back to article Word to your mother: Office 2016 preview flung at world + dog

If you want to get your hands on Office 2016, Microsoft has made it available now for download – but be warned, you'll have to take Office 2013 off before you do. Microsoft has marked the opening day of its Ignite conference (think TechEd and a bunch of other sysadmin shindigs rolled into one economical bundle) in Chicago by …

  1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
    Windows

    UI design

    "they will adapt their user interface for the systems they are running on – such as making buttons bigger for tablets"

    Gaah!! If you are on a tablet where space is at a premium, the correct UI decision is to get rid of all the stupid buttons and replace them with (text) popup menus. This was common knowledge a few decades ago when *everything* was short of screen space. Apparently it is now rocket science and has to be relearned by the kids.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: UI design

      I just hate bigg(er) buttons everywhere - on phones, tablets, laptops or desktops, even on smart TVs!

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Re: UI design

        Indeed. They don't seem to have got rid of that idiotic ribbon yet - you'd think they weren't listening to their users!

    2. P. Lee

      Re: UI design

      >Gaah!! If you are on a tablet where space is at a premium, the correct UI decision is to get rid of all the stupid buttons and replace them with (text) popup menus.

      While I agree with your sentiment, making buttons larger on touch systems (i.e. without accurate pointing devices) is the correct thing to do. What the application dev does with that capability is a separate issue.

      If it makes you feel better, I assume the text-based menu activation areas are also enlarged to cope with fat fingers. The OS division is doing the right thing, even if the Office devs are not. Fortunately, Office on a touch device is unlikely to be something anyone has to do that much, its merely MS' way of having a unified platform to ease desktop devs into MS mobile.

  2. x 7

    Most businesses are still on 2007/2010 and haven't made the jump to 2013. Many are still on 2003.....

    I can see this new release bringing a considerable degree of purchasing fatigue resistance. Doesn't matter how good it may be: what most people have in place is good enough

    1. joed

      I don't know what most businesses ran but I know 1 thing. It's hard to promote new tech/UI served by MS with straight face. They really make IT job harder that need be.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Office hasn't really added anything worthwhile in over a decade. There is no need to upgrade.

      Our office power users (2%) are fine with office 2007, everyone else is fine with google docs (apps for businesses)

      1. Rusty 1

        I thought Word 2 was pretty good back in the early 90s. Almost good enough to write my thesis with; I deviated and used troff instead - not much in it for the final comparison as both tools were competent.

        A few years later, with more documents to publish, FrameMaker was the absolute mutt's nuts - capable of authoring huge documents, with inserted material, consistent layout, and straightforward to use. Even available as a beta on Linux at the time.

        What is there now? Whenever I do something other than write plain text in Word, like inserting a diagram with text to flow around it, I find I have to save the document first, so I can revert back to that version the 15 or 16 times it takes Word and me to agree on what I attempted to do.

        1. Yag

          Framemaker...

          I remember this one, able to handle documents with thousands of pages while Word had trouble not to corrupt any document over 50 pages...

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Office hasn't really added anything worthwhile in over a decade."

        Yeah, now that I think about it, I would agree with that. The changes have been either around the edges, behind the scenes or, sadly, one or two retrograde steps.

        I'm not thinking of anything I need that's not in 2007.

        When you have something that you are used to that does (roughly) what you tell it to do, what would you want to upgrade for? For me the answer to that is the Home Use Program, but I do that cos it's a tenner, not cos I actually need to upgrade.

        1. a_yank_lurker

          I would say this is generally true of most gerneral business applications. There are no real must have features only a gee-whiz feature for the dog and pony show.

      3. David Austin

        The only new feature I actually like in Office 2013 is Outlook's Attachment Reminder.

        Still, the number of times it's saved my bacon, it's been well worth the upgrade price.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Don't forget the PDF editor. This is a great feature that people have wanted for years.

          Works well too.

      4. theOtherJT Silver badge

        Dunno, have they fixed outlook?

        Office hasn't really added anything worthwhile in over a decade. There is no need to upgrade.

        Depends, I've not tested it yet, but it seems that outlook 2010 really doesn't like it when you get mailboxes in the 5+ Gb area.

