Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows: The spirit of Clippy lives on Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Windows, over two and half years after the launch of Office 2013 in January of that year. The Office team has been busy in the intervening period – and not just with Office 2016. March 2014 saw the release of Office for iPad, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in touch- …
FINALLY, THEY'VE GOT RID OF THE OFFICE 2013 SHOUTY CAPS. ONLY TOOK THEM 3 YEARS TO REALISE THEY SOUNDED LIKE MORONS THE WHOLE TIME.
A WHAT?
YES, I DO HAVE A HEARING AID!
MENDED? IT'S WORKING PERFECTLY ALRIGHT
I HAVEN'T GOT IT TURNED ON AT THE MOMENT. THE BATTERY RUNS DOWN
I once worked in a hotel and showed a picky American couple every room type in the three buildings, eventually they asked for a "room at the back of the hotel with a sea view" I just walked away.
(Exmoor started climbing at about 45 degrees behind the hotel, I'd have never managed to dig through to the south coast in time).
Precisely
The next thing you will notice is a lightbulb in the ribbon menu in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, captioned “Tell me what you want to do”. The idea is that rather than hunting through the ribbon, you type something..
So in effect El Reg is solemnly informing us that Microsoft have decided to slap a bit of paint over the dreadful ribbon, when they should have just got rid of it.
(Sticking with Libre Office. It's not great but it's good)
"Another new feature is real-time co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote (although not Excel)"
Followed by:
"Excel is the highlight of the suite: the new chart types and forecasting features look handy, and users will like the data analysis improvements. Real-time co-authoring is an impressive feat of engineering, despite some lag, though it is not as smooth as doing this in the browser, whether with Office 365 web apps or Google Docs"
I'm confiused, possibly not as confused as the article author though.
We use Google Docs at work, and the real time collaboration in Sheets works very nicely. However, I still have to use Excel for any serious number crunching and it would be great if they got that working properly in a future version of Office!
Were it not for Excel I would never use Office anymore, for my limited Word and PPT requirements google docs does the lot.
"Boo!" Isn't what most people end up "screaming in every office I've ever worked in... We can't be trying hard enough to scare them... Someone send them a DIY rasppi clock...
Does it still hide temp files/autosaves in a different hidden folder in each version of outlook? With the filepath hidden away in the registry...
Does it still "assume" (incorrectly) data types in CSV files (scientific notation FTW)?
Does it stop muppets from saving xslm, xls and xlsb files with VBA projects as xlsx yet?
...I'll stop there, but I have many questions...
Outlook here as well. Convoluted as Hell in places, it's the only email calendar thingies that actually does all I need, and I need a lot. The rest only get fired up for received "documents" although I won't hesitate to grab Excel for a "quickie." Serious crunching, I've always reached for heavy weaponry.
So, this reads like the one (and only one going forward) that I buy. Thirteen years later. Well, I'm not going to last another thirteen so good on Microsoft.
My main gripe is once again the interface. Instead of trying to make the 365 online parts look more like the desktop counterpart they're still insisting to reverse this process. We didn't come all this way with high-end graphic cards and powerful GUI extenders only to be greeted with a flat 2D interface.
Granted: this is still a little better than the horrid "lets remove all the color" approach, but yah. Guess my age is showing but for me this flatness still doesn't weigh up against the feature rich (and colorful!) interface of Office 2010. Which to this day still remains my absolute favorite.
The eyes want something too!
Standard Office 2016 not available on the UK MS Store yet. I asked the chat agent about it and they could not 'speculate' about a release date and had not heard anything official from MS. Derp!!
Not sure why I'd want to pay a sub for 365 rather that a one-off for the standalone? I don't do any collaboration/cloud/one drive b******s.
> Not sure why I'd want to pay a sub for 365 rather that a one-off for the standalone? I don't do any collaboration/cloud/one drive b******s.
You probably don't need O365 then. You probably shouldn't buy it.
I use it but that's because it's a nice tax-deductible expense that helpfully allows me to keep phone, tablet, laptop, desktop monster and all the other half's iThings and Mac-stuff up to date with minimal effort (and she uses all of Office quite a lot).
I find I don't need Office all that often but when i need it, I really need it and Open/Libre will not cut it, by a very long way. So I use O365. Horses for courses.
>Open/Libre will not cut it, by a very long way. So I use O365. Horses for courses.
But the choice appears to be between a nice little pony you can own and a shire horse which isn't for sale but you can rent.
