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excalibur

> The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.

This made me chuckle. Better late than never I suppose.

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A volunteer reverse engineering project being only 3 years behind a gigantic corporation is actually pretty impressive.

Very much so but there are some commercial companies that have been contributing to the project as well.

you're falling for MS's marketing gimmick: "let's put the year in the product name so it will slowly shame and pressure people to give us more money for next years version (whose killer feature is a new splash screen with a year that is closer to now).

Amen to this. If Wine is now compatible with Office 2013, how bad do you think the UX would really be if you tried to run 2016 on it?

Maybe it's just the crotchety old man part of my personality but I don't like anything after Office 2003. The ribbon interface is a deal breaker for me.

Whippersnappers with their newfangled stuff. Office was done with the 1997 version.

Although the late 80s Word and Excel for Mac would do perfectly well for 95% of today's users.

Office 97 is the last version I ever bought or used. I used it for a decade, or so, to open those few files that didn't work quite right in OpenOffice (or AbiWord or KWord or whatever other program I was using back then on Linux). I'm glad I haven't had to open MS Office in about a decade. These days, I keep LibreOffice installed, but use it maybe a couple of times a year; Google Docs does everything I need.

You do realise 'let's put the year in the product name' is not MS' current strategy with Office though right? Office 365 is what is promoted most heavily now, for both business and home users.

But that falls out of the pattern as one can subscribe to it?

It falls out of the pattern as it doesn't sell based on the year in the product name.

I havent used office in a many years now.. but I thought MS Office is now an online offering similar to Google Docs?

There's a "light" version available online, but you must be thinking about Office 365.

Although the core product is still desktop based, they've been shifting to an optional subscription model where you pay $9/month or so for perpetual updates and 1tb of storage.

This model is great for me. It's very rare that I need to view or edit a document in an Office application but it does happen occasionally when the formatting is complex or something. Just install Office in a VM, pay $9 for 1 month of access, and unsub again when I'm done!

Yes and no.

The old installable still exists and many features only exists in that version. The offline version has also become a lot easier to install.

The web app version is lacking in a number of ways and was buggy last I tried.

It has web applications, but they do not replace the desktop ones feature-wise. When you buy Office 365 subscription, you get both web access and desktop apps.

If you use OneDrive, then you basically get just the web apps for documents stored in there (which is also the easiest way to check out).

Office 360. I dont use it myself but I heard its not comparable and does not work without Internet Explorer...

It works OK in Linux, I use either Firefox or Chromium.

I haven't needed to do anything complicated, but I can open a document that someone's used "Track Changes" on, and modify it etc.

365, not 360. Also, the online features aren't the main selling point of Office 365, it's still predominantly a suite of desktop apps.

Microsoft Access is still used pretty heavily. As a developer, you may at some point be handed off an Access database. Additionally, Powerpoint still gets heavy usage, and switching to Google's version you're likely to lose a lot of design fidelity.

Office 2013 is amazingly uptodate support. I still use Office 2010 and it's way more than adequate.

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