Microsoft pops preview of 'biggest, most ambitious' Office yet Microsoft has released the last preview of its latest build of Office – the first release of one of Redmond's biggest cash cows. "This is the first round of Office designed from the get-go for Office to be a service," said CEO Steve Ballmer at a press conference in San Francisco. "We've transformed Office to embrace design …
Can anyone really want to work with a screen so fully crowded with all those little logos for each of the many applets and craplets that no particular one can be found in a reasonable time?
If Ballmer et al want to use this horrid franken-interface for a few years as beta testers before foisting it on those of us who use our machines to actually produce something (rather than only consuming media), I say let them. However - I'll not be getting any of the crap anywhere near my machines until there are absolutely no remotely viable alternatives.
Good grief, what a pack of morons.
I hope that my wife never reads this forum, but she has every square (oblong?) pixel of screen covered in Icons, applets and crapletts that are known to man - along with some that are probably known only to woman.
I don't normally care, but when the soul destroying phrase of ' hold on, just let me show you this .. hmm, now where did I put .. oh here it ... oh no it's not that one.. oh, that click didn't work did it?' raises its head, I come to think of the screen shots that have been used to illustrate windows 8. Still, I am sure that its parents will always love it.
I've installed the preview and have used it for a couple of hours and the overwhelming feeling is one of being transported back to the times of Windows 95 and the terrible 16 colour icons and desktop that we used to be presented with when Windows didn't have a driver for the graphics card. I cannot understand for the life of me why they have chosen such a stripped back, bare look for the suite - and the bright white has started to give me eye strain.
They call this progress?
On the other hand some people, myself included, prefer a more subdued look although agree to a degree they have gone a touch too far.
Nothing like the Windows 95 unsubtle visuals to my eyes, for that time travel experience we need the (IMO) retro look of current Android and iOS releases.
Way would you need more then 5 minutes to know Metro is shit?
I spent longer trying to find a way to turn it off, or better if I could disable it in an active directory policy.
I put Metro on the same list as Active Desktop, and the Office paperclip, except they were not as bad since they could be turned off.
Well, Office 2013 is an interesting hybrid. It's not metro. It's actually a "classic destop application" that is Metro-styled.
So it addresses one of the most important concerns: it allows for multi-windowed multitasking. But the interface still eats way more of the screen than Office 2003, and I can't make ubitmenu work properly on it. For what? Paste preview and cloud sync? (Pretty much the two features I feel it has over Office 2003.)
Heck of a tradeoff...
buying and installing tocuh screen monitors for all the secretaries and accountants, and then the endless frigging calls cos a user has smeared tomato sauce or mayo (at least I hope it's mayo on a work screen) and now cannot see Excel properly.
Skype. We ban skype cos it wastes bandwitdth and resources. If not all our overseas employees would be installing it and ringing the folks back home in where ever they are (people have tried to).
Microsoft have seriously been on the weed. I think Nokia's been a bad influence!
"frigging calls cos a user has smeared tomato sauce or mayo and now cannot see Excel properly."
You have clearly never supported general users. Here, let me rephrase your sentence for accuracy;
"frigging calls cos a user has fried their monitor after hosing it down with windex to clean off the tomato sauce or mayo that they had smeared on it earlier."
Of course they will admit to none of this, they will just tell you "I didn't do anything, it just stopped working,"
We used to deprecate Skype because as a well connected university, anyone using it on campus tended to become a supernode and consume much more bandwidth than required for their calls. Now that Skype no uses P2P supernodes, that doesn't really mater. All our telephony is Lync now, so it doesn't really matter what VOIP is used.
Sorry El Reg but you're losing your touch IMO. For those of us who want to see a little more about this new Office then they can go to the official Office preview page which doesn't show extremely much but the introduction movie does give you a good impression of how its going to look and feel.
Being an MS Office 2010 power user (and actually enjoying the environment) I can only say that after looking at that intro movie I'm convinced its going to suck. BIG time.
