
".doc and .exe file extensions are history" -- Yay, no more executable files, oh, wait, I guess you meant .xls :(
Microsoft is cutting support for exporting and importing legacy Office documents in the latest version of its Outlook email client. Outlook 2013 won’t let you import or export data to or from .doc or .xls files for Word 1997 to 2003 and Excel versions 1997 to 2003, the company has revealed in a blog. Also getting canned are …
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You mean, why aren't people complaining MS are dropping support for a proprietary format and pushing people towards an open XML format which supports the same functionality, whereas Google are dropping support for EAS and forcing people onto a half-arsed pseudo-open source stack which isn't fully adopted?
It's not just a proprietary format. It's Microsoft's own proprietary format that idiots like you helped them force on the rest of us. Now that we all have data in these formats, Microsoft (and by extension you) are just giving a big f*ck you to all of us.
THIS is why you avoid proprietary formats to begin with.
Crassus Maximus could decide to stop supporting the tools necessary for you to use your own data.
The legacy support issue is quite separate from the question of whether or not MIcrosoft has really given up on vendor lock for newly created documents.
an open XML format
Hahahaha - do you seriously believe that statement? Is it perchance based on MS conniving, bribing and conning MS OOXML through the ISO process so that it didn't lose gov contracts?
If you want an open standard that deserves the name it's ODF. The reason there is a lot of support of .doc and .xls is because those formats have remained stable since MS tried to ram their new formats down out throat, that's exactly why they are now dumping them. MS is desperate to turn some cash again..
"Open XML format? There was a huge outcry a few years ago when MS managed to 'persuade' ISO to count them as an open standard, despite being no more than an XML wrapper for a secret, proprietary, binary format. Open it is not."
Er, 'fraid you bought into typical ODF fanboi FUD. The modern Office formats are just standard ZIP files containing XML and extremely well documented (the biggest complaint from ODF fanbois was actually that they was too much documentation). There is no secret proprietary binary format at all.
There is no secret proprietary binary format at all.
Maybe you should cross check with reality. Documentation can be made wilfully unusable.
Thing is, you choose to upgrade your Outlook (which I gave up on years ago) and if you do, you don't get support for those things, but you can still use an old version and it will all still work.
but when google stops supporting something, its dead, there's no old version, there's nothing, everything just stops working, there's no options.
It's this small idea called capitalism.
The reason cars don't have 8 tracks or tape players is because it is no longer commercially viable for the manufacturer to include support for those features. The same applies to software. At some point the company has to make a call as to whether or not a given feature is economically viable to include in future versions.
Or would you rather that the new versions included a legacy feature tax in the price to pay some engineers, analysts, qa, localisation, managers etc to maintain that feature in all future releases?
Down vote away, but the OP did ask for an explanation.
"Yay, no more executable files,"
I think Microsoft removed support for exe files back in the 1990s, after some users complaining that it's not a good idea to execute .exe files on opening an e-mail when they have a "sound" mimetype.
Outlook 2013 is still a standalone program*. I presume they're talking about Document Previews, where some attachments can be previewed inside the message pane of Outlook instead of launching them in the appropriate program (Word, Paint, etc.)
* There's also a web based Outlook (Outlook.com) more akin to Hotmail.
"Could someone explain exactly what functionality is being cut?"
You know that function for exporting mails from Outlook directly into Word/Excel format? No? Not surprising as pretty much nobody uses it anyway. Well that can no longer export to the old binary Word/Excel file formats.
You can, of course, open and save old Office documents in Office 2013. Heck you can even export your Outlook mails into Word 2013 format, then open that in Word and save it out in the old binary format to acheive the same end result as the removed functionality if you want.
That is, you could, but you won't, because the chances are you never even knew you could do it in the first place, let alone actually ever wanted to.
"the fact Microsoft has cut access to this app for so many documents and spreadsheets will likely force users to move to Office 2007 if not Office 2013, once it ships."
Or to OpenOffice.
I don't know anybody who uses a recent version of Office on their home PCs anymore, it's either Open Office or a very old MS Office.
I upvoted this twice....
Once because it makes sense, the second because I hate MS and their proprietary bullshit software anyway.
I mean really - Outlook was / is such a piece of shit that that I went to Thunderbird.
Except for archival reasons - that is it's only remaining reason for existence.
Gmail gets all the business now.
Fuck Microsoft though..... anything they do is worthy of criticisim, whether I understand it or not.
Outlook is a piece of shit - hands down. I have hated that for years and I have also refused to use it for years.
It's a really ineptly put together piece of software.
Add in all the ribbon and the other bullshit....
The more the issues of Microsoft adding in more "lack of backward compatibility", are raised, the more my irritation forments.
My enthusiasm for Microsoft office, stopped at 2003......
And really beyond that, I think in a real world surmisation, that all the TRUE developments since then, could be listed in point form an in about 6 lines.
Beyond that....
