> Microsoft has created a new set of interfaces for Office 2013, based on HTML5 and JavaScript, that will allow services to be surfaced within Office applications... the same APIs will be made available to enterprises and third-party developers to create their own add-ons for Exchange, SharePoint, and the Office client applications.
> Microsoft is not abandoning Visual Basic for Applications; the VBA engine is still fully supported within Office 2013. But it’s clear that Microsoft wants to push office toward the same development frameworks that it is using for the Metro environment in Windows 8.
VBA macros getting replaced by JavaScript+HTML (or probably XAML)? That's potentially a game-changer right there. I have at least half-a-dozen data sources available online that I would love to get into Excel, but VBA/Excel isn't a good language for consuming data sources. Being able to build a web client into Excel would make my life drastically better.
I came here to post the same quote, but my interest is the reverse: think of all the interesting data currently stuck in Word and Excel that could be interfacing with web services!
The ability to sell subscriptions to Word plugins written on the web stack is going to power at least a few successful new businesses.
Their FAQ says it's a free beta of a paid product and to contact them if you're interested in using it commercially, so it probably won't be free for too much longer.
I've worked at two companies where the accounting departments depended on in-house apps written in VBA. This shift may be exciting from some developers' perspectives, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it become a stumbling block for migration forward.
one of the main goals for the Office applications is so that you can create your own visualizations. Don't like any of the charts in powerpoint? create your own.
There is one change that I'm excited about that no one seems to have noticed -- Microsoft finally turned on their typography features by default. At least in my version of Word, kerning and ligatures were enabled in a new document.
I don't care about cloud storage or menus in caps, but I do care about better looking documents.
Update: it seems to be enabled in Powerpoint as well! But not Outlook or Excel.
Yes you had to manually turn kerning and ligatures on in the second tab of the font dialog. And you had to select all the text you wanted to enable it for first. Needless to say, pretty much nobody did it.
Why would you try to create a document in word that "looks good". There are a million problems with using word for typesetting/document design and font rendering is the least of them.
Since Office 97 was released, I haven't noticed any features that I use on a day-to-day basis that have changed or improved much. I'm sure many things have changed in some subtle way; it's just that I really don't see any difference in day-to-day usage. I know that the UNICODE support added in 2003 was a lot of non-trivial work.
I haven't noticed a single feature within Excel that has changed the way that I work.
In word, all of the mundane features every beginner uses also appear to be functionally identical. Other more involved items I use daily such as styles, outlining, headers and footers, footnotes, indexes, templates, merging and so forth also appear to be unchanged.
The biggest change I've noticed was with Powerpoint 2007. They added gobs of features and options that didn't exist before. But, I probably do 5 to 10 presentations a year, so it's not big win for me.
I would love to see greater stability in Word. Large and/or complex documents have been a weekly problem with all versions for Word for as long as I can remember. I haven't noticed much difference in stability since '97 as long as Word is hosted on an NT-based OS.
In the reporting of this new version, the announcement was made that this version is mostly interface changes and some add-on options.
Has anyone noticed a mention of any core functionality changes, re-writes, etc?
I haven't used office 2013 yet, but the idea that Office's day-to-day features haven't improved much since '97 is really strange to me. Office 2007, for instance brought a huge [1] number of features, which I use all the time. Better style settings, much better equation editor, automatic referencing and massive, massive usability improvements (especially Excel 2007) are all things that I use in almost every single document I create.
Those "massive usability improvements" for you were a massive step backwards for me and many other power users. It confirmed tat my switch to OSX was the right choice, as I had to abandon all of the hard-learned short cuts anyway.
I strongly agree with the original post - there has been no real pace of improvement in Office, and that's just sad.
Indeed by 2007 I had more or less gotten rid of Word and gone to LaTeX. I haven't looked back since. It may not be for everybody but it is wonderful as a document generation environment.
I recently switched to LateX Beamer for my presentations, and all I can say is "Wow." There is no easier way to create better looking presentations than that.
(Actually, in all honesty, my LaTeX experience has changed the way I have used Word in those few cases I have had to use it, for example a contract writing technical documentation for Microsoft. I think every Word user should give LaTeX a try for a while. If you go back to using Word or similar, you can but your approach to documents will be much better.)
I'd like it if the next version of Word came with a device that zaps the user every time they try to change the font/style/size in-place. Than clippy should come out asking "it looks like you were about to do something stupid, would you like to learn about styles?"
> It confirmed tat my switch to OSX was the right choice, as I had to abandon all of the hard-learned short cuts anyway.
Changes in Microsoft Office confirmed your choice to switch to a different Operating System? I assume you meant you switched to an office suite that only runs on OSX?
