have gone up

By about eight percent. That's how many more pixels there are in 1920x1080 than there were in 1600x1200.

a single simple effect that covers a lot less than half the screen at a decent framerate

Likely response: "I don't need effects; I make my slideshows with cuts or wipes only, and those effects don't cover more than 1/20 of the screen in any given frame."

Re:1920x1080 vs. 1600x1200 is 8%

[SuricouRaven]

About the toughest effect to render software-wise would be the alpha blend fade, x=ta+(1-t)b. With a little adjustment work, you can do that using only integer math. That's one addition, one subtraction, two multiplications and three copies. All on three color channels. 21 operations per pixel. At 1920x1080, that's 43 million operations per frame. The P133 would indeed struggle, though it could still be made to work using a few optimisations (Like masking only those areas which differ between the frames, and pre-computing values for background colors) which would reduce the processing needs to a fraction of the most basic implimentation. But even without any optimisations at all, and taking half the cycles for overhead like memory moves, a 1GHz single-core processor of the type found in even the cheapest computer of some years back and easily outperformed by the dual-core ghz chips of most tablets would be able to render that demanding effect at 23fps. And as I said, that's using the 'idiot's basic rendering' method, which any competent programmer could improve upon by an order of magnitude or two. So, no, there is no need for hardware rendering of office documents. Sure, it might be nice to have for saving a little power on mobile devices if your powerpoint is full of overdone transitions, but software fallback is always an option and so the presence of either graphics hardware or the directX api should not be a requirement. That it is a requirement is purely a business decision, not a technical one: MS is increasingly upset over the refusal of many users to update from Windows XP, an OS which MS wishes were considered entirely obsolete but which remains 'good enough' that so many see no reason to leave. Withholding office is Microsoft's way of making sure they do leave XP at last.

Re:1920x1080 vs. 1600x1200 is 8%

[jbolden]

Remember this version of office is going to be around a while. Apple starting their migration to retina in Mar 2012 with the iPad3; the first laptop in Jun 2012. Lets assume they are completely migrated by Dec 2013. That means retina screens start hitting PC laptops enmass in 2014. By 2018 or so they will be the norm. This version of Office needs to support that.

Re:1920x1080 vs. 1600x1200 is 8%

[tepples]

But even without any optimisations at all, and taking half the cycles for overhead like memory moves, a 1GHz single-core processor of the type found in even the cheapest computer of some years back and easily outperformed by the dual-core ghz chips of most tablets would be able to render [an alpha-blended fade] at 23fps.

And guess what the minimum CPU requirement of this application is: 1 GHz, same as the OS it runs on. Besides, a fade isn't the most intense transition effect. There's the "spinning newspaper" rotozoom effect, which needs an implementation of affine texture mapping.

Tablets, that's a brilliant idea

[gelfling]

because all the office heavy lifting will be done on dinky litter devices w/o keyboards.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[wmac1]

Word processor pages are rendered similar to a web browser. We now use graphics card acceleration for browsers. Why not for publishing software?

Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[OrangeTide]

I was forced to upgrade to Tiger for iWork'08.

If you buy iWork'09 today, it requires Snow Leopard. It will no longer run on Leopard unless you're lucky enough to have an old DVD of it.

Re:VIM

[kikito]

> Maybe my vim-fu is weak but remind me how I can check my email and schedule a meeting with vim?

Are you implying that Office is the only tool you know to do those tasks? That's ... kind of sad, actually. Good luck.

No

[OrangeTide]

Have you actually tried it? IT DOES NOT RUN!

Apple should be the one modded down factually incorrect.

Oddly the wikipedia page seems correct, even though that is usually the other way around.

Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[ceoyoyo]

Did you just make tat up without even cursory checking, just so you could say "Apple fanbois?"

PDF vs doc

[Compaqt]

>Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.

It's hard to understand what you mean.

If you sent someone a perfectly formatted .doc, the formatting would, of course, change when your European colleagues open it up. That's because they have their settings on A4.

It would never have been the same in both places.

On the other hand, if you (or they) send a PDF, your OS/printer will slightly enlarge/reduce and center the document so it all prints on an A4 sheet, or letter sheet. No muss, no fuss.

And the page numbering doesn't change, so you can still refer to page nos. in conference calls.

>Also, I don't know what decade you're living in, but if you have the same paper size selected word documents don't seem to have that problem across computers.

His experience (and mine) trump yours. You haven't seen that, but that doesn't prove it doesn't happen. He has, and that does prove it happens.

The usual reason is printer drivers. A very minute difference in space available will result in a line having to go to the next page, which can then have a cascading effect.

Re:PDF vs doc

[Sir_Sri]

so it all prints on an A4 sheet

Or it prints one page, and then a line on another page that is otherwise blank etc. As I say you can work around it (fit to page essentially) but my point is that this is a deliberate choice by microsoft to adjust the document to your particular printer settings.

