Office 15 steals OVERLARGE font, design vision from Windows PHO Large corporations which find themselves with an unexpectedly popular feature tend to go overboard with it. So it was with Java, which in the mid-1990s rapidly evolved from a programming language into an environment, then a platform, and then an embedded OS – so we got "Java for lightbulbs" - and finally a corporate philosophy …
Not really interested, thanks - Open Office works fine for me, the price is right, as are the licensing terms and installation procedure.
I was rather impressed that Ubuntu installed it by default on a brand new installation of the OS, that it reads office docs with few issues and that I don't need to tap in a license key when installing it.
I just hope that OO doesn't implement a ribbon.
ttfn
I am desperately trying to wean people off outlook - the only real thorn in my move to openoffice. I have installed openoffice on all of our PCs and encourage people to use it. I have also scripted a start menu change to hide office a little more. OWA works quite well and is quick enough "internally" although multiple calendars are still an issue. Still, i'd rather licence a couple of "outlook" copies for teh people who need it.
The great thing about a Mac is there's a single menu which is always visible. The Ribbon can only be an alternative and not take over the design; so it makes sense to be able to remove it.
Never understood why cluttering up vertical space is considered 'a good thing' in an age where widescreen is the most common screen format. The most appropriate format is to have a set of floating menus on the side of the page, a-la the 'traditional' Mac designs.
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how many features can a word processor have?
For starters:
When it autosaves, it doesn't completely hang. (Or if it does, it autosaves during the hour the screensaver is active, instead of 10milliseconds after I get back to my PC to finish what I was doing before the interruption.)
It repaginates BEFORE the print job, so it says "page 1 of 234" on page 1 and "page 234 of 234" on the last one, instead of varying "Numpages" throughout the document while it's printing it in a non-humerous fashion.
If I set the document language to something, it keeps it set to that, instead of randomly changing the language of individual words when a copy and past a paragraph from one place to another.
I could go on....
How many features can an email program have?
When there is one window open where I have to type something (e.g. someone's email address), I can open another window (e.g. an email) to copy/paste the information I need for the other window.
At least in the Exchange / Schedule days you could copy something from Exchange to Schedule, now since it's one program it seems that once you open a dialogue box, you have to close it before you can do ANYTHING else in the program! Get with it MS; it's not DOS anymore!
When I select "Send from account X" it actually sends the email from account X. It doesn't send it from a different one without telling me, and then even lie when I look in sent items telling me that it did send it from X, when it really sent it from Y.
>But the Windows Phone isn't popular because of the typography, or even the tiles: it's popular because (like the iPhone) it makes a subset of very common tasks available and easy to access.
I was under the impression that WInPho is hugely unpopular, to the extend that WinMob 6.5 units are still outselling WinPho7
Agreed, I really like the ribbon interface now (after these four years) and am on the second version of it in Office 2010.
I hope they keep it, the old one feels clunky now and it's harder to find functions -- with the ribbon most functions are all out and available, all the time.
The worst interface is the Mac Office 2011 which is a mixture of the old menus, the ribbon, some new tab stuff, and menus at the top of the screen -- it's a veritable dog's dinner.
"Only testing will tell if it's as well received as the Phone UI revamp. But the Windows Phone isn't popular because of the typography, or even the tiles: it's popular because (like the iPhone) it makes a subset of very common tasks available and easy to access."
->
"Only testing will tell if it's as well received as the Phone UI revamp. But the Windows Phone isn't popular."
Fixed
That Moorea thing looks rather odd.
Microsoft had an unexpected and rare (of late) design success with WP7. The next thing you know, they suddenly think that design needs to be translated into every single Microsoft product.
Remind me, why do I need an app that arranges text and pictures into a grid of squares? If I did happen to need that, couldn't I use Excel?
"The next thing you know, they suddenly think that design needs to be translated into every single Microsoft product."
What do you mean like the UI that a certain company put on a certain touch based music player, and then on a phone, and then on a tablet, and then on a TV, and then they decided that it'd look good on a desktop too? :-p
WinPho7 is actually very nice, even though it's selling poorly due to being just as expensive as an iPhone 4, and everyone seems to want the one with the Apple on the back and the thousands of popular Apps rather than the one with the best camera or UI.
