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Microsoft Office 2016 Public Preview Released
jones_supa writes: Back in March, Microsoft made Office 2016, the next release of the company's leading office suite, available to IT professionals to test and submit feedback on. At Microsoft's Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella announced that the public preview of Office 2016 has now been released as well. Office 2016 comes with a range of new features that build upon Office 2013. There is far more integration with cloud, allowing a user to access documents anywhere, and Outlook now syncs with OneDrive when sending large files. So called Smart Applications extend the functionality of Office, including Tell Me, a new search tool, and Clutter, which unclutters your inbox based on machine learning. Anyone can start testing the free Office 2016 Preview right now. Just as they have done with Windows 10, Microsoft is receiving open feedback on the product.
Whenever I read "more cloud integration" or some other marketing crap like that my immediate thought is "How many people am I going to have to downgrade or switch to an Open alternative?"
Office 2003 is the last Microsoft Office suite I used and I could not be happier with my choice. The writing was on the wall when they went "ribbon" crazy.
You know software as a service and all that?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Since Windows 7 is not actively developed anymore and is in extended security only support does this mean office 2016 will require an OS designed for tablets?
http://saveie6.com/
"There is far more integration with cloud, allowing a user to access documents anywhere, and Outlook now syncs with OneDrive when sending large files."
Access documents how? Can they save them anywhere they want? Do I really want to open access to OneDrive for attachments?
Too many security questions when it comes to these cloud features. And too many stupid users to allow them unfettered access to company information. I wish that owner's son could grasp that concept.
Office 365 is the name of the subscription service. The major updates/non-subscription products are still named the same as in the past (Office 365 is currently based on Office 2013).
You know software as a service and all that?
It was only good for 365 days - right there in the name...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'd just be happy with an announcement that the online Office 365 apps would finally get the features they need to quit making them toys (and forcing everyone to download docs to local Office apps anyway).
Second to that would be an option in Office 365 to default to "yes, when I opened the document, put me in f***ing editing mode by default." Hell, call it the "Google Docs" mode if you want.
She continued further, "Using Microsoft product means you save so much on retraining you employees on the office products they use daily. All the years of experience will continue to pay off".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wouldn't it make more sense to have users be the testers? The ones who use the products all freakin' day long? What do IT people know about how the product is used by the masses?
Oh wait. Microsoft. They don't care what the consumers really want. They want to look cool. Double fail.
It may be a little tragic. Microsoft, may be hated, but it's still by far the best (or standard) office suite. We should actually be happy they're still selling the old standalone office without price hikes (Adobe don't seem to be doing that anymore with the Creative Suite). Heck, now they're freely offering almost fully functional multiplataform versions of office for phones and tablets. Nowadays, it's actually believable that some day they may actually release a working Office Suite for Linux.
Sure you can use Open/Libre Office and be happy with it for several purposes, but the small incompatibilities are surely gonna cause you serious trouble once you can't see properly the documents you need. Even iWork, actively developed by what is now the world's biggest private company, eventually gets broken by something and eventually many users install Office for their needs. For work or study purposes involving constant document exchange with users which you can't garantee will use the same tool as you, I still see dropping Office as no go, and it may be ever so. It's just like image editing: Gimp works fine for most personal projects but if you do it for a living, unless you're lucky and find an opensource haven nobody is gonna hire you don't use Adobe tools.
You're not coerced into using any of the optional cloud features if you don't want to give Microsoft your data. I for one, got one free office 365 license with a new computer and one from work, and the desktop version still works fine and, except for the 1TB onedrive which is useful, I haven't moved on and used it because I prefer the standalone version, and besides frequent upgrades which I will obviously miss, even some quite good cloud integration is available trough the bundled onedrive if that's your thing. Also, all questioning that sould sincerely check if their questioning behaviour with their Android or iOS phones is similar, which would surely make the complaints rational questioning of a huge powerful corporation, or whether it's just hate of Microsoft and love of Google or Apple, which have been doing much worse than Redmond.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
Lucky you. Some of us have to do end-user support...
LibreOffice being the only viable alternative is a good reason just to use Word right off the bat.
Cortany?
Too bad you can't embed images in slashdot posts, otherwise this would be a great time to use the "The most evil thing I can imagine" meme. :)
Hmm, I have already been using Office 2016 for a few weeks.