Adobe deliberately went another way (that is after all how you differentiate your products). But one isn't 'better' than the other, they are aiming to solve different problems. If you have something where the aspect ratio particularly matters then shrinking or expanding to fill paper size is the wrong answer, if you have something where page numbers must be preserved then you can go with PDF.

OH NO!

[Murdoch5]

Oh wait, Libre Office will still install :-) disaster avoided.

Re:VIM

[Murdoch5]

Well you can use the interactive editor to pipe into sendmail for email, you could easily tie that into evolution for scheduling. That would maybe take a hour to set up and test, which is less then the time to install windows and office.

Bloat bloat bloat...

[oh_my_080980980]

...bloat bloat bloat....

Outrageous requiirements for a TABLET

[tekrat]

Wait just a cottonpickin' minute...
MS is developing WIndows 8 which is specifically geared towards Tablets -- so much so, that they are willing to piss off their desktop users.

Now comes Office 2013, geared towards Windows 8 -- except with those requirements, there's no way to run it on a Tablet.... so.... uh.... what exactly is the point?

Is this a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing? Why develop an office suite that requires you have the latest and greatest power-hungry desktop, and then say "but you have to run it under our tablet-oriented OS" ?

Seriously Microsoft... fuck you.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[Compaqt]

Do we indeed use graphics accel for browsers?

Also, browsers normally show videos and other content that may need to be hardware accelerated (H264).

It's hard to see what would be the same in word procs, unless the document were just a collection of videos, in which case, why would you print it?

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[archen]

What's alarming about this is about how Vista is being written out of Microsoft support history so quickly. If I buy Windows 8, and it doesn't have the "critic mass" required, does that mean MS is going to quickly drop support on that too? Another reason to be wary of 8.

Re:I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but..

[Tharkkun]

Vista is over 5 years old. That is ancient in computer terms.

Who cares? Why should people spend their money upgrading when they have no reason to? To make Microsoft happy?

You don't see any other software vendors saying windows 7 only. They actually value their paying customers.

Vista does not offer DirectX11 GPU

Whats this got to do with office?

nor the DRM and document protection of Windows 7 for the sharing features of Sky Drive Pro.

This is really great. Windows 7 has more DRM. Let me run out and upgrade right away.

Yeah like Apple who drops support the previous version of the OS immediately after their updated one comes out! Oh wait.... There's no reason to buy Office 2013 just to buy it. But if you're going to upgrade you need to use a modern day OS. It's not rocket science. XP is going on 12 years. Microsoft has easily held up their end of the support bargain compared to any company. Probably doubled it.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[Macthorpe]

Isn't it just a logical progression from rendering parts of the desktop on 7 using DirectX, to doing the same for the layout on Word? I mean, any processing you can offload from the CPU is generally a good thing, especially when you're not using the GPU at all.

It also does point out hardware acceleration isn't actually required.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[Killjoy_NL]

Please reread that line, it says for users WANTING hardware acceleration.
It's not mandatory, it is optional and personally I like having the option of using hardware acceleration.

Re: DirectX 10-compatible graphics card

[DocSavage64109]

It could be for those spiffy Powerpoint animations.

Re: we use a rational system

[DocSavage64109]

Unless you're using ISO 8601 then you can't claim to be using a rational date system.

Re:stupid people will be stupid.

[Johann Lau]

can be scripted down to running only 12 processes, until other services are needed

That sounds interesting, care to elaborate?

This thread is now about getting the most out of Windows X:P

Re:Windows 7 is actually usable on 512MB

[DocSavage64109]

This person is correct, however, don't try installing any antivirus software with less than 1GB.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[0123456]

Word processor pages are rendered similar to a web browser. We now use graphics card acceleration for browsers. Why not for publishing software?

Now?

Now?

We were using graphics card acceleration for browsers and word processors in the 90s. And didn't require some fancy 3D hardware to do so.

U r completely correct

[pmathew]

A technical document particularly like my thesis in electrical engineering is mostly equations and images . I prefer latex for the sheer beauty of equations that it churns out . I like the convenience of word+math-type but it doesn't come out "perfect" looking and cross referencing is cumbersome .I wish someone at Microsoft spent some time in improving these two features than making it cuter . But except for word other elements of the office suite really kicks ass particularly excel and Visio . Libreoffice cal hangs at large data points which excel just chews through and Visio is a just pure awesomeness . I mean i am a linux user and used to get stuff done with xfig but visio rendering is so much better that i decided to donate my green to MS that to my pirate overlords :) .

DirectWrite

[tepples]

My guess is that the DirectWrite API used for high-quality text rendering depends on changes made in DirectX 10, and I'm guessing one of them is a change in how texture coordinates are interpreted (corner vs. center).