        Nice as it would be to tell people to just "Stop leaving everything in your damn mailbox!" they're going to do it anyway because the zimbra webapp is just fine with that.

        What makes it funny is that somehow the fact that Outlook crashes all the time with their enormous mailbox is clearly zimbra's fault, not Outlooks... but that's office staff for you.

        1. TheVogon

          Re: Dunno, have they fixed outlook?

          "it seems that outlook 2010 really doesn't like it when you get mailboxes in the 5+ Gb area."

          Nope that's fine. Default limit is 50GB. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/982577

          If you have with 5GB mailboxes then the issue probably isn't directly caused by Outlook. So your Office staff might well be right. (Assuming you have deployed all "recommended" Office updates from Windows Update of course...)

          1. x 7

            Re: Dunno, have they fixed outlook?

            ". Default limit is 50GB

            Is that true even on 32-bit? Presumably the 4GB limit kicks in then?

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Dunno, have they fixed outlook?

              "Is that true even on 32-bit?"

              Yes.

              "Presumably the 4GB limit kicks in then?"

              No, the 4GB limit is a user process RAM size limit in a 32 bit architecture. If Outlook ever needed 4GB of RAM many users would be rather unhappy! It reads just what it needs from the potentially much larger mailbox file....

              1. x 7

                Re: Dunno, have they fixed outlook?

                but...isn't the max file size on 32-bit 4GB? So if the mail files are held locally as pst files rather than on an Exchange server then anything of 4GB IS a problem

      5. BongoJoe
        Mushroom

        The Last Good Thing in Office was when were were permitted to have more than 64,000 lines in a spreadsheet.

        Other than that, there was nothing added of real worth.

        In the meantime we've lost the ease of replacing menu items, adding VBA commands into the menu with ease into the right menu and generally making Office work for that particular client.

        Now it's simply a mess designed by a committee of 'designers'. And that's not even looking at the price tag!

      6. BigAndos

        Google docs seems perfect for most of our business users. We only use Excel for more advanced data analysis, or macros/add-ins, and then 2007 is fine. Only recent new office feature I'm interested in is Power BI but that seems to be tied in to a cloud subscription! I don't think Word or PPT have had any decent new features for a long time.

    3. Warm Braw

      I'm still using 2000. It's taken years to get used to its "idiosyncrasies" and I can't face going through all that again...

      1. Oldfogey

        2000????

        I've found absolutely no reason to move from Ofice 97 (with the file compatibility add-on)

        1. x 7

          Re: 2000????

          I didn't think the compatibility filters worked with '97 .....just XP & 2003 and maybe 2000

  3. Barry Rueger

    No rush here

    In this household we're still on Office 2013, and just for Word.

    I only use LibreOffice, and find it fine for everything that I need. The SO uses Word because that's she's always needed. She relies on some pretty funky MS Word docs that I'm sure would choke in LibreOffice.

    Now, why I am unlikely to toss more money at Microsoft: Somewhere along the line after my Android phone updated to Lollipop I added Office Mobile - it's entirely likely that I'll occasionally need to edit an MS document, and it was free.

    Several weeks later someone sent me a .doc Word doc, and I thought "Oh good! I can do quick edit on my phone and send it back!"

    You guessed it, Office Mobile won't let you edit a .doc file.

    OK, it's am old format, but it's still used a lot in the Real World.

    I was not impressed.

  4. ops4096

    Video/bandwidth

    So everybody in a collaborative work group is going to have any number of Skype video channels active and chewing up bandwidth ? Quick, somebody tell Malcolm that his pathetic little tin can and string NBN is about to meltdown.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Office 2007 is fine

    Why bother with all ths bloat and feature creep?

    It's like pushing shit backwards.

    1. king of foo

      Re: Office 2007 is fine

      Office 2007 is NOT fine.

      Aside from users still feeling the GUI change pain, it's proven (anecdotally) less stable than 2003 and prone to insane formatting issues (excel) when trying (and failing) to make use of all those extra cells...