Let me elaborate...
As we all feared the whole kaboodle sits in Metro. If you look at the movie you'll notice around 0:28 a screenshot of OneNote. This is a program I actually use very often, almost on a daily basis. Honestly: you only get to see the notebook sections and only get to see the notebooks themselves when you move your mouse to make it scroll in ?
Right now I have the notebooks sitting in the menu on my left, and the notebook sections on top. I get to chose what I want to see. More importantly: I can switch from my main notebook to my online (SkyDrive) notebook with 1 (one) click of the mouse. This is important to me because my online notebook holds info which is shared between all of my computers (main PC, laptop & WinPhone). Why would I want a sliding panel which only delays my movements?
And really; a round 'dial' pop-up menu ?
Outlook... (0:34); When I sit in Outlook right now I continue to have access to other information, even Messenger and for example, I dunno... A clock maybe? What good is a frickin' appointment calendar without so much as an actual clock visible on your screen ?
What's that? I should get a watch? But like; isn't this Office suppose to make things /easier/ (see the intro movie) ? So how come it doesn't do stuff which the old "inferior" Office does RIGHT NOW ?
Nice to have a 2D full screen Excel window but you know... Very often I add charts to some of my Word documents, and because Excel is quite a good program for that (IMO of course) I have it setup that I can start Excel with the click of a mouse button (sits in Words' quickstart panel).
Guess what ?
Win-RightMouse and it immediately moves to the right of my screen. When I'm in Word I can simply hit Win-LeftMouse and all of a sudden I have 2 programs on 1 1024x768 screen allowing me to work on my document as well as my charts.
I can't do that within Metro because my screen resolution isn't high enough. But why would I want a higher resolution when all I'm doing with this PC is using it for administrative purposes?
But here's the thing...
If you go to that link I showed above you'll notice that as soon as it comes to business use MS is no longer touting their new "Wonderful" Office. No; then all of a sudden its Office 365 (ProPlus, Small Business Premium & Enterprise).
With all due respect but those applications work quite nicely but are in /no way/ comparable to the stuff I can do with the common desktop apps. I tried 365 a month myself, I can see its potential but if you need a little more out of Office then get the desktop apps. For example: VBA scripting? Non existent in 365 because the webapps don't go that far.
I think MS clearly shows in the preview movie itself where this is headed: look at 0:24 in the movie ;-)
>And really; a round 'dial' pop-up menu ?
AKA a Pie Menu... apparently they are only in OneNote at the moment, but may be in other Office applications in the future.
In CAD software, Pie Menus can be very good, adding very quick access to eight tools without getting in the way of anything else. You still have a normal R-mouseclick context menu, the radial menu is hold R-mouse and drag.
I'm not sure how much pie menus would add to Office (common tasks already have well-established keyboard short-cuts) but they can't do any harm, since they don't get in the way of other functions.
I get the impression that you promoted a Fine Arts graduate to the head of the Design department after discovering him/her working in the the cafeteria pool.
Please tell us who this person is so that the rest of the corporate world will know who to never, EVER place in such a position again!
a LOT of people in this world have had PC's for a long time,
and there is a change happening, one that scares and frightens those people who have all been used to being young and of the 'PC' eara. the fact is: they need to allow the new and brave through...!
its better to risk and die, than to do nothing and fade away (eh MS?).
office nees to work in the cloud and on tablets : fact
people will continue to use desktops etc : fact
its the private market MS is after, Apple have been grabbing that market (and google) in droves. and MS want a piece of that pie, at the end of the day metro is only a different menu and on by default when you log in.
(ok i personally aint to keen, but on a tablet it would work well i could see it as an ipad replacement (maybe/ish), when it gets some apps on it etc..)
there WILL be hacks making it more customisable, and it will settle down and people will cope, you will get used to it, but also statistically something stupid like > 50% of computers will be mobile/touch based by 2014
(i forget the actual stats, but its something stupid like this)
so in all real terms the desktop is suddenly a second place and mobile gets the extra effort.