Couldn't agree more, one of the prime reasons for using Microsoft software was backwards compatibility but this ended after Office2003.
The primary reason for changing file formats is nothing to do with improvement but all about marketing & sending that .docx file with the veiled message of "look what our shiny new software can do that yours cant..." be easily read? what a crock of shit. And whilst the Microsoft evangelists will heap scorn on me & those who choose otherwise, I for one would prefer to hand write & post mail than use the ill conceived junk that Outlook & Office has become.
They've realised that not everyone quakes at the words, "It isn't supported any longer."
Who cares? It stopped needing support years ago! When stuff works ...it works.
I have never seen the need to progress beyond (otherwise known as pay MS for) any version of Office beyond 2000, which is the one I happen to own. I imagine that many, many others feel the same.
Mind you, I don't have anything to do with Outlook, either, so I guess I don't give a toss about this!
Wrote :-
"They've realised that not everyone quakes at the words, "It isn't supported any longer." Who cares? It stopped needing support years ago! When stuff works ...it works. I have never seen the need to progress beyond ... any version of Office beyond 2000"
All very well. until your PC needs replacing (like HDD fails) and your new PC has a new version of Windows (WGA prevents you from installing your old version), which will not run your old version of Office.
OK... so they'll get us somehow in the end. Glad I abandoned the whole thing.
The only problem with abandoning the whole thing is that Libre Office is hugely worse than office 2000.
And then, there's those forgotten Publisher documents that we suddenly need again that only Publisher will open. At least that led me to discovering scribus --- but it meant starting from scratch.
I tried OO 3-4 years ago, but ditched it within a week as it had an interface something akin to Word 2! I now use Office 2010 at home: yes the Ribbon is frustrating but it's improved from 2007, and Outlook seriously rocks! Fast, smooth, powerful, solid, and with Outlook Web Access and a BlackBerry the heart of my digital comms.
"Outlook 2013 won’t work with .doc or .exe files for Word 1997 to 2003 and Excel versions 1997 to 2003, the company has revealed in a blog."
That's a pretty vague statement (even allowing for the presumed typo of .exe), isn't it? Does this mean I won't be able to send these files as attachments? Or does it in fact mean that they can't be used for some rather more onscure import/export functions?
If you're going to recycle a blog post then at least try and add something (like clarity) to it.
I have to say that whenever I want to work with a DOC or XLS file, Outlook isn't my first choice of application. In fact, not being an Outlook user, I wasn't aware that it *had* any special support for them and I'm rather surprised to discover that it does. If you want to manipulate a WORD or EXCEL document then OLE automation is the way to do it, not banging away on raw file formats. Surely the Outlook people are aware of this? They are part of Office and the Office teams pretty much invented all this stuff for exactly this purpose.
No, it won't. The deprecated feature is the ability to import/export in those formats (presumably things like contact lists or entire emails). People with hard drives full of legacy .doc and .xls files will still be able to use them in Outlook 2013 (i.e. email them to people).
"The news will be a blow to users with hard drives and servers full of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets written using these file formats"
If they're on your hard drive or server anyway, wouldn't it be better to view them in Word or Excel (or OpenOffice/LibreOffice if you insist!) instead of trying to preview them on an email program?
Does anyone else miss the days when a piece of software got on and simply did the task it was designed best for rather than trying to pretend to be every other bit of software too?
If they're on your hard drive or server anyway, wouldn't it be better to view them in Word or Excel (or OpenOffice/LibreOffice if you insist!) instead of trying to preview them on an email program?
If this story was about previewing, possibly. It's not. It's about exporting emails to old formats or exporting address books to old formats. Previewing old formats still works without issue (or indeed, change).
Read the blog - http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/12/19/outlook-2013-deprecated-features-and-components.aspx - it's about exporting and importing data from Outlook (the email client only), and not anything else to do with Office.
-----
Import/Export to Legacy Applications
Outlook has traditionally supported importing and exporting data to and from many different file formats. Many of the formats Outlook has supported are outdated and are no longer in mainstream use. Outlook will continue to support comma-separated-value (.csv) files as well as .PST files, but other file formats are no longer supported.
This list includes:
- ACT! Contact manager files
- Word 97-2003 (.doc)
- Excel 97-2003 (.xls)
- Outlook Express archives
Support for legacy documents sounds like a good thing to remove. Just another place for a bug to creep in and exploit the program.
I'm trialing Outlook 2013 currently and having a problem with S/MIME
I have a .pfx key that works fine on my iphone for signing messages, but when I setup Outlook to use it, the program locks up when I try to send a signed message. So far I've not seen anything else on google about this.
Oh great, yet more smime issues with outlook.
Bad enough that it already apparently randomly chooses to use its ms-tnef format which breaks the ability to read the clear-signed messages in non-smime-capable Android clients. Now they want to break things yet again. ANyone would think that they don't like having support for an open encryption standard...