But its interface works well filling all that screen space because you use a phone interface in a fairly serial manner - shrunk into a quarter of the screen while I've got other things going on, that amount of whitespace is going to be really annoying.
The market for office software is saturated, Microsoft already has the largest share of it, and no one really wants upgrades. Why? Because it's DONE. It's a problem that has been solved, by Microsoft and others, and there's no need to add much more to it. But if you're Microsoft, you have to keep milking the cash cow, so you add CRAP to it in order to keep customers from thinking that they're paying $500 for mere bugfixes and updates.
Microsoft's main problem with design is that they're usability group is focused on "statistics" rather than actual design. For instance, when they do usability testing they're interested in how long it takes a user to complete a task... this isn't an unreasonable metric, except that it forces their designs to cater to new users. Which means that in a lot of cases, they don't cater to the vast majority of software users, who are neither novices nor power users. The "ribbon" and the "hide unused menu items" are just the most egregious instances of this. The first tries to show everything a new user might want to do in a giant jumble, where the second causes interface changes (to a lot of users this change appears to be semi-random), hiding items.
A second and not unrelated problem is that Microsoft tends to have the "hammer/nail" mentality. When the "Start" button worked out on the desktop, where it really did have some utility, they crammed it into their smartphone UI, where it was a hindrance. Now that their phone UI has garnered some praise, they're moving that model over to the desktop. Whatever tool they're currently enamored of makes every problem a nail.
I'm going out on a limb here, to suggest that "Moorea" is a portmanteau of "Moore's Law" and "diarrhea".
It embodies that other common law regarding PC performance: No matter how much the hardware guys improve performance, Microsoft's development teams will come up even with more crap to use up your system resources.
Both Apple and MS are in the process of converting their OS' GUIs to work with touch screens, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it makes classical WIMP use a pain in the arse and neither of them have thought to include ability to choose GUI based on input device or user preference.
And that's why OpenOffice sucks. They managed to faithfully copy all the retarded annoyances where control is taken away from the object in front of the screen and the silly program imposes its own opinion on where the table/break/formatting should go. Permanently. With no recourse. When you have to hand in the paper in about an hour.
Also:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cohn/thoughts/advice.html
"If you are going to submit a paper to a journal, you should do a professional job of it. If possible, you should write your paper using LaTeX (the TeX users group has information). That's not necessary, but it can't hurt to make it look professional, and it means the journal won't need to retype your paper if it is accepted for publication (which can introduce errors). Almost all research papers in mathematics use LaTeX. "
No, really. If Microsoft keep stuffing the UI up like this, people will eventually lose patience with having to re-learn ways of performing common tasks every other year. In the past, it was the file-format lock-in and the stagnation of other company's products that kept Office on top.
Now? Not so much. Export as PDF, anyone?
Once upon a time - long ago enough that new users will not even recall it - Word did have a reasonably usable interface. The new *cough* "upgrade" mainly seems to undo the damage Microsoft has inflicted on usability, and I'm willing to bet some marketing dweeb is gong to crow about that as *cough* "innovation" - casually omitting it was them that ruined it in the first place.
This is why I use OOo - that's not perfect either but it's got one UI which works and which has remained pretty much stable over the years. Why? Well, they don't need to tart up the program to ram the purchase of a new version down your throat. A similar story exists with the file format - I am fed up with their crowd pressure approach to force people to upgrade through the file format. I have as yet to see *ANY* benefit from the .???x formats.
The nice thing is that I'm no longer alone in this, so maybe Vista and the ribbon has brought some good after all. Keep sinking Microsoft, let me know if you need someone to enlarge the hole in your Titanic..
Maybe that's why they bought Skype: they think that "too big to fail" also works for software companies..
/rant
MS Office article = fanboism of OO.
I run Ubuntu. Its great, stable, nice UI, functional etc etc basically all the good things I need in a computer. LibreOffice is bundled. But i don't like it. as much.
I have a Windows 7 machine in Virtualbox for using Office 2010. Why? Because its better than Open Office and LibreOffice. I'm studying at the minute and find MS Office a nicer tool for completing assignments.
My Gmail account is brilliant as I can access it from all my devices, however my important backups are done using Outlook where I can chuck mail into a PST and burn to disk (Its lazy but it works and Google have shown it is possible to lose data even in the cloud).
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