MS knows this and is betting big on this, i say good on them.
last point
you know, metro is not aimed at Buisiness right? Win7 is still the buisiness software of choice, people have only just moved to it, they aint gonna budge just yet, MS know this, so is this a window of opertunity to try and grab the personal tablet market. it makes so much sense. i would HATE to use Metro at work, in fact i just dont think i could. but this market place is static, and flat line, why would you move again now. tablets is where the money is at.
if you were MS what would you have done? copy apple? stay the same? create a new menu for office, add a few tweeks, and say, look how dull we are? you would complain about that too.
more positivity people come on pleeeaaase...
Why exactly should we be positive?
Fact: Metro is ass.
Fact: The goddamned ribbon bar is STILL ass, years later.
Fact: The "cloud" offerings are also ass.
Fact: Microsoft isn't paying the rest of us to astroturf.
So why, exactly should we be positive? Have faith in your favourite company? Why? I don't have faith in a deity. Why would I have faith in a company that doesn't listen to me, actively discriminates against my customers and goes out of its way to prevent the kind of innovation I would like to implement with its products for my customers. (Multitennant Windows 7 service-provider based VDI, as one example.)
Microsoft has some great technologies and great people. But the licensing department, Windows 8, Office post-2003 and Office 365 are not among them.
It isn't "bashing" to point out flaws. Especially not when you devote at least as much time to pointing out the things done right.
As I have said before, Microsoft have some truly great stuff. Hyper-V for example, or System Center 2012. SMB 3.0 deserves a nod, as do Microsoft's efforts regarding NFS of late. I think SQL server is grand, and I am increasingly impressed by IIS. Microsoft Dynamics is a decent product that is coming along nicely and I think the xbox is finally coming into its own. (As an "own your whole living room" content delivery platform, complete with original/unique or first run content that Microsoft pays for.)
I even think that Windows Phone was a decently designed platform, even if I happened to prefer Android's interface. (At least WP7 was tight to the hardware with decent battery life and stellar performance!)
I have written articles to this effect. I give praise where it is due.
But this Office cloudy 8 Metro fingerpaints edition?
Lock that sideways.
You wrote, "and there is a change happening, one that scares and frightens those people who have all been used to being young and of the 'PC' eara. the fact is: they need to allow the new and brave through...!"
The first computer I worked on was a DEC PDP8/e with 4 KB of core memory, and punched paper tape for mass storage. I've seen a lot of change since then. I've learned:
Not all change is good. And, change, simply for the sake of change (or marketing), is bad for the end-users.
You're mistaking foolishness for bravery. They're perhaps quite similar in appearance but when you grow up you'll learn the difference.
Who knows,you may even learn how to use capital letters...
(Posted from my phone. Which has an ordinary numeric telephone keypad and is still capable of such niceties)
I think Microsoft are trying to please not only the emerging tablet / touch screen market, but also the simplicity needed in the high growth markets of BRIC. I say simplicity only because even though I find it more difficult to actually get work done with the silly ribbon, new buyers with fresh eyes might find the latest incarnation more pleasing.
Microsoft have excelled at stealing ideas and software, so seeing them trying to keep up is actually quite amusing.
I wish Google Docs released a downloadable app that I could install and use daily, that would be a killer app.
So now the choice is between Open Office and LibreOffice...coz if MS Office is going to cost more than $10.00 its pointless.
Oh ...and the entire store docs on MS servers thing...sorry...'Cloud'...I laughed. A lot. There's a good chance of a few giggles of disbelief tomorrow morning as well.
MS -> Lost. The. Plot.
Pint coz well fuck it.
Why is it that when a new version of anything is made available in beta form for evaluation, the first people to comment have ready made opinions from minds unsullied by trying the beta or learning about it beyond reading some hack article or watching a short video?