The original blog post only seems to be talking about import/export functions, which I must confess (as a non-user) I didn't even know existed.
<quote>
Outlook has traditionally supported importing and exporting data to and from many different file formats. Many of the formats Outlook has supported are outdated and are no longer in mainstream use. Outlook will continue to support comma-separated-value (.csv) files as well as .PST files, but other file formats are no longer supported.
This list includes:
- ACT! Contact manager files
- Word 97-2003 (.doc)
- Excel 97-2003 (.xls)
- Outlook Express archives
</quote>
This may be important to some users but I suspect not to the majority.
Office 2013 (Yes I know this is about Outlook!) drops support for .doc or .xls or .ppt files (i.e. Office 2003 and older) just like office 2007 dropped support for PPT files created prior to Office 97/2000.
A Royal PITA when you have 1000's of schematices that were converted and saved into PPT from Office 95 and 97 (because, hey, everyone in the company has it installed) that you can't open in PPT 2007 (yet annoyingly you can see the contents in the preview)
Can be opened in Office2000, (and up-saved) but oh yeah, the windows 2000 computers that have Office 2000 aren't allowed on the network anymore....
Burns disk with files from network
opens files on old computer
up-saves to office 2000 format
re-burns disk
virus checks
opens files in office 2007
Why would anyone want to upgrade to yet another of Microsoft's latest productivity software is a mystery to me.
And for those of you who are proponents of open source alternatives... I know what you're getting at, but Microsoft Exchange runs a lot of the email infrastructure in the business world, and thus far, only Outlook (Office's Outlook, not the revamped Hotmail) plays nicely with Exchange.
>"Sorry, Redmond, but Open/Llibre office does the same, IMHO. "
No, they don't. The latest reads fine the .sxw files that the first versions of OpenOffice used. They do ask you to use the newer format when saving , which usually makes sense since the ODT formats are understood by some other programs as well, even some by Microsoft. But you can still save in the old format if you really want.
Ironic if after Office 2012, the most accurate way to import old Microsoft files into it is loading and saving them in LibreOffice... And a good thing too: people might notice they can well ditch MS Office altogether at this point and save the hassle.
Microsoft not supporting a format in a version of its software.
This forces people to use a new format that is ONLY supported in the latest version of the software.
So when you interact with another person and send them a document, it is in the NEW format.
This forces your colleague to upgrade to the new version as well.
And the cycle goes on.
So Microsoft gets everyone to upgrade even if they really don't need it.
Microsoft makes BIG BUX on upgrades.
Isn't this the idea?
Me? I use Libre Office which works just fine on my Linux machine!
Obsolete means no longer in active use. Most of the WP documents I receive are .doc and so are most of the ones on the web. (Nearly all these would be better as pdf but that's another matter.)
As for Outlook ... when the 2010 version imported my Outlook Express emails, without warning it stripped out all the From addresses, so when I later wanted to contact someone who had sent me an email I couldn't because I hadn't separately saved the sender as a contact. You know, like when you file paper letters you cut off the letterhead.
It also has a documented bug that sometimes turns all the bytes of an attached pdf to zero. Happened to me today. The mechanism is known but MS hasn't been interested in correcting it.
It also rolls up all your emails contacts and appointments into one gigantic file which can easily grow huge (mine is over 4 GB, I know some people have over 10 GB), so making simple archive and backup slow and awkward. If you want to keep the header information, that stops its own email archiving system from working and also stops you stripping out attachments, so there is no way to reduce the file size. Great program!
"Why would it need "support" for any kind of files? Surely it just sends them as binary blobs and doesn't need any specific support for them at all?"
"Support" in this context means "Allows you to output mails/contacts into this format". It has nothing to do with sending/receiving attachments in any format.
What a bunch of tight-fisted cry babies.
Microsoft Office is a good suite of software and has been since Office 4.2. I personally think Outlook is worth £100. (£33pa on a 3 yearly release cycle (£16pa if you skip a version))
How much is Adobe Photoshop or AutoDesk AutoCAD? That's right, more than Office 2012 Professional in its entirety, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher and OneNote.
I wouldn't upgrade every version, but skipping a version seems fair to me and I don't feel the slightest bit ripped off buying it.
You do not BUY it, you pay for a license to USE IT.
It's not YOUR software, you can't reverse engineer is, decompile it.. blah, blah, blah etc...
And this is from a company, full of people STUPID enough to FORCE you to have 1/3 of you VALUABLE screen space, permanently taken up with a list of functions, that for the most part, never to rarely ever get used.
With NO way to set it back to a minimalist filing system list.
If I archived every legitimate grievance with Microsoft, and the fucking bullshit - of badly configured, designed and set up, or functioning software they have supplied, and all the fucking angst and time wasting that this has created, then the list would be lengthy much.
*Microsoft is like anal sex with sand in your Vaseline. Linux is like life without Microsoft.
"You do not BUY it, you pay for a license to USE IT."