      I checked out the XML behind a bloated xlsx and I shit you not, in 2 sheets there were a million+ rows all coded a bit like this "<row 5><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 5>"

      I almost did a LOL, instead favouring a facepalm

      1. h4rm0ny

        Re: Office 2007 is fine

        >>"I checked out the XML behind a bloated xlsx and I shit you not, in 2 sheets there were a million+ rows all coded a bit like this "<row 5><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 5>""

        The thing is, that's uncompressed. Once you zip that up, it's no longer a pile of characters, it's (in simple terms) one instance of that string with an integer saying repeat one million times. So what you're going "LOL" at is very far from what is actually being passed around as an actual .docx file being passed around. Remember that a .docx file is a compressed archive.

        This sort of thing also is part of the reason you can have this as Open Standard. If it was pure binary, as the old proprietary Office formats were, that would be a lot harder.

        1. Yag

          Re: Office 2007 is fine

          The thing is, that's uncompressed. Once you zip that up, it's no longer a pile of characters, it's (in simple terms) one instance of that string with an integer saying repeat one million times.

          First, this is wrong, as I'm pretty sure the numbers after "row" and "col" are variable (one entry for each combination)

          Second, compression is not an excuse for something that could be solved by a less crappy format (Keeping the XML and adding a simple rule like "Saving : Empty cells are not be saved. Loading : If a cell is not defined in the file then it's considered empty" would do the trick)

          1. h4rm0ny

            Re: Office 2007 is fine

            >>"First, this is wrong, as I'm pretty sure the numbers after "row" and "col" are variable (one entry for each combination)"

            True, but modern compression techniques handle that. If you have a sequence like the following:

            <row 1><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 1>

            <row 2><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 2>

            <row 3><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 3>

            ...

            <row 999999><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 999999>

            Then compression will pull out the like parts and just preserve the sequence of the row numbers and how they fit into it. But it will actually go further. If it recognizes a simple sequence (e.g. incrementing by 1 each time), then it will codify that sequence instead.

            The people who write compression algorithms are very, very smart. Both you and I could probably write something that does what I just described. So why expect someone who does it professionally not to? It takes a modern processor almost no time at all to expand a compression technique such as I just described. Compared to image compression, it's child's play.

            The OP was very wrong to suggest that this was "bloated" because they'd completely forgotten that docx is a container format that is compressed as standard.

            >>"Second, compression is not an excuse for something that could be solved by a less crappy format (Keeping the XML and adding a simple rule like "Saving : Empty cells are not be saved. Loading : If a cell is not defined in the file then it's considered empty" would do the trick)"

            Have you actually tried this? I just created an workbook in Excel 2013. I put data in rows 1,2,3 and 5 and saved it. I then unpacked the file using 7zip and had a look.

            Within the <sheetData> element are <row> elements each with an "r" attribute which is clearly the row number. I have enties for 1,2,3 and 5 but no row element for 4. So it seems it actually does do what you suggest. Probably there is something that the OP omitted to mention such as special formatting or references or similar. Or come to think of it, they're talking about Office 2007 which is eight years old and uses the very crap version of .docx that was rushed through ISO for marketing reasons. At any rate, modern versions of .docx omit the elements where possible - I've just checked.

            But that "where possible" is important. If you add custom rules as you suggest, then you can quickly reach the point that it is no longer valid XML and then you create interoperability problems for third parties. And one of the big deals with .docx unlike their old proprietary formats, is that it is a standard that is open and can be used by third parties. Having your formats be valid XML is a MAJOR boost to that. You can't just decide you don't want to represent some of the XML elements because you feel like it. And as pointed out, they have minimal effect on file size due to modern compression techniques.

            1. Yag

              Re: Office 2007 is fine

              My bad, I didn't tried myself, I was assuming op's informations were accurate. (and we all know what "assume" makes of U and especially me :))

              1. h4rm0ny
                Pint

                Re: Office 2007 is fine

                No problem. And for all that I know, it's true for them, but I can't check because my version of Office isn't eight years old. Maybe Office 2007 isn't fine. ;) Anyway, cheers for posting a response. Most people wouldn't.

