Microsoft to launch Office 365 on June 28 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft to launch Office 365 on June 28

zdnet.com

30 pointsGarbage15 comments

(Disclaimer: I work on Office at Microsoft)

If you want a preview of the Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote pieces of Office 365, you can use them for free at http://office.live.com - if you're using OneNote locally, they'll also host your OneNote notebooks so you can access them anywhere (as well as still use them via the desktop app)

I just tried the Excel version. Is there some reason that the line graphs are so ugly? The graphs in Excel 2007/2010 are beautiful, but the 365 graphs are filled with jaggies. See: http://i.imgur.com/KOHSI.png

Not sure, but totally agree - I'll try to file a bug.

Last time I tried this, after reading something microsoft wrote that specifically mentioned tablets, I wasted an hour trying to hack office web apps to run, then finally got a message asking me to install silverlight on an ipad.

So pardon me if this seems rude, but do you have an actual web office suite, or is this more bullshit?

Thanks. MS office has a great ui, and i'm looking forward to try a web version of it if such a thing ever exists.

It doesn't work on an iPad yet. It's our first web Office release, it's still a little rough, but it's definitely something we're putting a lot of engineering work behind to improve.

However, you don't actually need Silverlight to use it (I'm not sure what they're using it for), I've used it on Chrome in Ubuntu and it worked just as well. Any new'ish browser should work.

Google really needs to turn up the heat with Docs. The spreadsheet, etc need to get a lot better if they want to steal market share from Microsoft. Office is hard to beat.

I think the developement on docs is going at a pretty fascinating pace. They just don't necessarily have the focus on things you'd expect them to work out first.

But they have a pretty rock solid collab feature that is currently unmatched in any other office suite. Once you get the habit of working like that on certain projects, it's hard to go back to the old way of collaborating by sharing files.

Spreadsheet is the least polished app of all, but i think this is no coincidence. SpreadSheet is the app in which the functionality gap is the biggest, and also where user expectations are the most tainted by excel's idiosyncrasies. I wouldn't be surprised if the spreadsheet app doesn't get much love for a long time.

Not sure I agree. A small number of sophisticated users really use Excel in something close to its potential, but most people I know use spreadsheets for simple lists and maybe adding up a column of numbers. If Google start chasing Excel on features, they could find themselves on the losing side of a "fire and motion"[1] strategy.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

It might be the perception thing. OWA looks more 'professional' than GMail for example, although the latter probably has more capabilities and obviously isn't tied to Exchange.

I'm guessing this version of Office will be extremely flashy, and Google Docs will look like a 90s edition of WordPerfect by comparison.

Yeah, I use the Spreadsheet app the most. It's quicker to download all the Javascript required to run it than it is to boot Excel off my hard drive, and I just use it for groceries and things.

This makes a lot of sense strategically- as an excel power user it's hard to imagine google docs really ever catching up with excel, but that's not how most people use office. Excel really is a fantastic product, and when used with the excellent analytics plug-in is so awesome for analyzing web analytics & SEO data that it actually makes me glad to be running windows (and I'm not sure I could ever move entirely to Mac/Linux because of how developed these specific niche products are on windows). Although google clearly could build something of this quality for web analytics data mining, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction, and making the GA interface less powerful (for reasons which are understandable albeit not really admirable)

I've been using the beta for a while now, and look forward to it being launched. I must be in the small minority of people who prefer hosted Exchange to Gmail (but oh do I), but I've been pretty impressed so far with the functionality.

My biggest complaint with Google Docs is related to consistent formatting. I am anxious to see how MS handles this. I do agree that for pure collaboration, Google Docs is currently unmatched.

The name sounds like we will have to pay a little bit for it for 365 days a year...

I dislike names with 365, 360, X, Live and so forth. Microsoft violates all of them :-/

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