Sing a song of Office, a pocketful of why: ARM64 version running in a Pi The Register's adventures into the world of Pi-powered Windows 11 continued today with the installation of the ARM64 version of Microsoft's popular Office suite. To recap, following some freely available instructions, we managed to get the Windows 11 Preview working on our Pi-400 last week. There were, however, a few hoops to …
Microsoft briefly showed off a version of Office compiled for ARM running on Windows, also compiled for ARM, a very long time ago: 2008? "Oh goodie" we all thought, "MS are getting into this ARM thing heavily, we'll all have ARM desktops before too long (glad I kept the old Archimedes)". And what came out was - tada - WinRT.
What a let down.
So 13 years later they finally seem to be getting the idea.
Indeed. Not sure why MS took so long to get this act together. The chaotic state of arm platform (non-)standards probably had a lot to do with it, as Windows/Office tends to get deep and dirty with the system architecture. And of course the chronic OS bloat never helped on ARM.
With mobile-oriented OS eating steadily into the workspace market and *nix unshakably entrenched in service/cloud space, Office is the only monopoly product M$ has left. It makes sense to roll it out across as much of the new ecology as can be reached.
Maybe now is the moment when these two things can at last come together. I'm glad for Microsoft, but kinda nervous for my unencumbered and less fashion-laden LibreOfiice.
Actually, the popular KMS_VL_ALL crack for Windows provides x64, x86 and A64 dll hooks to allow a localhost activation. It would be interesting to see if this works well on the Pi.
Sadly enough it has reached a point where I just don't quite care about Windows enough any more to try it myself. How in the world did that happen? I used to love all this stuff.
Possibly because I realize that even if it is cracked, it still feels like an advert infested demo that I really don't want to actually use any more. Nice work Microsoft.
So, I have a stupid windows 11 question:
as you have additional apps/windows open, does the entire start menu and button start shifting to the left, or does it just all sort of mush together in the center and make a giant mess of the GUI? I think I see what they were getting at, but OSX/MacOS does it SO much better...
I'm glad you asked.
The idea of shifting everything to the left and adding at the right when adding tasks makes sense. (Arabic et al versions presumably vice versa).
Knowing M$, they will add alternate additions to the left and to the right, with them jumping to the other side at random if an existing process closes.
As far as I know (* meaning someone will be along and correct me shortly *), The Sun were first following Caledonian Thistle's dramatic 3-1 win against Celtic in 2000, leading to their backpage headline of "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious".
That said, fair play to El Reg for inventiveness for continuously getting appropriate wording to fit.
From where I'm sitting, the only reason it's popular is because the competition has been all but squashed for the every day Joe. There is no viable alternative on their radar and when I talk about Libre Office, I'm met with a blank stare. As far as Google office goes, it still validates, "wugahumphtama" as a correctly spelled word, despite showing this to a Google engineer in 2013 who promptly said, "Oh, it shouldn't be doing that..." and even checking on the document just now, it's still accepting it.
Hmm. Apple shoves iWork onto every Mac and iOS device, for free. Pages is as good as Word, better in some ways, Keynote is better than PowerPoint, and Numbers is… truly awful. WordPerfect Office is still cheap. WordPerfect itself is better than Word, always was, always will be. Quattro in competent, far better than Numbers, not that that’s difficult. I’ve never used the presentation component or the database component; I feel sure that the database is better than Access, again not difficult, but the presentation stuff simply can’t compete with PowerPoint or Keynote. Those are two that I can think of without trying. Hint: I was using WordPerfect in the dayze of DOS…
... release a C/C++ compiler that targets an intermediate, portable format. i.e. app developers produce a universal binary and when you run it the first time, the operating system constructs a native version from it and runs that. In that way the app will run on anything that Windows itself runs on.
Expecting developers to produce native builds for targets other than Intel has never gone well and never will. Maybe Microsoft and a few other companies will bother but the rest won't and they'll be stuck using emulation and the device itself will suck.
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