Office 2013 now available for some home users Office 2013 is still a few weeks away from release, but Microsoft has made it available to certain customers as part of its Home Use Program (HUP), a scheme it uses to sell cheap software to folks whose employers have a Software Assurance deal. Office 2013 has just been added to the HUP, at very reasonable prices: the UK page …
...that the lack of the start menu is a lack in functionality. And as such they're now pushing the start menu functionality onto other programs. Amongst which, you guessed it: Office.
Unfortunately that makes it extremely annoying to work with, for me that is. Its the simple things; whenever I start, say, Word I do so to start a new document. If I needed to start with another document (be this an old file or template) then I would have selected it from the jumplist (in the Win7 start menu).
This Word otoh. always starts with the "Recent files "tab"" (in the backstage view). And you can't get around it, which is /extremely/ annoying.
And don't get me started on the "touch simplified" menu's and such, that's a major annoyance in itself.
I really don't see the need to upgrade from 2010, IMO that still is the better version. Especially if you're on Windows 7.
I've been using the Office 365 preview for the last month. While I'm quite happy with the move to the ribbon the colour schemes and flat-styling is dreadful to use, its very hard on the eyes and difficult to navigate. Office 2010 was perfect, I just don't know why they didn't stay with that design.
Just ordered using the HUP and included Visio and Project, at the price, it is daft not to if offered and you use office at home, which I do. I will wait though and see what SP1 or the next update brings, usually these fix major issues and address UI criticisms if MS are going to address these. Also ordered Win 8 Pro which is on offer until end Jan, again, will hold off until I can confirm all my software will work. This is probably my cheapest upgrade ever, but happy with Office 2010 and Win 7, so will let others dive in and will learn from them before upgrading.
I reckon Ciaus Petronius would recognise the grief of software upgrades, ribbons and menus, even in 66AD, "We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation."
Beer, because that is what Fridays were invented for.
..who gives a shit about new versions of Office? Won't be long now before the shrink wrapped product is largely dead. I use Google Docs for all my stuff now (except highly confidential stuff, obviously. Only a Hmong would put that in the cloud) and I find that all the buttons I ever use (bold, underline, bullet, justify) work just fine and do not require me to remove wads of cash from my trousers for the benefit of Billy G.
Hardly even news. I work for a 50,000+ employee company, and we're not even fully off XP+Office 2003 yet!
"Won't be long now before the shrink wrapped product is largely dead."
Be careful for what you wish.
That's what MSFT wants. The pricing on shrinkwrap vs subscription (Office 365 or whatever it's called these days) is so far weighted to subscription that the latter is the most viable option for all but the most die-hard must have a disc types. A subscription is an income stream that's a bit more predictable. Subscriptions bring along SkyDrive (or Lync) so more lock-in.
a misnomer if ever there was one
Only partly joking here. Word is an application that I spend a large part of my workday in, and no other program has ever caused so much loss of work and productivity as this one. Crashes, hangups, stuff that didn't get saved and corrupted files. Without it, the world would be a better place. Or mine, at least.
I'll take libre office any day of the week.
I was of the view it was £8.95 for professional plus so I might as well give it a try. So far it feels a bit weird, it's a different look, but I'm not sure how much of an improvement on 2010 it is yet.
It was quite odd that it didn't seem to do much of an install, it didn't even replace 2010.
Dunno if this is of use but certainly in group policy for office 2013 there is an option for starting on the usual screen and not the landing screen...might be in options in word etc.
Been trialing it on several machines and the staff seem to like it, even the brilliant white screen which suprised me. I switched to dark grey straight away, hard on the eyes. Other than that gripe i quite like it. Some nice touches especially opening pdfs.
Windows 8 is another issue altogether.....tifkam would cause chaos.
I really don't know what the advantage of MS Office is, in comparison to Libre Office and Calligra Suite.
Can someone enlighten me here?
Whenever I discuss the issue why a company is spending thousands if not millions in licensing money every year on Office products, even die-hard Linux implementers don't want to move away from it. Don't count on support from the Acca trained CFO either, he cannot combine technological processes with financial decisions. All I hear is subjective arguments which can be summarized with "'cos we've always done it this way". When pushed, imagined or rarely occurring examples are mentioned, for example:
. "There is no support for Libre Office or Calligra Suite" - not true
. "Visio files won't work" - not true, they can be imported with Libre Office Drawing
. "The files our customers send to us cannot be opened with Libre Office or Calligra Suite" - not true, I've seen mostly data being sent in pdf format, also for legal reasons, as it is not that easy to change a pdf file. And, it is easy to export files in docx, xlsx, and pdf format with Libre Office or Calligra Suite. Libre Office even has a pdf import extension.
