Office 2013: Microsoft's bid to win the future
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> Microsoft is not abandoning Visual Basic for Applications; the VBA engine is still fully supported within Office 2013. But it’s clear that Microsoft wants to push office toward the same development frameworks that it is using for the Metro environment in Windows 8.
VBA macros getting replaced by JavaScript+HTML (or probably XAML)? That's potentially a game-changer right there. I have at least half-a-dozen data sources available online that I would love to get into Excel, but VBA/Excel isn't a good language for consuming data sources. Being able to build a web client into Excel would make my life drastically better.
The ability to sell subscriptions to Word plugins written on the web stack is going to power at least a few successful new businesses.
I don't care about cloud storage or menus in caps, but I do care about better looking documents.
Update: it seems to be enabled in Powerpoint as well! But not Outlook or Excel.
Everyone uses Word. I have to stare at Word documents all the time. Why can’t I be happy when they look a bit better?
I haven't noticed a single feature within Excel that has changed the way that I work.
In word, all of the mundane features every beginner uses also appear to be functionally identical. Other more involved items I use daily such as styles, outlining, headers and footers, footnotes, indexes, templates, merging and so forth also appear to be unchanged.
The biggest change I've noticed was with Powerpoint 2007. They added gobs of features and options that didn't exist before. But, I probably do 5 to 10 presentations a year, so it's not big win for me.
I would love to see greater stability in Word. Large and/or complex documents have been a weekly problem with all versions for Word for as long as I can remember. I haven't noticed much difference in stability since '97 as long as Word is hosted on an NT-based OS.
In the reporting of this new version, the announcement was made that this version is mostly interface changes and some add-on options.
Has anyone noticed a mention of any core functionality changes, re-writes, etc?
I strongly agree with the original post - there has been no real pace of improvement in Office, and that's just sad.
I recently switched to LateX Beamer for my presentations, and all I can say is "Wow." There is no easier way to create better looking presentations than that.
(Actually, in all honesty, my LaTeX experience has changed the way I have used Word in those few cases I have had to use it, for example a contract writing technical documentation for Microsoft. I think every Word user should give LaTeX a try for a while. If you go back to using Word or similar, you can but your approach to documents will be much better.)
Changes in Microsoft Office confirmed your choice to switch to a different Operating System? I assume you meant you switched to an office suite that only runs on OSX?
One of my friends even switched to LaTeX for his medical-based PhD after he saw with how much ease I use it, especially figure and table numbering and captions. If only the rest of the medical world could catch up and allow LaTeX in their journals instead of requiring doc.
I am starting to understand that this is the true for designing presentations too. I can't imagine getting Powerpoint to do the things that Beamer does so easily.
Also, it's pretty from 2007 on. It's really easy to create something that doesn't burn your eyes out.
There a few additional functions, like iferror, that save on some of the most common inefficiencies in large spreadsheets.
The Ribbon interface means that you can't find any function ever. As opposed to an obvious search algorithm of looking through the toolbar menu, you have to wander your eye around non-linearly hoping to pick up an icon that looks vaguely related to what you are doing.
I don't know if it is 2007, but in Excel 2010 there are sparkcharts and there is also a way to embed a table with a barchart - which is actually a pretty awesome visualisation.
It's in my opinion a significant forward shift, not counting the ribbon. I still feel dirty using it though.
Otherwise as an occasional user I don't see much difference. GUI keeps changing, but that's pretty much it for me.
They just last year updated ie6 to 7 on our xp systems. And just recently are trialing windows 7 for certain groups. Big corporations move glacially slow at updates.
My first twinge of sympathy for them.
And these needn't be developed in house. Our pretty expensive IT ticket management system doesn't run well on IE9, so we run IE8 internally by default. (We're all able to install our own browsers, so most people are on chrome or firefox)
One "None"-looking Office for Sean, please! You gotta sweat the details.
There, I've said it. I would happily pay £500 or whatever it is to be able to run Office without Windows, and without having to use virtual machines.
Because it's not an option, I use Google Docs/Drive. But let's be clear... I really would prefer Excel (pivot table magic) and Powerpoint (smart charts) over the Google and Open Office alternatives.
I'd be interested in seeing recommendations for alternatives.
"Is Office 365 required to run Office 2013?
No. You will still be able to purchase any Office 2013 edition with a perpetual license that doesn’t require any ongoing subscription fees. This version can be combined with a free Microsoft Account (aka Windows Live account) to allow online document storage and sharing."
http://www.zdnet.com/office-2013-editions-at-a-glance-and-fa...
Note: actually, iWork doesn't come with every new Mac, but I felt the joke irresistible.
PowerPoint is the main issue. I've made a lot of animations for my courses that I'll have to remake from scratch if I switch programs.
(that said, I don't love LibreOffice and I don't know of any truly solid presentation solutions that are open, cheap, multiplatform and reasonably future-proof. I'm a coder so I've ended up in HTML5 + Sublime Text for my slides, but tooling for this option is rather limited)
Um, what about allowing the customer to purchase online? Seems like they could cut out the middleman that way.
However it's to Microsoft's benefit to keep their file formats rendering in obscure ways, as it makes it difficult for competitors to edit them.
The reason why Office made the switch to using Word as the default (and not even allowing Trident as an option) was to unify the layout results between authoring and reading emails. A common complaint "back in the day" was that users would write emails and they would end up looking different, since IE and Word render things differently.
While Word will read and render HTML, making it a standards-compliant rendering engine was and is not a priority (HTML is a convenient storage format that happens to also be rendered by other programs). So, the decision was made to make Word the default email renderer, and cut Trident from Outlook as an email renderer.
(I work on Word, but I don't and have never directly worked on wordmail, but I've heard this explained in hallways over the past few years when I complain that Word doesn't render animated gifs, I am not an official MS representative, etc. etc. etc.).
The flip side of the coin is fixing HTML rendering in Word such that we can pass Acid tests, but considering the sort of mail people send, what sort of tasks Word is used for, and the fact that a working renderer is a mouse-click away, and you can see that it's just not cost-effective to take on this work.
I guess the third side of that coin is to take out Word and use something else as an email composer, but that would break all sorts of things I can't even begin to think about and is even harder than making Word a great HTML renderer (which I think is completely doable, but again, not ultimately worth it).
I'm also not on the Outlook team, so they likely have a different perspective than I on this topic, but that's how I see things.
Word being added to the mix in the first place only reinforces that.
Anyway, I use my Windows 8 tablet rather than the MacBook, so it's all good. Except that when I accept a meeting invite from Gmail using the Metro Mail app, it puts the meeting into Outlook. WTF?!?
I get that cloud is cool and all, and that everything talks to everything else. I just really hope that Outlook 2013 cleans the accounts confusion up because I'm missing meetings.
That aside I'm looking forward to trying it out.
MS Access has no open source equivalent. Some small businesses would flounder without it.
If you don't need to share xls/doc files, then yes, more power to you, but if you do, you will run into problems using opensource alternatives.
Open source alternatives use standard formats, so it's really better than xls/doc files, for short and, above all, long term.
(Google should have staked out a spot in this inchoate note scene when they introduced pen support in ICS, and Samsung launched the Galaxy Note, but stock Android doesn't even have a bundled Notes app much less something to compete with OneNote)