                1. king of foo

                  Re: Office 2007 is fine

                  I was talking about a seemingly small workbook in excel 2007 xlsx format (yes, ancient, but FTSE 50 corporate environment, so cutting edge...) with approx 50 rows and 10 columns actually in use on one sheet. The most complex formula was a sum at the bottom of said 50th row. File size = 16MB (when compressed)

                  The only thing I could find "wrong" was a teeny tiny vertical scroll bar, indicating phantom content in the gazillion unused rows - but there really was nothing there. They'd already tried clearing the contents of all unused rows and columns.

                  The "fix" was to firstly clear all formatting then delete all unused rows and columns (not just clear). After doing so it was reduced to mere KBs. Both format clearing and deletion were required. I was able to try each in isolation with no change in size or time taken to open.

                  So... Bloat. In excel 2007

                  But thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm sure note recent versions have been corrected, but we don't have that luxury.

  6. Hans 1
    Mushroom

    And 2007/2010 PowerPiNT still do not allow you to move/resize callouts without fucking with where the arrows point...

    Compare 2003 to 2007/2010 in this respect.

    Now imagine, our bi-monthly new powerpoint template freshly minted by Mark Eting, whoever that fellow is, once applied, causes Pint² to move a bunch of "seemly random" pictures to the left, so there you are ... 80 slides of moving images/callouts joy (of course, the new template gives either more or less screen real-estate for the content, so you resize half the images ...) ... of course, you have 40 decks ... ;-)

    Shoot 'em all!

  7. vmistery

    Bit of a shame they are not going to do a one year free upgrade for this too.

  8. Alan Sharkey

    I installed it on a system with office 2013 and it did not remove the old version. They are both still there. I can tell because the new one has lower case menu names.

    Alan

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Skype for Business... with an upper limit of 10,000 participants

    This I must see.

    1. mastodon't

      Re: Skype for Business... with an upper limit of 10,000 participants

      That's the puppy, have you ever used live-meeting with ppt.

      It's based on ppt 2007 engine so no unsupported shapes, (speech bubbles e.t.c) or custom fonts and it loads like a jpg in the 20th century all pixellating text and gradual sharpening which really fucks up an animation.

      Get this to work and management teams the world over will be wetting themselves to use it.

  10. Unicornpiss
    Meh

    I really want to like this...

    There are two peeves I have with Office 365. (and really everything from Office 2007 on up) One is the bazillion options on the ribbon interface, some not where you'd expect them to be. Maybe a 'simplified' UI can be toggled on and off, such as the way a lot of copiers do?

    The other peeve is speed and reliability. While each increasing version of Office has more impressive document recovery features built in for when something goes wrong, it's annoying how often they must be used. When you combine the bloat of Office with Microsoft's cloud services, I'm very afraid for the future. Since my company migrated to SharePoint and inked the deal in blood with MS for cloud services, I can't tell you how many times mail, SharePoint, etc. has been offline, slow, or just a general pain the butt. Maybe Lotus wasn't as shiny or feature-packed (let the flames begin), but when we had our mail servers in house, we never had a failure of the magnitude that we currently experience about once a month. I guess such is the cloud, eh?

    Also, with each Office release, the number of users that have Excel (especially) just 'hang' for no explicable reason increases. Since everything in MS's world has its hooks into each other, this typically means Windows Explorer stops responding and users freak out when they can't click their desktop icons or do anything until Task Manager is invoked to whack the errant app or it eventually begins responding again. The classic error "Something went wrong." is nice too, as are errors to the effect of 'your system is low on resources' when only email, one spreadsheet, and maybe a couple of other apps are open on a machine with 8GB of RAM. Then begins the hunt for what may be causing Office to throw tantrums. Defunct network drives or printers? Nope. (Why must Office apparently verify all of these at startup anyway, even when they're not being used?) Third party software (that works normally), nope. All updates installed... looks like it. Oh wait, check Office too since it eschews Windows Updates and has its own mechanism now.

    There are a lot of gorgeous features and abilities in Office and SharePoint. I just wish the damn things worked more consistently. To quote Douglas Adams: "It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all"

  11. x 7

    I've still got a copy of Wordperfect 6 somewhere, and for simple document creation its still hard to beat

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