. "There is no project management application" - not true, there is Calligra Plan and not every employee needs PM software.
By comparison, open source or free products like rsync, Squid Proxy and Apache Web Server are happily installed on mission critical, revenue generating systems, but when it comes to desktop software large expenditures are signed off without accepting questions.
Thus, can someone please let me know MS Office' unique advantage?
Mr Think, it's really the docx thing in my experience. I've many custs who have never even enabled the display of file extensions; they don't even know what a .doc is, let alone docx. On top of this you have to then explain how to export using an older format labelled 'Office XP / 2003' or whatever. It just makes their eyes glaze over. All quite deliberate and cynically planned for, of course.
There are two major advantages of MS Office over other suites:
(a) documents *look* the same. Ever since we went WYSIWYG, the fact that a document word wraps at the same position has become FAR more important than what's actually in it, so using MS Office means you won't get whinged at by people who have nothing better to do than making sure your margins are the same.
(b) you don't have to wait for the next incarnation of import/export facilities in Open/LibreOffice. The people who write this stuff have a lot of work still ahead of them, because I don't think MS will ever give up on inserting stupidity into their format just to make their life difficult. Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for their work (I work by default in OpenOffice) but if I have to make the choice between battling for 30 mins to get things in shape or 5 minutes wait for MS Word to load up I'm afraid MS Office pays for itself quickly. It's just not worth the hassle.
Having said that, I use OpenOffice as my main package (somehow LibreOffice is too different for me to get on with) but on OSX there is a VERY annoying bit of behaviour that makes me jump to Apple iWork's Pages or MS Word: dragging in an image. For some bizarre reason, OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) insist on opening that image up in Draw instead of just dumping it on the page like any other word processor does. So you have to use "insert image" to make it behave, *very* annoying, and never adequately explained.
Each package has IMHO its own killer feature:
MS Word gives me a command not found in other packages: "resume cursor position". It's a pretty hidden command which hides under Shift-F5, but if you're editing a big document it's fantastically useful. It's about as useful as the ribbon isn't.
Apple's "Pages" gives me good layout facilities (once you understand them), it's very quick to hack up a layout - it feels more DTP than word processing focused
Open/LibreOffice give me the same UI on Windows, Linux and OSX and as I use all 3 it's an easy choice. To me, the Navigator is worth its code in Gold as it's like Word's Document Map, but far more intelligent. That, and its ability to rescue MS Word documents where Word has screwed up formatting so much in documents it won't even open them. OOo has no problem with it.
However, I really wished that every one of them started with a tutorial on the importance of using styles. Once you get the hang of that, structure and layout are *so* much easier..
My employer rolled out 2010 last year, and opened up the HUP offer at the same time. I took them up on it and got 2 licences for home use.
It's nice having exactly the same user interface on both my work laptop and my home PC.
I can't speak for 2013, and don't think my company are planning an upgrade.
For £8.95, and being bored with all the snow, I thought what the heck and went for it.
First impression is that some aspects of the UI aren't too bad - I can live with the ribbon bar in "show tabs" mode.
What I hate is that they have removed most of the themes that were in Outlook 2010, so you have a choice of White, Very White or Extremely White! They've also removed most of the visual cues that delineate the different elements on the screen.
Also: most of the reviews say that you can have the weather on your Calendar - but I don't have this listed under Options for Calendar. Is it just me, or is it something that was removed for RTM (or UK users)?
Dare To Think: "Thus, can someone please let me know MS Office' unique advantage?"
The chances are quite good that every local high school. college, public library, or community center within easy driving distance from your home is offers courses in MS Office. Recruiting experienced MS Office workers is dead easy pretty much anywhere south of the Artic Circle.
Microsoft sells Office as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. The geek still tends to think in terms of the stand-alone office suite.
The office manager doesn't want themes.
He wants mature tools for deployment and administration.
He wants to be able to place his full time staff, temps and senior volunteers at any available desk and be productive.
I want to know how Microsoft can justify the 60% premium on the cost of this in Australia. If I login to the HUP site and enter the code for my employer then change the country from US to AU to NZ I get different pricing based on the country. Microsoft (and other companies) claim (in a governmental pricing enquiry) that it is all to do with the size of the Australian market and the costs that implies. If that is the case then why is it that the cheapest place to get the software is NZ (the smallest market) where it costs $NZ9.95 (~$AU8)?
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