DirectX on Xbox 360

[tepples]

read how chosing OpenGL over DirectX resulted in business opportunities that personally made him $US 3.5 million dollars in a few months when his OpenGL code was very easily ported to the iPad/iPhone unlike DirectX apps that are stuck on the Windows desktop

True, OpenGL is portable to iOS and Android, but DirectX is portable to Xbox 360.

tricked developers into building workflows using DirectX, since MS knew this would make it hard for game developers to leave

Was it the workflows, or was it access to a console to which a game in a living room friendly genre could be ported? The only console open to anyone who's not a veteran of the traditional video game industry is the Xbox 360, whose XNA API is based on DirectX.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[sirlark]

Why not for publishing software?

That's an ambitious... nay, generous term

Get on that upgrade treadmill you micro-serfs!

[walterbyrd]

Gotta love vendor lockin. MS wins, computer uses lose. What a bunch of saps.

Re:WRONG!!!!

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Deadlocks the whole OS as soon as you try to use a DX10+ feature is not working just fine.

chicken or egg?

[roc97007]

Since many companies are still using XP and don't have any particular desire to move to 7 or 8, I wonder if Office 2013 will draw them into upgrading, (which has to be done all at once and can be a real hassle) or will investment in the present OS draw them into sticking with the previous version of Office and calling it good?

Vendor lock-in

[peppepz]

Certainly, this is only because of the deep technical differences between Windows Vista and Windows 7, which didn't enable Microsoft's experts to port Office 2013 to Windows Vista; it's not an arbitrary decision by Microsoft, trying to leverage vendor lock-in: because Microsoft has changed since the 90s.

It's funny how, on Windows XP, Microsoft wasn't even able to port an old-fashioned, low on features browser such as Internet Explorer 9, whereas on the same OS you're free to install, say, Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and enjoy the latest and the greatest of web technologies. (And let's remember that even on Vista, with IE9, it's not native HTML5. )
Since I can't imagine the changed Microsoft deliberately cutting compatibility with their older and not-so-old OSes in order to force their customers to upgrade, I have to think that Microsoft's coders are either lazy or incompetent.

Re:VIM

[DeathFromSomewhere]

No.... I was asking how to do it in vim since the OP suggested vim was a replacement for Office. It's a joke. Lighten up.

Re:Windows 7 is actually usable on 512MB

[asdf7890]

MS's AV option might be practical. It has a much lower memory footprint than the other common options and from the group-tests I've seen its detection rate isn't disappointing either. I put it on an old 512Mb laptop of a friend when we rebuilt it after walware infection and it seemed efficient enough, though that was on XP rather then 7.

I use auto-numbering

[Chirs]

Count me as one of the few then....when writing anything remotely substantial in Word/OpenOffice I always use autonumbering, styles, headers, etc. So much simpler to define the style once and be able to change one thing and affect the whole document.

Actual market share

[jbolden]

There hasn't been any research in about 2 years. But at that point the range was from 5% (india) to 22%(Poland & Czech Republic) with the US at 9%. The market share of Linux may be low; but similar to how Firefox progressed Open Office and derivatives have progressed to large user bases:
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-openoffice-market-shares.html

If Linux does ever win the desktop it will need first to most people's software stack with open source alternatives so instead of people running
Mostly proprietary software on proprietary OSes they are running
Mostly Free software on proprietary Oses.

Re: But you should see Clippy

[DeathFromSomewhere]

DX10 level hardware is hardly fancy. Try finding a PC built in the last couple years that doesn't support DX10. It's even been built into the intel chips for some time. DX10 hardware isn't required either, software fallback still works.

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[CashLoaderz.EU]

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Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Dept. of Redundancy Dept.

[SplashMyBandit]

Actually not redundant at all. It could have been $AU 3.5 million, or $NZ 3.5 million, or $HK 3.5 million, or $CAN 3.5 million. All of which are different amounts. It is a share that US folks are only dimly aware about the Rest of the World outside their borders. The reason I wrote $US 3.5 million dollars is because $3.5 million is different amounts depending on whose currency it is in. So next time, no need to be snarky just because you have a significant gap in knowledge requiring international currency (which international Slashdot readers are aware of, and are sure to specify precisely what they mean).

So I hope we can have a good laugh that the joke is actually on you and your fellow posters who were not aware there are several dollar currencies besides the US one - which necessitates specifying the particular currency if you want to give an accurate figure :)

Still No

[OrangeTide]

"Required OS"

Attempts to install it have just failed.

Enjoy

Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this

[OrangeTide]

personal experience. plus a search of problems on forums. plus a table on wikipedia.

mostly I'll trust my personal experience over what you guys say. I keep trying it and IT STILL DOESN'T WORK.

Maybe I'm just not as cool as the guy who writes press releases for Apple.

But the point is taken. Apple did not *intentionally* break their software for older OS releases. So Microsoft is the bigger douchebag today.

2GB for 64bit?

[Aizenmyou]

Seriously? For Office Programs? So now the phrase will be, "But can it run Office 2013?!"

Re:You poor sap

[hicksw]

...requires CAT tools.

Is that tomography or cabling?

Re: But you should see Clippy

[faragon]

Because you can?