That's Softmaker Office 2016 (www.softmaker.com) however, which to me is like an updated Microsoft Office 2003. I don't want to start a flamewar but I hate ribbons. Softmaker gives me regular menus and toolbars and is exceedingly compatible with the Microsoft Office files.
I've found, since as far back as Softmaker 2008, that Softmaker makes a much more stable, higher performance "Office Clone" than Open/Libre Office or anyone else.
Softmaker even makes their previous version Free to use (for personal or business use): http://www.freeoffice.com/en/
LibreOffice being the only viable alternative is a good reason just to use Word right off the bat.
Softmaker office
And their previous version (for free, even for business)
Gives Open/Libre Office a good run for their money.
My organization recently migrated to Office365, including Exchange / Outlook 365.
I was impressed with Outlook 365 OWA (outlook.office365.com). My initial thought was that having the entire infrastructure presented through a single portal is a recipe for disaster. Yet as soon as I type in the @company.com portion of my email address, it re-directs to our own authentication infrastructure (Ping in our case). None the less, I am sure that there are people working night and day trying to figure out how to MitM outlook.office365.com
Office 365 OWA and Outlook 2013 are nearly identical in terms of UI layout and functionality. For the average user, I think that they could do without the desktop client and most likely, not notice much if any loss of functionality.
Clutter is working well. I turned it on almost two weeks ago. So far it has done a great job of filtering out of all of the junk emails from the sales drones, while at the same time letting the important emails through. I have not missed any emails that I need to see.
Depends what you do. Office 97 was horrible by today's standard as it didn't deal with many content types which made creating marketing documents a nightmare. Open Office is fine but it too has it's limitations. As I stated in an earlier post, you can't put all users in the same basket, if you could then MS wouldn't sell any office software.
The old DirectX redists are dead and has been since Vista introduced WDDM, though the Platform Updates backports some things.
"There is far more integration with cloud."
So you're saying it has absolutely no application to any business that wants any level of privacy or Microsoft account management and access control. Great marketing plan.
Forget all the cloud crap. What I need to know is:
1. Is there finally a ModernUI (Metro) version of Office?
2. Does Outlook 2016 finally do Caldav?
3. Does Lync finally "not suck?"
I find it horrible too, basically because the interface is so fucking ugly, with three pale, bland colour schemes to choose from (blinding white, light grey and a slightly darker light grey). PLUS THE MENU ITEMS SHOUT AT YOU
If they made it nicer to look at and not so flat looking, I might be tempted to use it
-- Fuck Beta
We're approaching it.
I've done back-end and end-user support for 15 years.
For at least five of those years, the machines I used myself only had Open/LibreOffice on them.
It wasn't a hindrance.
As I say to my users all the time: No, I only manage this stuff. I don't know how to use every obscure feature of every random bit of junk that you've made me install, nor what your working practice usually involves. I'll help and advise, sure, but that rarely consists of more than a Google for "where the hell is the X button in the new versions of Office?" for most things.
Finance, especially, are lost by this. I know how to install their software, manage it, connect it to the banks, authorise the smartcards with the bank and everything else. I do the annual rollovers and the reporting and lots of other stuff. But I don't even understand what the terms mean for the rest of the stuff. I have no idea what code you should be using for that purchase. No, I don't know why your figures don't tally.
Almost certainly I can work out and dig into things and get the answer. I've never not been able to when it matters. But, it's not my job to know the ins and outs of every single detail of HOW the software should be used, every feature it has, and automatically know every click necessary to do every task. (This is my bug-bear with rote learning of things like Windows Server on courses... no... just no.)
As such... MS Office features? Basics, I'll show you. One-offs, I'll help you Google (basically, I'm Google-by-proxy for those users who want to do something quite simple that they've never done before). Everything else, I'll either know, or we'll have to find out. If you're doing it regularly, I suggest a training course or learning yourself.
MS Office isn't on my radar. At home I use LibreOffice. At my previous workplace - in the same position - I used Open/LibreOffice throughout their 2000->2003->2013 transitions.
Sure, I'll help. But it's Office. Unless it isn't activating or you need a normal.dotm reset or similar (Outlook profile reset etc.), chances are it's not high on my list.