Office 2013 now available for some home users
Office 2013 is still a few weeks away from release, but Microsoft has made it available to certain customers as part of its Home Use Program (HUP), a scheme it uses to sell cheap software to folks whose employers have a Software Assurance deal. Office 2013 has just been added to the HUP, at very reasonable prices: the UK page …
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Re: Can someone enlighten me?
There are two major advantages of MS Office over other suites:
(a) documents *look* the same. Ever since we went WYSIWYG, the fact that a document word wraps at the same position has become FAR more important than what's actually in it, so using MS Office means you won't get whinged at by people who have nothing better to do than making sure your margins are the same.
(b) you don't have to wait for the next incarnation of import/export facilities in Open/LibreOffice. The people who write this stuff have a lot of work still ahead of them, because I don't think MS will ever give up on inserting stupidity into their format just to make their life difficult. Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for their work (I work by default in OpenOffice) but if I have to make the choice between battling for 30 mins to get things in shape or 5 minutes wait for MS Word to load up I'm afraid MS Office pays for itself quickly. It's just not worth the hassle.
Having said that, I use OpenOffice as my main package (somehow LibreOffice is too different for me to get on with) but on OSX there is a VERY annoying bit of behaviour that makes me jump to Apple iWork's Pages or MS Word: dragging in an image. For some bizarre reason, OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) insist on opening that image up in Draw instead of just dumping it on the page like any other word processor does. So you have to use "insert image" to make it behave, *very* annoying, and never adequately explained.
Each package has IMHO its own killer feature:
MS Word gives me a command not found in other packages: "resume cursor position". It's a pretty hidden command which hides under Shift-F5, but if you're editing a big document it's fantastically useful. It's about as useful as the ribbon isn't.
Apple's "Pages" gives me good layout facilities (once you understand them), it's very quick to hack up a layout - it feels more DTP than word processing focused
Open/LibreOffice give me the same UI on Windows, Linux and OSX and as I use all 3 it's an easy choice. To me, the Navigator is worth its code in Gold as it's like Word's Document Map, but far more intelligent. That, and its ability to rescue MS Word documents where Word has screwed up formatting so much in documents it won't even open them. OOo has no problem with it.
However, I really wished that every one of them started with a tutorial on the importance of using styles. Once you get the hang of that, structure and layout are *so* much easier..
HUP is a good initiative
My employer rolled out 2010 last year, and opened up the HUP offer at the same time. I took them up on it and got 2 licences for home use.
It's nice having exactly the same user interface on both my work laptop and my home PC.
I can't speak for 2013, and don't think my company are planning an upgrade.
Where's the weather?
For £8.95, and being bored with all the snow, I thought what the heck and went for it.
First impression is that some aspects of the UI aren't too bad - I can live with the ribbon bar in "show tabs" mode.
What I hate is that they have removed most of the themes that were in Outlook 2010, so you have a choice of White, Very White or Extremely White! They've also removed most of the visual cues that delineate the different elements on the screen.
Also: most of the reviews say that you can have the weather on your Calendar - but I don't have this listed under Options for Calendar. Is it just me, or is it something that was removed for RTM (or UK users)?
Dare To Think: "Thus, can someone please let me know MS Office' unique advantage?"
The chances are quite good that every local high school. college, public library, or community center within easy driving distance from your home is offers courses in MS Office. Recruiting experienced MS Office workers is dead easy pretty much anywhere south of the Artic Circle.
Microsoft sells Office as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. The geek still tends to think in terms of the stand-alone office suite.
The office manager doesn't want themes.
He wants mature tools for deployment and administration.
He wants to be able to place his full time staff, temps and senior volunteers at any available desk and be productive.
Give me the down voters
OK, I'm not a power user but I've been running 2013 for a couple of months (RTM version) and I definitely prefer it to 2010. A lot cleaner looking and some bits I've been bemoaning for years (tables in Word for example) greatly improved.
The Australia tax rises its ugly head yet again.
I want to know how Microsoft can justify the 60% premium on the cost of this in Australia. If I login to the HUP site and enter the code for my employer then change the country from US to AU to NZ I get different pricing based on the country. Microsoft (and other companies) claim (in a governmental pricing enquiry) that it is all to do with the size of the Australian market and the costs that implies. If that is the case then why is it that the cheapest place to get the software is NZ (the smallest market) where it costs $NZ9.95 (~$AU8)?
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