Final Office 2013 for ARM may not ship until January Microsoft has revealed some more details about the version of Office 2013 for ARM-powered devices running Windows RT, including the fact that some customers will have to wait until January 2013 to get their hands on the final code. In a post to the Office Next blog on Thursday, Microsoft reps explained that the version of …
Like who cares?
Ok; that was a sneer (troll?). Sorry, but I can't come to conclude that MS is doing its utmost best to make their new products as inaccessible as they can.
Take the new Office.. If I want to start a new Word document I fire up Word. Sounds logical enough; but the new Word doesn't put me in a new (empty) Word document. Nooooo.... It gets me into the "open new & recent" section from which I can select a previous document or select a template on which to base my document on. Of course without any option to skip this crap and move into the empty section I want. Nope; I need to press escape first.
Talk about fail.. I mean honestly; why not give us users a choice. You know; allowing a wide range of end users to use your products the way WE want ?
I can understand how Microsoft finally discovered the start screen, many other vendors (NetBeans being my example) have done so too though YEARS before them. However; those vendors also (very) quickly discovered that adding an option to disable or bypass that start screen was a very smart decision too.
And here we are now: Microsoft reinventing he wheel without paying attention to any prior cause. As usual. While ending up making things much harder on the end user. As usual again it seems.
@ShelLuser - you never seem to bother to actually look into Windows 8 at more than the most cursory level to see if what you list as a big problem is actually easily resolvable or even a problem at all.
Example: When you start Word 2013 you make the default page sound like some difficult thing to escape from. No, you don't have to press Escape even, you can just click on the blank document template that is right there prominently displayed. I actually find the recent document list useful (it's certainly better than previous versions, what with being compartmentalised into locations and having everything clearly titled in a different font). But if you don't want this as your default - you can turn it off. Open up options, it's right there on the default option page that first appears - Show Start Screen on Start-up. Just untick this and you go straight into a blank document every single time. It literally took me thirty seconds to do that.
"Talk about fail.. I mean honestly; why not give us users a choice. You know; allowing a wide range of end users to use your products the way WE want ?"
Why did you not bother to make a trivial check to find that there actually is a choice before pouring your anger out on a forum posting inaccurate comments? Seriously, more than half the time I use Word, I want to open up an existing document and it's one click to get a blank from the default page anyway. This is not cause for the endless angry posts you make here.
"And here we are now: Microsoft reinventing he wheel without paying attention to any prior cause. As usual. While ending up making things much harder on the end user. As usual again it seems."
I'm sorry to say it, but another flying off the handle post from you without any fact checking as usual. You spend four paragraphs talking about lack of choice (translation, an extra click, compensated for by reduced multiple clicks in other use cases) when the option is right there on the first tab in Options.
Did I read that right, you can't check email unless you pay for an app from the app store? True Win7 didn't come with an email client, but you could just download one from anywhere, the implications here are that you can't just download one, you have to buy one from MS. Every tablet, at least every one that I have used, came with a built in or pre-installed mail app, a lot of people are going to have a bit of a shock here, in my experience tablets are, for the most part, used for web browsing and email, its only after owning one for a while do users actually start spreading there wings a bit, should be fun!
@PM
"The stupid thing is that this bundled app will not support POP3 / SMTP and is generally a weak one . But I am sure there will be free alternatives in the market."
I hadn't realised that. That seems incredible! I know that MS want us all to use their services, but that's taking the Michael. That may come as some relief to Blackberry. One of their remaining key selling points is the way they do messaging and email, and they do support POP3/SMTP really very well indeed.
In general if MS want to be business friendly you'd have thought that they would do an Outlook for tablets. Outlook is still pretty big for business people with busy calendars, etc, and a tablet without it definitely risks being consigned to the 'toy' category. And yes I know that MS want people to use Office365, but I doubt that a lot of people will want to depend utterly on a net connection and MS keeping their services up in order to find out which meeting they're due in next.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I couldn't find a way to add a generic IMAP account into the TIFKAM email app which came with WinRT on the Samsung device I've being looking at. I don't have it with me at the moment, but from memory I thought you could only add in accounts from one or two providers like Google.