Contrary to popular belief, the GPL offers exactly the same deal. The "L" stands for "License".
"It's not YOUR software, you can't reverse engineer is, decompile it.. blah, blah, blah etc..."
Like anyone who isn't a (bored) programmer gives a toss. If I wanted to write my own word processor, I'd have bought Visual Studio, not Microsoft Office. Open Source is an irrelevance; open standards are what matter. And if all your data is still in a proprietary file format after lo these many years, you only have yourself to blame. Seriously, stop showing off your ignorance.
This is the IT industry. File formats are expected to become obsolete – especially proprietary file formats – so not planning for that is just stupid. Microsoft have never made any secret of their desire to move away from their old (and rather poorly documented) formats. They've been pushing DOCX and its siblings for damned hear an entire decade.
And I've no idea why you insist on whining about your dislike for Microsoft's GUIs. I happen to quite like Windows 8, but then, I use the keyboard shortcuts, so changes to the pretty pictures makes no never-mind. The same shortcuts work in all the versions I've used.
Perhaps you're just doing it wrong?
@b166er - You are short sighted beyond words.
I am a professional writer. I have several novels, articles and short story collections in DOC format on my PC. I also have at least five hundred DOC / XLS files in my email concerning contracts, corporate papers, royalty payments, etc. I need to refer to those on a continuing basis. To be forced to convert those documents will mean paying someone to go through each in turn to look for errors and issues with the text to avoid tax, legal, and contractual issues. Having gone through this before, no conversion is ever 100% accurate. So your £100 pound guess just jumped to £5000 minimum sunshine. I cannot imagine the bill my solicitors will have with all of their past email using M$ formats.
Read this: http://www.winbeta.org/news/microsoft-drops-importingexporting-support-xls-and-doc-outlook-2013
"As much as we love adding new features to Outlook, for the maintainability of our product we sometimes need to remove those that are out of date and aren't utilized by a large number of users. This allows us to focus on improving the Outlook features that most of you, our customers, rely on,"
This is another maneuver from M$ to force people to pay for an upgrade. It is far easier to stop buying M$ products and go with something with more universal access and long term viability. As I shall never have Win8 on any of my computers, it looks like I can finally take the leap and get of the MS train for good.
"I am a professional writer. I have several novels, articles and short story collections in DOC format on my PC. I also have at least five hundred DOC / XLS files in my email concerning contracts, corporate papers, royalty payments, etc."
And you've been completely unaware of Microsoft's move away from their old document formats because...?
I'm a professional technical author and translator myself. I use Scrivener for writing, not Microsoft Word. I use MS Word for translations, and even then, only because that's the format most of my work arrives in. (I actually use SDL Trados, but that relies on MS Office components for some of its functionality.)
This is the IT industry. Proprietary file formats can, and do, become obsolete and unsupported over time. I've lost count of the many TLAs that have gone to that great Winchester drive in the sky.
The Microsoft DOC and XLS file formats are not open standards and therefore cannot be relied upon to remain supported in perpetuity. Hell, there are even differences in how well they're supported in Microsoft's own software; the formats have never been particularly well documented. (If they had been, Libre/OpenOffice might do a better than half-arsed job of working with them.)
There are archival-quality open ISO Standard formats available (e.g. PDF/A) that you should have been migrating to years ago. You could have the process five years ago, converting a few files a month, and been done with it all ages ago. The only person to blame for leaving all your washing up in the sink for so long is yourself.
"I am a professional writer. I have several novels, articles and short story collections in DOC format"
And this is why it matters that the article mis-represents the MS statement.
The professional IT people understand that the article was false, and that nothing important has happened.
But readers who don't have that kind of knowledge are frightened and cheated.
Nothing you've described will be affected in the least by the changes in Outlook. All of those files embedded in your Outlook PST would be just as usable if you installed Office 2013 as before. You aren't likely to import them to or export to them from Outlook. Outlook doesn't much care with is in a binary attachment beyond security warnings. You don't need to convert anything. The most current versions of Word and Excel will still work with those files just fine BECAUSE IT MATTERS IN THOSE APPS AND NOT IN OUTLOOK. They dropped the functionality from Outlook because it hardly mattered and only added to the work load that could be better applied elsewhere.
And converting those files to an open archival format like PDF is a trivial task that can be automated for far less than the costs you suggest.
And how is this MS forcing someone to pay for an upgrade? "We stopped supporting a thing scarcely anyone does." This is neutral at worst. The small number attached to elderly software aren't likely to make the leap anyway and those who are already on more recent versions simply aren't affected by the change and it doesn't factor into whether the new version is attractive.
Yeah until you are THE one, that has to do it.
3,000 old perfectly fine *.doc files, that need to be copied as is and backed up, AND THEN converted and individually checked, as some of them have graphics, notations, formatting, headers and other "funny things" just just do not get updated or updated correctly when the need arises.