Office 2013 may be crap, mediocre or an improvement over 2010 I simply don't know yet. In theory making an interface that works well with mouse/keyboard as well as touch sounds like a worthwhile endeavour. What I do know is reading a bunch of reactionary comments from people clearly antagonistic to any kind of change has already warmed my heart a degree or two.
Word 2013 seems fine after a couple of hours use, although my personal preference would be slightly more emphatic icons - I find it harder to find or react to icons with the Metro-pale look.
What disappointed was finding features such as the font selection combo not designed properly - on ribbon or on context menu. Too narrow to display many font names.
Its the little things that make for a great release and my first impression was lack of attention to detail.
Sometimes it feels like everything that MS does makes it harder to just create a paper document with words in it.
If I'm using an Office suite, I'm writing for paper, not the web, not multimedia, not Skype.
I don't want things hyperlinked - despite underlining and turning things blue, the links don't work when you click the printed output.
I don't want MS auto-formatting things left, right and center.
And when I paste a chunk of text into a document I want it to adopt the formatting for the desination, not carry over whatever lame-ass HTML formatting that some web page gave it.
Even though I actually like The Ribbon, I find that MS Office is far from a useful tool for routine tasks.
But they just have to add more stuff to list on the box to sell updates. Even the extra value stuff is crap, most of the fonts and almost all the clip art is unusable (I think I used one of the arrows on a wet paint sign once).
When you find some website that was created in Word it's always good for a laugh.
Acrobat is another program where I don't want sound and video crap, I want a file I can email to someone or post on a web site, and another person can print, and the print will look like my copy no mater what software / OS he is using.
As with earlier versions of office word, you can turn auto-formatting options on and off. My gripe is some of these features would be better done on a per document or per class of document than globally over all word editing and its unfortunate Microsoft haven't put more effort into some basic aspects of usability.
Copy/paste deficiencies haven't been properly addressed for years, what we have now is virtually unchanged from 20 years ago, in some instances worse. Pretty pathetic the half hearted changes in 13.
When I'm using Word I'm usually writing for electronic distribution not paper although that often means PDF so similar issues involved.
I also prefer ribbon to the old menu style, puts me off LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
Fair play... Its not the ribbon per se, but that
1, I can't find anything on it. There was no interim product with both menus and the ribbon, where selecting a menu item would show you where the same item was located on the ribbon. (just as how, in older versions, menus would teach you the keyboard short-cut.)
2. It takes up space. In Solidworks, for example, it doesn't matter so much: the location of the Ribbon-like 'Command Manager' can be changed or turned off, along with with other toolbars- and for that sort of work your workspace doesn't necessarily have to be tall (like a text document does, 80% of the time). In CAD, having large pictograms can be useful.
It is worth noting that Solidworks and its competitors don't force any command-selection method upon you- you are free to use a menus, context menus, pie-menus, a tabbed command manager, toolbars or even a command line, should you wish.
It seems to me that Office was good, mature and fit for purpose at the turn of the century- around the same time CAD was coming down off the mainframe and onto the Windows-based workstation. So in the last ten years it is in the CAD sector that I've seen more development of User Interfaces, usually for the better.
I have no point to make, other than to say that looking at how other software handles its UI can be instructive, but different UI elements work better for some tasks and in some circumstances than others.
I chose to participate in the Office 365 ProPlus which includes a 'click to run' version of Office. It was downoaded, installed, and running in under 3 minutes on a cable internet connection over Wi-Fi. I've bought iPad app that took longer to download and install! I'm impressed with the install time and touch friendly interface. I don't see much in new functionality, but such a full-featured app being touch friendly is impressive!
I understand (I think) that when a user presses 'save' it saves a local copy and when it has an internet connection uploads to the cloud.
Quick question to those that have played with it, is it possible to stop the uploading happening?
I don't mean just at the office etc but when the user has taken his/her laptop home or on a public wifi.
If it is, how can you be sure?
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