Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows: The spirit of Clippy lives on Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Windows, over two and half years after the launch of Office 2013 in January of that year. The Office team has been busy in the intervening period – and not just with Office 2016. March 2014 saw the release of Office for iPad, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in touch- …
FINALLY, THEY'VE GOT RID OF THE OFFICE 2013 SHOUTY CAPS. ONLY TOOK THEM 3 YEARS TO REALISE THEY SOUNDED LIKE MORONS THE WHOLE TIME.
A WHAT?
YES, I DO HAVE A HEARING AID!
MENDED? IT'S WORKING PERFECTLY ALRIGHT
I HAVEN'T GOT IT TURNED ON AT THE MOMENT. THE BATTERY RUNS DOWN
I once worked in a hotel and showed a picky American couple every room type in the three buildings, eventually they asked for a "room at the back of the hotel with a sea view" I just walked away.
(Exmoor started climbing at about 45 degrees behind the hotel, I'd have never managed to dig through to the south coast in time).
Precisely
The next thing you will notice is a lightbulb in the ribbon menu in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, captioned “Tell me what you want to do”. The idea is that rather than hunting through the ribbon, you type something..
So in effect El Reg is solemnly informing us that Microsoft have decided to slap a bit of paint over the dreadful ribbon, when they should have just got rid of it.
(Sticking with Libre Office. It's not great but it's good)
"Another new feature is real-time co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote (although not Excel)"
Followed by:
"Excel is the highlight of the suite: the new chart types and forecasting features look handy, and users will like the data analysis improvements. Real-time co-authoring is an impressive feat of engineering, despite some lag, though it is not as smooth as doing this in the browser, whether with Office 365 web apps or Google Docs"
I'm confiused, possibly not as confused as the article author though.
We use Google Docs at work, and the real time collaboration in Sheets works very nicely. However, I still have to use Excel for any serious number crunching and it would be great if they got that working properly in a future version of Office!
Were it not for Excel I would never use Office anymore, for my limited Word and PPT requirements google docs does the lot.
"Boo!" Isn't what most people end up "screaming in every office I've ever worked in... We can't be trying hard enough to scare them... Someone send them a DIY rasppi clock...
Does it still hide temp files/autosaves in a different hidden folder in each version of outlook? With the filepath hidden away in the registry...
Does it still "assume" (incorrectly) data types in CSV files (scientific notation FTW)?
Does it stop muppets from saving xslm, xls and xlsb files with VBA projects as xlsx yet?
...I'll stop there, but I have many questions...
Outlook here as well. Convoluted as Hell in places, it's the only email calendar thingies that actually does all I need, and I need a lot. The rest only get fired up for received "documents" although I won't hesitate to grab Excel for a "quickie." Serious crunching, I've always reached for heavy weaponry.
So, this reads like the one (and only one going forward) that I buy. Thirteen years later. Well, I'm not going to last another thirteen so good on Microsoft.
My main gripe is once again the interface. Instead of trying to make the 365 online parts look more like the desktop counterpart they're still insisting to reverse this process. We didn't come all this way with high-end graphic cards and powerful GUI extenders only to be greeted with a flat 2D interface.
Granted: this is still a little better than the horrid "lets remove all the color" approach, but yah. Guess my age is showing but for me this flatness still doesn't weigh up against the feature rich (and colorful!) interface of Office 2010. Which to this day still remains my absolute favorite.
The eyes want something too!
Standard Office 2016 not available on the UK MS Store yet. I asked the chat agent about it and they could not 'speculate' about a release date and had not heard anything official from MS. Derp!!
Not sure why I'd want to pay a sub for 365 rather that a one-off for the standalone? I don't do any collaboration/cloud/one drive b******s.
> Not sure why I'd want to pay a sub for 365 rather that a one-off for the standalone? I don't do any collaboration/cloud/one drive b******s.
You probably don't need O365 then. You probably shouldn't buy it.
I use it but that's because it's a nice tax-deductible expense that helpfully allows me to keep phone, tablet, laptop, desktop monster and all the other half's iThings and Mac-stuff up to date with minimal effort (and she uses all of Office quite a lot).
I find I don't need Office all that often but when i need it, I really need it and Open/Libre will not cut it, by a very long way. So I use O365. Horses for courses.
>Open/Libre will not cut it, by a very long way. So I use O365. Horses for courses.