Let me see, that is about 2 or 4 weeks worth of time spent on that - why? Just because the arseholes in Microsoft want to play fucking cash grabbing games, and fucking you around in the process.
It's a major anger issue of mine is that I hate being involved in a contract for the supply of goods and services, that ends up fucking me around and costing me BIG time in the process.
"Ohhh the $200 worth of software, just caused me $20,000 in lost revenue and 4 weeks of my time? - because the arseholes in Microsoft just want to keep right on fucking me around."
This falls into the problems caused by makers of shitty hard drives and other fucking crap.
"Ohhhhh 70% of all your work done in Version C, does not open and format correctly in Version D...."
And all the documents are important, and 20% of them critically so.......
A bit sensationalist? I don't think so.
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I've been testing office 2013 for a few weeks now, both on my work laptop, the workstations in my room and a couple of staff machines...I've had nothing but good comments about it. Outlook seems to be opening/previewing .doc and .xls files normally. Only problem I've had is on one machine where pptx files that have been emailed show as corrupted even if they have been saved locally first. I did side by side it with office 2010 on that machine thought so it could be that.,.
It seems that some of you fellow commentards are not understanding the story. It is only Outlook 2013 that will not support the importing of .doc/.xls files - hardly a major feature! Excel and Word 2013 will still open these documents so worry not about the millions of old Office files stored on servers - they will not need converting!
Seasons greetings!
You can't really be angry from Langley if you bother to actually read something! This is insufferable!Something must be done! It's those… up to their usual tricks, etc.
The article is badly written and does not provide context and examples of what is meant: you cannot import things like contact details from .xls, .doc, etc. That really isn't a big deal: csv, which is a far greater data exchange format than either is still supported for those times when you do need to import a load of addresses, something that I imagine few users have ever done.
I am not a fan on MS Office and personally think the Outlook is a fairly poor mail program - Mr Orlowski gave a thoughtful analysis of the decline in good mail programs a few years ago which is worth searching for - and the awful ribbon interface has been sent to try us but I don't have too many problems with OOXML as it leads to considerably more compact files than what went before. That said I hate XML with a passion and those who defend its openness as somehow magical even more; they should actually read the source of some of these files sometime to realise that without documentation all file formats are abominable. The only saving grace for XML is the number of libraries that facilitate reading and writing it.
If Microsoft found that consumers and more importantly, businesses, were dragging their feet moving on from Windows XP, imagine Microsoft's surprise when they find that consumers and companies won't be willing to shell out for or use Office 2013, particularly MS Outlook. Open Office still supports .doc and .xml based Word and Excel files without the ridiculous expense. Sure, you may not get outlook or any of the rarely used features of that insane ribbon interface, but I don't personally care or need that. I will never use Office 2013, or Outlook 2013 now that I know that. Open Office or even Libre Office, will get the job done for free. Surprise, Microsoft. Balmer screwed up again.
Fuck you.
I'm still not buying a new version of Office. Bastards.
The problem is twofold:
A) Office 2003 formats are standard. That isn't changing any time soon for most of my clients.
B) They absolutely rely on being able to "preview" XLS spreadsheets in their outlook. The lack of this won't prompt a change in workflow - or an upgrade to Microsoft's latest GIVE ME MONEY scheme - it will prompt a move to a new mail client.
Which is more research and work for me. Hence: Fuck you, Microsoft. This was a headache I didn't need and exists only because Microsoft wants to crank the knobs on it's existing hostages to try to squeeze a few more coppers out of them.
Absolute bastards.
@nuked
I have at least two clients that absolutely require the ability to import and export things from outlook on a regular basis. They exchange information with their clients (and suppliers) in this fashion all the time. They have a massive Office 2003 install base - across the whole "cloud" of companies involved - and this would basically create a wall between anyone using Office 2013 and previous versions.
So what are the alternatives? Downgrade new installs to 2010? Possible; but it involves fighting with India for each bloody install. Especially since these tend to be smaller businesses, so not using volume licensing. (Certainly not using SA.)
I can migrate to a new mail client – and probably LibreOffice – which involves finding a new mail client. A lot of research, a pain in the ass, but the likely route out of this.
Alternately, my clients can reward Microsoft for being douches by giving them more money for a product they don't want (Office 2013) to replace a perfectly functional product (Office 2003) that they actually like.
Lovely choices.
I find myself wondering if you understand what importing and exporting means in this context. It doesn't mean if someone using Outlook 2013 receives a message with a Word 2000 document attached, that they will be unable to save the attachment and open it in Word.
At worst, if you want export a set of Outlook 2013 contacts to a Word 2003 file, you add an extra step by exporting it to DOCX first, then save it as DOC in Word. Wow, that'll collapse the company for sure.
If there are really lots of businesses that will be cripplingly affected by this, it is an opportunity for companies like Aspose to offer a solution that adds the functionality into Outlook 2013. But the slightly roundabout method is free.