Office Home & Student 2013 RT that will ship [...] will only be a preview version [...] customers would eventually receive an upgrade to the final version of the suite [...] delivered automatically via Windows Update at no cost.
So, I assume they are expecting you to *purchase* the "preview" (read *BETA*) version and then they will magnanimously "upgrade" it for "free".
Golly, how totally generous of them.
Next thing you know they will be going all open source on us.
is that the 'greatest software company on earth' seems completely unable to convert some 25 year old code to run on a more than capable CPU.
I think they have a large collection of assembler that is core to their system and no longer have the expertise to maintain it - its just been copied and pasted since 3.1.
If Intel has an architecture change that drops 8088 compatibility they are truly screwed - there is no need to maintain a windows base so you can use your old documents if the new windows wont - other than for archive retrieval.
In fairness to the Office team, getting Office to run on WinRT is rather more than a cross compile. You also have to port it to a far less capable OS.
Quite why MS have delivered such a feeble platform is still a mystery. It can't be the hardware, since almost any 2012 smartphone has a hardware spec that would have been mouth-wateringly top-end for a workstation of yesteryear. No, it must just be that crufty old "PC operating systems" were designed to enable the end-user to get the best out of the hardware whereas the modern "platforms" are designed to tie them down to the vendor's walled garden.
The fact that MS can't deliver Office on WinRT just confirms that this platform is BAD (broken as designed).
But they've had well over 10 years to do it and they still haven't. They concentrated on trying to destroy ARM rather than modify the code. I'm not saying its an easy task but when you have the market potential of ARM - which has been bloody obvious to some of us for years - why have they not managed it?
IMHO there is a windows/office core of code which is just too big for anyone to get their heads round now - too many side effects used by one of those annoying geniuses who can write brilliant but most importantly UNMAINTAINABLE code that has been cut and pasted from version to version but when ARM came along netbooks were shot up on the runway to prevent them taking off but now due to phones and android they just cant avoid the technology anymore and are hoping we wont notice office dont work like what it aught to.
UEFI - well shit your really dont want someone seeing how well Libre Office runs on that thing on top of a full blown enterprise level operating system...
Amazing level of logic fail in this comment section.
Office 2013 on x86 isn't done yet, so how in the hell can they ship a completed version on RT? I've been using the preview version on Win8 and it's been quite good. But I'm just one user accessing a small subset of the total package. Who knows, outside of Redmond, how much work remains?
The article author also neglected to mention the email alternative that many people use by default these days: the web. I may be set in my ways acquired in the 80s but a lot of people who are newer to email got started with a web based account and have never seen fit to use a local client to download message on a permanent basis.
I've little doubt there will be a dozen or more email alternatives on RT within a few months, including ports from Android, like Kaiten. WinRT will probably get a full Outlook in the next revision of Office when they get it off the desktop completely.
What we still don't know, though, is exactly what "preview version" means when it comes to Office 2013 RT. It could simply mean that the applications are buggy and crash-prone, or it could mean that the suite will ship with certain features disabled, or even entire Office components missing.
And this differs how from the normal "full" version? Says he who's just had to pick Excel 2010 off the floor where it decided to land in an ugly heap.
Perhaps others have made this observation, but to me it seems that having a tablet which allows me to run proper office apps (not DocsToGo or such like) is the reason that Win8 tablets will be successful.
I travel a lot, and I can *almost* do everything on an iPad (I'm management, so I only really need shiny toys to keep me amused) - but the killer is that, if I need to update a document, or change a presentation, I'm forced into the almost-but-not-quite-compatible world of Apple's Pages and Keynote apps - guaranteed to break the formatting in some subtle way that leaves me cursing in my hotel room late at night.
I will buy a Win8 tablet solely because it supports Office properly.
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