But the choice appears to be between a nice little pony you can own and a shire horse which isn't for sale but you can rent.
I'd like to buy the shire horse and I'd like it not to drop dead after three-to-five years.
Yes, MSOffice has more features but for me, a tax deduction this year does not outweigh additional costs every year.
What happens when I retire or become unemployed or injured and no longer run a business and get tax deductions. Poof! All documents are inaccessible. Office rentals this year... Windows rentals next year? With the slowing pace of innovation, access longevity actually becomes a more significant issue than it was when it was worthwhile upgrading hardware and software every couple of years.
"Yeah with Open/Libre Office, I can open up Word at the same time, type up a book in Word, send it off for proof reading and editing, have some marketing meetings, get the book published, in the shops and then the bargain bin before Writer has even opened."
@jason 7: that's pretty impressive for about 6 seconds (hit Mod4-Space to bring up whisker-menu, type writ.., press enter, wonder why I didn't switch off the splash screen, start typing) on my old core-duo Thinkpad.
At work I have OpenOffice as a network application arriving on a Windows 7 client that is an Atom based little box with 2Gb of ram. Now loading that would give you enough time to file a bit of copy about the length of this post. But I only do that once a day then leave it running.
Coat: its about MS Office...
that's pretty impressive for about 6 seconds (hit Mod4-Space to bring up whisker-menu, type writ.., press enter, wonder why I didn't switch off the splash screen, start typing) on my old core-duo Thinkpad.
Are you ure you din't slap an SSD in there? It takes 23 seconds on average for Writer to start on my desktop machine
" It takes 23 seconds on average for Writer to start on my desktop machine"
Well as I mentioned below on this laptop,OpenSUSE 13.1, LO 4.1.6.2 500GB HD i7 it take (at the most) 2 secs from clicking the icon to Writer open with a cursor. .
In fact it takes 2 secs to load Calc and my finance spreadsheet and that's via WiFi from my fileserver
Standard Office 2016 not available on the UK MS Store yet.
From the microsoft office page https://products.office.com/en-us/whats-new-office it looks like there is no Standard Office 2016. There's Home & Student which is the only non-subscription version.
Also, the "Home & Student Office 2016" is not even available for download for MSDN subscribers, though it seems like in the US we can download it after purchase through the Office site.
(1) It needs to be faster. Why does every version take longer and longer to load? That is unacceptable.
(2) It needs to be robust. I have had to do a full repair on 3 different Office 2013/365 installations. That is unacceptable. Once in unacceptable, three much more so.
(3) We need an option to have the old menu interface or the ribbon. That way you can choose which interface you like. Why does Microsoft hate giving customers choices?
(3a) MENUS SHOULD NEVER EVER BE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!
(4) The flat look needs to die, immediately. After it is dead, it needs to be thrown in a sack, the sack thrown in a safe, and the safe hurled into the sun. (P.S. I am also looking at you, Windows 10.)
(5) At no time should "save to onedrive" be default, ever and without exception. Saving files to your computer should be easier and not confusing like it is in Office 2013.
I've heard from consultants that using Office 2013 uses so much more resources, that you have to reduce the number of clients on a Remote Desktop environment with as much as 25%. I'm wondering what the verdict is on the latest Office version.
(1) It needs to be faster. Why does every version take longer and longer to load? That is unacceptable.
I've not worked with Office 2013 but that certainly seems to be the case in comparison with Office 2010 for Windows and Office 2011 for Mac. However, memory use seems to be better. I have some huge Excel files which cause the older files considerable trouble, whereas Office 2016 seems okay once it's loaded.
If you need a search tool to find stuff on it.
I get really tired on Off2013 hunting about for features that used to be on easy-to-browse menus. Particularly when the dialog I'm after is one of those called up by the semi-invisible corner marks on some ribbon sections.
What is always amusing is the way the often, the resulting dialog seems to be unchanged from Office 97. You notice stuff like that in Windows Classic theme.
rag-tag shareware office suite
I think you'll find that MS Office isn't shareware... HMG has plenty of (paid for) MS Office licences and installed desktops, which it will be wanting to people to use. However, you should note that ODF is now the standard format for the exchange of documents such as tender submissions, so to find that Office 2016's ODF support is "limited" and "sub-optimal" should be of great concern to you.