But why is this a big deal at all? You say you're in IT and yet you seem to be completely unaware that Microsoft makes a free add-on for older versions of Office to equip them to handle DOCX and XLSX files. It's been around since Office 2007 launched. I have many cheapskate customers in field that operate on a shoestring who still install Office 2000 on new workstations and the File Format Converter is just part of the install procedure.
"Office 2003 formats are standard."
No they're not. They are proprietary de-facto standards. There is a difference, and any computer "expert" worthy of that name would be fully aware of their fleeting lifespan.
I find PDFs work well for archiving purposes. PDF is an ISO standard now and unlikely to disappear any time soon. Macs can print to PDFs as a matter of routine; Windows users can get similar functionality from various PDF applications.
As for those claiming that they'd have to spend "weeks" doing this: what the fuck were you doing when you were working on your Business Continuity plans? Or did it never occur to you that an old, obsolete file format might no longer be supported in the future? Again: whither the plangent cries demanding support for WordStar, WordPerfect, or AmiPro files? Where's the whining about lack of support for Visicalc?
It's IT, for crying out loud, obsolescence is guaranteed.
"They absolutely rely on being able to "preview" XLS spreadsheets in their outlook."
And they'll still be able to do so just as before. That has not changed. It's only importing and exporting of data from Outlook that has dropped support for DOC and XLS formats. This is no big deal at all.
RTFA.
Re: "Office 2003 formats are standard."
I did not mean - or say - that they were official standards. I said that they were standard. As in they are "standard for those clients and their clients, and their clients' clients." They are the standard format used by the particular "cloud" of interacting companies here.
Official standards or not official standards are completely irrelevant. What is a good archive standard or not is completely irrelevant. What matters to these businesses is simple: that they be able to continue doing what they are doing exactly as they are doing it without retraining, fighting with clients/suppliers on formats or spending wodges of cash to buy another copy of something that works just fine right now.
"Standard" in this sense is "everyone within the cluster of these interconnected companies uses it." That's the only standard that matters. They give zero fucks about what is or is not an international standard or what other methods they could use for long term archival. Change costs money, training and a lot of political capital wrangling back and forth.
Unless there is a compelling reason – read new "must have" features or something that provides a demonstrable return on investment you won't convince these companies to splash out on upgrades to Microsoft's latest "pay for the same song, but on CD this time!" grab.
Regarding your "it's IT, for crying out loud, obsolescence is guaranteed" crack: stuff it. I'm not in the mood. That isn't something that SMBs accept – I believe the word "cop out" is generally used – and it's not something I accept either. Fuck planned obsolescence and fuck each and every spineless asshole that supports the tactic. Fuck them with a lacquered bus.
You want more money, provide more functionality. Give a return on investment or just fuck absolute miles of off.
Even "just" nerfing the ability to import and export from Outlook using these older formats is enough to cause a lot of troubles at two of these companies – not to mention their suppliers, clients, etc. I don't need, or want the headache. There's no good reason for it. There is no value to me or to my customers behind this move.
So fuck Microsoft. And fuck everyone who supports them in this too.
Did you all just stop reading after the first sentence of the article and decide to leap to a very wrong conclusion in a single bound?
I appreciate that Gavin's piece appears to be classic troll bait – and boy did it ever work; there are a lot of very stupid-looking posters in this thread – but even so, I had to check the URL to make sure I wasn't accidentally reading a Daily Mail letters page by mistake. Jesus, but the level of stupid here is astonishing.
The ONLY feature being "dropped" here is support for EXPORTING or IMPORTING certain parts of the Outlook database to these old legacy file formats.
That's it. That's all that's changed. Nothing else. DOC and XLS files will preview just fine.
Seriously, first RTFA, then form your opinion. This is basic "Reading 101" stuff.
You're right, I was wrong. You can still preview things.
That saves me updating at least three clients.
That said, there are two clients who *do* use import/export heavily, and the inability to do so using Office 2003 formats will be an absolute showstopper. It will trigger a bunch of research into finding an alternative client before the May timeframe: a headache I don't want or need.
It is still Microsoft shitcanning older format support to drive adoption of their newer stuff for no good reason whatsoever. Pay the tithe sir. Use our new interface sir. Buy our training for our new interface sir...
It's crap. It's crap that doesn't need to be causing headaches, but is so that Microsoft can add a few bent coppers to the pile. Nothing more.
"It is still Microsoft shitcanning older format support to drive adoption of their newer stuff for no good reason whatsoever. Pay the tithe sir. Use our new interface sir. Buy our training for our new interface sir..."
[SARCASM]
Of course, nobody else does this at all. Ever. Only Microsoft. Not Apple. Or Samsung. Or HTC. Or Nokia. It's only Microsoft who ever tout new shiny to replace last year's shiny.
[/SARCASM]
I can only assume from your rant that you have never used any Adobe software in anger. They update every bloody year and their upgrade prices are typically higher than the full price for Microsoft's complete Office Professional suite. They've been frequently accused of price gouging and monopolistic practices for some time now – particularly after they swallowed Macromedia whole with a nice Chianti.