I'd like to buy the shire horse and I'd like it not to drop dead after three-to-five years.
Yes, MSOffice has more features but for me, a tax deduction this year does not outweigh additional costs every year.
What happens when I retire or become unemployed or injured and no longer run a business and get tax deductions. Poof! All documents are inaccessible. Office rentals this year... Windows rentals next year? With the slowing pace of innovation, access longevity actually becomes a more significant issue than it was when it was worthwhile upgrading hardware and software every couple of years.
"Yeah with Open/Libre Office, I can open up Word at the same time, type up a book in Word, send it off for proof reading and editing, have some marketing meetings, get the book published, in the shops and then the bargain bin before Writer has even opened."
@jason 7: that's pretty impressive for about 6 seconds (hit Mod4-Space to bring up whisker-menu, type writ.., press enter, wonder why I didn't switch off the splash screen, start typing) on my old core-duo Thinkpad.
At work I have OpenOffice as a network application arriving on a Windows 7 client that is an Atom based little box with 2Gb of ram. Now loading that would give you enough time to file a bit of copy about the length of this post. But I only do that once a day then leave it running.
Coat: its about MS Office...
that's pretty impressive for about 6 seconds (hit Mod4-Space to bring up whisker-menu, type writ.., press enter, wonder why I didn't switch off the splash screen, start typing) on my old core-duo Thinkpad.
Are you ure you din't slap an SSD in there? It takes 23 seconds on average for Writer to start on my desktop machine
" It takes 23 seconds on average for Writer to start on my desktop machine"
Well as I mentioned below on this laptop,OpenSUSE 13.1, LO 4.1.6.2 500GB HD i7 it take (at the most) 2 secs from clicking the icon to Writer open with a cursor. .
In fact it takes 2 secs to load Calc and my finance spreadsheet and that's via WiFi from my fileserver
Standard Office 2016 not available on the UK MS Store yet.
From the microsoft office page https://products.office.com/en-us/whats-new-office it looks like there is no Standard Office 2016. There's Home & Student which is the only non-subscription version.
Also, the "Home & Student Office 2016" is not even available for download for MSDN subscribers, though it seems like in the US we can download it after purchase through the Office site.
(1) It needs to be faster. Why does every version take longer and longer to load? That is unacceptable.
(2) It needs to be robust. I have had to do a full repair on 3 different Office 2013/365 installations. That is unacceptable. Once in unacceptable, three much more so.
(3) We need an option to have the old menu interface or the ribbon. That way you can choose which interface you like. Why does Microsoft hate giving customers choices?
(3a) MENUS SHOULD NEVER EVER BE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!
(4) The flat look needs to die, immediately. After it is dead, it needs to be thrown in a sack, the sack thrown in a safe, and the safe hurled into the sun. (P.S. I am also looking at you, Windows 10.)
(5) At no time should "save to onedrive" be default, ever and without exception. Saving files to your computer should be easier and not confusing like it is in Office 2013.
I've heard from consultants that using Office 2013 uses so much more resources, that you have to reduce the number of clients on a Remote Desktop environment with as much as 25%. I'm wondering what the verdict is on the latest Office version.
(1) It needs to be faster. Why does every version take longer and longer to load? That is unacceptable.
I've not worked with Office 2013 but that certainly seems to be the case in comparison with Office 2010 for Windows and Office 2011 for Mac. However, memory use seems to be better. I have some huge Excel files which cause the older files considerable trouble, whereas Office 2016 seems okay once it's loaded.
If you need a search tool to find stuff on it.
I get really tired on Off2013 hunting about for features that used to be on easy-to-browse menus. Particularly when the dialog I'm after is one of those called up by the semi-invisible corner marks on some ribbon sections.
What is always amusing is the way the often, the resulting dialog seems to be unchanged from Office 97. You notice stuff like that in Windows Classic theme.
rag-tag shareware office suite
I think you'll find that MS Office isn't shareware... HMG has plenty of (paid for) MS Office licences and installed desktops, which it will be wanting to people to use. However, you should note that ODF is now the standard format for the exchange of documents such as tender submissions, so to find that Office 2016's ODF support is "limited" and "sub-optimal" should be of great concern to you.
Clearly MS want people to experience the frustration of creating a document in Office then go to save it (set by default to ODF by any sensible sysAdmin) and get an unhelpful box displayed that tells them that some formatting will be lost unless some other format is used... Personally I would of expected O2016 to "grey out" programme features not supported by the selected document save format.
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