Clearly MS want people to experience the frustration of creating a document in Office then go to save it (set by default to ODF by any sensible sysAdmin) and get an unhelpful box displayed that tells them that some formatting will be lost unless some other format is used... Personally I would of expected O2016 to "grey out" programme features not supported by the selected document save format.
>Unfortunately, the use of ODF for engaging with HMG is bobbins.
Arrh yes as expected! HMG's left and right hands clearly operate independently. From your comment I presume you email files directly to your customers rather than upload them to whichever one of the many tendering portals HMG et al operate.
If I attach a document to an email it no longer gets sent as an attachment but gets uploaded to OneDrive and a link added to the email.
That's going to make every data controller of every none US company happy. NOT
PS, yes I know that you can override the default behaviour, but this now means that your Sys Admin is going to have to check EVERY update to ensure that this behaviour is not turned on again.
Users will need to understand the implications, for example that “attached files” in old emails may no longer exist, or may have different content.
I read that and alarms started ringing in my head. Compliance/Governance could go right out the window unless some magic solution is out there. There has to be since the FCRP are utterly unforgiving. Then toss in those links with edit permissions set for both our concerns and these are the defaults?
I must be missing something.
"“Tell Me” is the latest effort to make Office easier to use"
It seems completely lost on them that just organising the menus in a simple, logical, way is the way to achieve this. Oh and not adding lots extra functionality that nobody uses and pretending its value-add in order to justify the ludicrous price tag of office.
Their efforts with the ribbon went in exactly the opposite direction, making the interface more obscure by hiding commonly used functions.
For context, I use Excel 2010 on a daily basis and I _HATE_ its ribbon interface. Even now after years of using it, I still have to hunt around to find several quite basic functions!
(You'd think I'd have learned the keyboard shortcuts by now wouldn't you...may this also says something about the rubbish interface)
"For context, I use Excel 2010 on a daily basis and I _HATE_ its ribbon interface. Even now after years of using it, I still have to hunt around to find several quite basic functions!
(You'd think I'd have learned the keyboard shortcuts by now wouldn't you...may this also says something about the rubbish interface)"
I think it says quite a bit about you too.
Before the company I work for upgraded to Office 2013/365, I took a screen shot of the menu bars in Office 2011. When I was 'upgraded', I modified the Quick Access Bar to look like the old menus and then hid the ribbon. I can find 90% of the functions I use quickly, the other 10% I would have had to hunt for in any version.
"For context, I use Excel 2010 on a daily basis and I _HATE_ its ribbon interface. Even now after years of using it, I still have to hunt around to find several quite basic functions!"
Dr. Farnsworth good news for you then! Microsoft have added a "Tell Me" bar so you can stop hunting around to find aforementioned basic functions. Your complaint is the entire point this exists.
>>"you've spent a lot of money for an application that's no better than free alternatives. Thanks, sucker!"
Why do people such as yourself always assume you know better than other people what they want? ESPECIALLY on an IT site where we're all going to be fairly aware of those alternatives. You don't know what other people's needs are - whether they might want collaborative tools or elegant document merging or a better equation editor or whatever. And you certainly don't know where something sits on the value-cost curve for each individual. One person might balk at paying £120 for a word processor. Another might think that if it saves them just two hours over the course of a year then they've already made their money back.
But of course you in your righteous omniscience know what we want, don't you? And how much value we set on it. And decide to pronounce us idiots for it. Good for you - the world needs more self-righteousness.
"such as opening another user’s mailbox. This option is buried in File > Account Settings > Select account > Change > More Settings > Advanced tab"
That's the process for adding another (user's) mailbox folders 'permanently' to your profile. What about quickly opening a user's inbox/calendar/contacts - which in 2007 is File > Open > Other User's Folder - has that changed?
Could it be that the codebase is a horrid mess of antiquated code with hack upon hack and that the only things they can mess with are the front-end and bolt on more bloat?
It's staggering how each office version seems to do things slower than previous versions and that they've got away with this for so long.
Hammer, nail, head.
I am one of those who loves the fresh feeling of a new version with new features to play with, and enjoy more the plaintive cries of the slow-witted around me in the office as they are reminded that the world requires you once again adapt or die, permanence being an illusion and all that.
However, I'm also one of those VBA hacky Excel management charty types and I'm continually disappointed at just how much they are reskinning Excel 97. They need to do a ground-up recoding and:
1. Add a modern, genuinely powerful charting engine with everything from sankey charts to network maps. Hell, even a stacked+grouped bar chart has been missing (and hacked in by various geniuses) since roughly Office 95.