I'm sorry, but when people start complaining that a business that makes a product is being so evil by touting new, shinier, versions of said product on a regular basis in order to drum up business, I have to wonder what the hell they teach kids these days. Do fashion houses not do precisely this every damned season? Do TV broadcasters not advertise new episodes of their hit shows on top of shows that are actually being broadcast immediately after every damned ad break, and even at each end of said ad breaks?
I'm not fan of Microsoft myself – I use a Mac – but I'm seriously bored of all these immature "Evil capitalist PIG!" screeds that somehow seem to ignore the fact that every goddamned corporation does exactly the same things.
If you don't like the rules of the game, change the game. But don't blame the players for playing by the rules. They can lobby for changes to said rules, but they don't actually get to make them. That's your job.
As for your "headache": may I suggest you advise upgrading to a more recent version of Microsoft Office? It can still read its old formats, while also supporting the new ones. That would make the transition easier.
Once your clients have been weaned off those old proprietary formats and have archived their old documents properly, you can then start to move then towards the likes of Libre/OpenOffice, but only if your clients don't rely on MS Office's extensibility. (VBA is popular, but Office also has a very powerful API. Specialist software like SDL Trados – the translation world's industry standard – relies heavily on MS Office's components to ingest and export, as well as to display, document previews for MS Word-based projects.)
@Sean Timarco Baggaley
No, as a matter of fact, I don't upgrade Adobe every year. In fact, several of my clients are still working just fine on Photoshop 7. There are several CS1 installs a large base of CS3 and I think we have one or two CS5.5s around.
As regards upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Office: no. The reasons why are spelled out in my posts above and I won't rehash them.
Regarding your bullshit sarcasm stating that I am bitching at Microsoft specifically - while ignoring that other vendors do this too - stuff it. That's a crock of shit and you know it. I take everyone to task who does this. Just because I choose not to rant at Apple (or Google) in a thread about Microsoft doesn't mean I don't have a large helping of "fuck off" for those twunts as well. (Google, stop moving my fucking buttons.)
Let me try to explain this to you very simply: my clients do not spend a single dollar on anything - hardware, software, or services - without having a clear ROI on what they are getting for that dollar. If they are being asked to buy another version of something they already have, it must present a clear advantage to the thing they already have; a compelling reason to spend money on it. I am very sorry if this is a concept that you are unable to grok.
You might have bought in to the idea that we are morally and ethically obligated to refresh our hardware and software every three years or you may believe that "new" is a reason to change what works. If so, I fell sorry for you. I don't buy into pointless consumerism and – shockingly – neither do most of my customers.
If you want my money – or that of my customers – then you provide value for that money. You make our lives even easier than they are with the tools we already have. Not harder. Not more incompatible. Not requiring retraining or changing to a subscription model that drives up the average revenue per user while providing nothing but further lock-in, interface changes and frustration.
If you want my money, work for it, you son of a bitch. You don't deserve my money. You earn it.
LibreOffice and a new mail client will be the way forward on this. There is zero return on investing more into Microsoft Office.
Cheers and Happy Chrismakwanzika.
"That said, there are two clients who *do* use import/export heavily, and the inability to do so using Office 2003 formats will be an absolute showstopper. It will trigger a bunch of research into finding an alternative client before the May timeframe: a headache I don't want or need."
Export to Office 2013 format, open in Word 2013, save as Office 2003 format. Likewise for import.
It's mildly inconvenient, but only a problem if you upgrade to Office 2013 and yet still require the ability to use the old formats for some reason. It's an exremely niche problem at the best of times.
"You might have bought in to the idea that we are morally and ethically obligated to refresh our hardware and software every three years or you may believe that "new" is a reason to change what works."
Oddly enough, no, I haven't bought into that idea myself.
I was merely pointing out that corporations ARE "morally and ethically obligated" to refresh their products. They are legally obliged to provide the best value and returns for their investors and / or shareholders. They don't get to choose not to do so. This typically means giving potential customers a justification or excuse for buying new stuff, rather than sticking with the old stuff.
But given how many people really do seem to be distressingly prone to fads and fashions, I can't say I blame them. But no, I'm not big on consumerism myself*. I even stopped owning a TV way back in 1996, long before it became fashionable to do so.
Consider how often you've heard the phrase, "Now washes better than ever!" I've always wondered what the hell those companies were putting in their boxes of washing powder 30-40 years ago. Mud? Dried sewage? How much "better" can such a powder possibly be after so many years?
This endless exhortation to buy more stuff, newer stuff, shinier stuff, vaguely 'better' stuff, is not new. It's been going on for generations. It's not about to end just because some Mayans' laser printer ran out of paper.
* (With the ever-increasing horde of nephews and nieces to "voluntarily" buy presents for each year, it's not as if I have the option anyway.)