2. Sort out pivottables, they are clumsy and missing some huge features and useability improvements. Nested (blank)s anyone for a column-defined pivottable? Only one label field allowed before hierarchical or report data? Neither are any use really.
3. Update the VBA IDE to something vaguely modern please. How hard can it be to take VS2013 Express for Desktop, rip out all of the extra bits, bung in some default interop references and let us poor sods take advantage of the IDE advancements such as
a. Dark theme (new eyes please)
b. Better intellisense
c. Contextual highlighting/colour
d. I guess VBA.NET is too much to hope for really (better object types/collections)
Rant over, how'd I do?
Mine's the one with the VBA-VB.NET cross reference guide in.
"3. Update the VBA IDE to something vaguely modern please. How hard can it be to take VS2013 Express for Desktop, rip out all of the extra bits, bung in some default interop references and let us poor sods take advantage of the IDE advancements such as..."
Pretty hard. For a start VBA doesn't have a place in the cloud, and that's the way the wind is blowing, though I appreciate there'll still be corporates using it in anger. VS2013 doesn't include a VB6 SDK - it's all .NET. The enhancements you suggest are certainly nice to haves productivity wise but they're not changing the fundamentals of what you actually can or can't do.
Better the devil you know, I suspect.
As a suggestion if you're keen to use the latest gear, if you _can_ break out of macros you can develop for Office in Visual Studio 2005-2015 using the PIA and Office SDK.
I often find myself musing on the fact that corporate IT bods are about as well-grounded in the real world as the Bullingdon set... And that real-world people are too busy doing their own jobs to be bothered even reading about (let alone using) a fraction of the daft tricks these so-called 'upgrades' perform...
On that basis it would seem that this latest "pig's head" has a pretty mouth which some might find appealing.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, life goes on happily re-installing shanner copies of Office 2007. - Even that, in reality, being no particularly useful advance (for most real-world users) on what went a decade before it...
Hmm, Werd version 1 was released in 1990 or thereabouts. MS released office 4.2 around 1994, which was one of the better versions.
So that makes the office suite around 25 years old and it predates the internet FFS.
What's the next version going to be called - Office Davros? Lets have some regeneration added, yeah, have some glowing gold buttons, that should do it.
We have Office 365 at work, and are encouraged to use the cloud drives so our colleagues can get at files. But when you save, you're presented with so many different permutations of "drive": OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Office 365 Drive, Sharepoint, Sharepoint for Business, etc. it takes me ages to find one bloody file. I've gone over to DropBox, at least you only have to look in one location to find the file!
Just downloaded Office 2016 and it's working absolutely fine here. It's a minor incremental change from 2013.
I can only assume that the people who have been complaining about slow start-up haven't actually run 2016 themselves.
I don't sign in with a Live account, and it does add documents as attachments (not as links to OneDrive) in emails. Nor does it try to save to OneDrive. The Dark Grey scheme, while not perfect, is good enough.
How's 2016 for forwards and backwards compatibility?
Will previous versions screw up its formatting? (See, for example, the unpatched differences between Word 2007 and Word 2010. The file format was apparently the same, but switching between them had the nasty habit of removing the spaces from between words.)
Remember when applications laid out their menus and options in a sensible and logical way, so that you didn't have to rely on typing "how the f*ck do I actually do this simple task" into a search bar everytime you wanted to do something more advanced than copy/paste or change the font?
One of the worst for me has to be access, which I'm forced to use at work. I'm convinced most of the functionality has actually been removed as no-one can figure out how to do half the stuff in 2007 that we did in 2003
I don't believe that we need to go back too far to find a reasonable (I'll hold off the use of the word "good" here for various reasons) version of Office.
The problem is, however, that each incremental change might bring in the occasional good-to-have feature but is usually swamped by gimmicks and useless tweaks that are either efforts to make the new product look good (which usually fails), efforts to lock users into a particular ecosystem (O365, Onedrive, etc.) or efforts that might have been good had they actually worked.
For example, ribbons are for tying your hair up, not for pulling your hair out with.
Yet again we see that Microsoft don't really listen to their customers - and before anyone points at the current regime, bear in mind that the rot set in many years ago. If anything, the first charge that needs to be levied against the current lot is that they have done little to resolve the mistakes made by the past lot.
As for the line about needing a search feature to find a function... loved it!!!
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