The only problem with your analysis is that Microsoft is the concept of "justification to buy new things" as opposed to "providing something of actual value that people want to buy." They are different. Justification in Microsoft's world has become "abuse of dominant position" once more. (For a while there, they were doing good.)
To top it off "it has always been this way" is a bullshit excuse to hide behind. I don't give a rat's ass that scam artists have been selling extra blue crystals in their kitchen powder for decades. It doesn't change the fact that if you own a company you are required to get the best possible value for your dollar in order to satisfy your investors. Your duty is to your own shareholders. Not Blue Crystal Manufcatory Inc's gaggle of unrepentantly sociopathic goons.
That means demanding return on investment. Which more and more is meaning "fuck you Microsoft." Like Oracle, they no longer provide ROI. They simply balance the cost of exiting the ecosystem against how far they've turned the knob this year.
You'll pardon me if I am not generally enamoured of being a hostage, nor am I like to be so willingly. I'm really quite a pain in the ASCII that way.
"We're slowly obsoleting our old formats; breaking compatibility in order to force people to upgrade" is not value to me. Oh, for some enterprises it is an excuse for those who belive "new" has inherant value to push upgrade...but it does not represent to me a return on investment. Indeed, it is a signal to exit the ecosystem with alacrity as the vendor cannot be trusted. It's one of those distressing signs that the vendor has realised they have no new way to grow revenues except to turn the dial on extant products (without delivering new value) in order to drive up ARPU.
That's bad. For them. For me. Ultimately, for their shareholders. That's the beginning of the end; the death of innovation and the start of the decades-long death spiral that has claimed so many in our industry.
15% more, good sir? Just another 15%? Good sir? 15%?
find this story a bit strange as we had microsoft in at my work on wed giving us a windows 8 demo and office 2013. The guys there showed us excel working with csv and stated clearly that the file types wont be changing and everying this fully backwords compatable and showed it open up old word 97 documents.
Seems pretty strange that they show us what is supposed to be the final product but now this story comeso ut 2 days later saying diffrently. Not saying the information is wrong. Just find it strange i got showing it working fully the otehr day. Have micrsoft decided to remove these features at the last minute or what.
Word 2013 will open Word 97 files. That is a straightforward obvious need for Office 2013 to have value to longtime users. Importing and exporting to/from Outlook is a more esoteric operation used by a far smaller set of users and the need to do the operation to/from the older formats is smaller and shrinking subset of that.
If, when looking at an article like this one, you cannot see how it affects you, it very probably doesn't.
The company I work for is only just getting around to migrating its users from office 2003 to 2010. We have many files that just don't open properly in 2010.
What about all those documents that some companies have to legally retain for 5 or 10 years? The 10 year retention will have them hanging about till 2017 at a minimum.
And if you have to upgrade/replace some customers old kit (I'm dealing with stuff from '80s and '90s at the moment) you have no chance to read the old documentation to find out what the old system was doing.
There is no shortage of solutions.
Is the File Format Converter installed on the old systems? You might have better result outputting to DOCX on the old machines than through the newer Office. It depends on what was done that isn't being interpreted the same on the newer version.
Files requiring long term retention are typically not subject to editing. Just the opposite, they need to remain just as they are. So batch outputting them as print jobs to PDF is a good way to store them for the long haul. You'll probably be able to easily find a PDF reader 50 years from now.
Dealing with legacy systems is a good application for virtualisation. If the old software is on a fairly generic old PC, convert the contents of the hard drive to a VHD and make the system accessible within a much newer system. The same VM that works for ancient games will do just as well for an ancient accounting system.
How many of the text documents that get sent around between workers, offices, departments, companies actually need to be in some proprietory word processing format anyway?
Most of the Word .docs I get sent by managers and admins at my work could just as easily have been sent as .rtf or in some cases even .txt format, for all the complicated formatting they require: letters, memos, minutes of meetings, etc. In fact the vast majority don't require me to be able to edit the text in any way, so could [and should] be sent as PDFs.
The trouble is that most office clerical types are collossally ignorant about anything to do with hardware, software, operating systems etc. They think every computer in the world runs the exact same version of Windows + Office as the one in front of them and that those two [along with Internet Exploder] constitute the entire world of computing. So they fire up Word and create a bloated .doc or .docx file, to send you a four line memo, because to them Word = document. In the past I've even had clients send me Word .docs when supplying images for websites I was building for them. Rather than just zip and attach the images themselves to an email, they drag them into a Word .doc and email that, because they think that is THE format for a document created on a computer.
This is the widespread level of ignorance that abounds and part of the reason Microsoft can keep shafting people for year after year, in spite of the piss-poor quality of most of their output and the existence of better, freer, more open, more suitable alternatives. Hopefully the success of iOS and Android are beginning to chip away at this ignorance and let people see that there are other softwares out there, but there's a lot of it about and it's very ingrained.