Every time a new Office comes out I have a look to see how far along the long road of functionality Word progressed to come even close to the functionality of LaTeX for Computer Science papers, and laugh.
One of my friends even switched to LaTeX for his medical-based PhD after he saw with how much ease I use it, especially figure and table numbering and captions. If only the rest of the medical world could catch up and allow LaTeX in their journals instead of requiring doc.
Yeah, for heavy-duty writing, there is nothing that competes with LaTeX out there.
I am starting to understand that this is the true for designing presentations too. I can't imagine getting Powerpoint to do the things that Beamer does so easily.
Coming from someone who works in it, the whole biosciences field is woefully out of touch with good technology practices. People demand MS office documents for things that could easily be pdfs or txts all the time ><
The change between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 is pretty significant. There are a few key functions, but mostly the row and column count limits are gone.
Also, it's pretty from 2007 on. It's really easy to create something that doesn't burn your eyes out.
There a few additional functions, like iferror, that save on some of the most common inefficiencies in large spreadsheets.
The Ribbon interface means that you can't find any function ever. As opposed to an obvious search algorithm of looking through the toolbar menu, you have to wander your eye around non-linearly hoping to pick up an icon that looks vaguely related to what you are doing.
I don't know if it is 2007, but in Excel 2010 there are sparkcharts and there is also a way to embed a table with a barchart - which is actually a pretty awesome visualisation.
It's in my opinion a significant forward shift, not counting the ribbon. I still feel dirty using it though.
So many Fortune 500 companies are going to sit on Windows 7 and Office 2010 for years because of Windows 8 and Office 2013. Not because they are bad, but because this all looks like a big shift.
You're more likely to see an intermediate upgrade in the next year or two to Office 2013 without a jump to Windows 8. Having worked at Large Org Inc., several years ago, they were still running Windows XP but upgraded the Office Suite to 2007 without an OS jump. I imagine the same will happen here, especially as people with pull start asking why they don't have the latest and greatest powerpoint toys.
If the company I work at is any indication, expect IE 8 to be around for a long time.
They just last year updated ie6 to 7 on our xp systems. And just recently are trialing windows 7 for certain groups. Big corporations move glacially slow at updates.
Are there any good posts out there from the perspective of an IT team sticking with IE6/7 and XP? Would love to see this story from the other side of the fence.
Not a post exactly but I had my first ping of sympathy yesterday. We have an application that relies on flash for communication/video, and it broke several times over the last few weeks on Chrome & Firefox as they made adjustments & pushed them automatically. Sat down w/ my CTO and discussed the option of locking down automatic updates. Not the same thing exactly, but I imagine many IT departments wanted to update, saw their applications break on the new platform, and resist the change. It could cost more money and there is no guarantee of improvement by switching, so they keep it the same.
Mostly third party webapps like the intranet, lunch menu or internal change request forms.
And these needn't be developed in house. Our pretty expensive IT ticket management system doesn't run well on IE9, so we run IE8 internally by default. (We're all able to install our own browsers, so most people are on chrome or firefox)
It will never happen... and maybe I should drop PJ an email... I would love to be able to buy a copy of Office for Linux.
There, I've said it. I would happily pay £500 or whatever it is to be able to run Office without Windows, and without having to use virtual machines.
Because it's not an option, I use Google Docs/Drive. But let's be clear... I really would prefer Excel (pivot table magic) and Powerpoint (smart charts) over the Google and Open Office alternatives.
So they are moving this in a SaaS direction?
Won't this vastly increase the TCO in the long term?
There are only so many monthly subscriptions that my credit card can withstand!
Is it only me or does the article look like the author took the already written material from MSFT and just did search and replace from "we" to "Microsoft"? It smell lot more like a "marketing department prepared" material than the plain article.
Given that the author of the article simultaneously published this overview and 3 in-depth hands-on reviews of the customer previews of Word, Outlook, and Excel, I don't think that he regurgitated any prepared marketing statements.
PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote are more important to my job (I teach) than any other program. But none of those features will improve my work, and the impending subscription service makes me want to look at other options.
I'd be interested in seeing recommendations for alternatives.
You don't have to subscribe. Office 2013 will be available standalone:
"Is Office 365 required to run Office 2013?
No. You will still be able to purchase any Office 2013 edition with a perpetual license that doesn’t require any ongoing subscription fees. This version can be combined with a free Microsoft Account (aka Windows Live account) to allow online document storage and sharing."
I'm not sure about OneNote, but you can go a long way (even export PowerPoint and Excel files) with both LibreOffice (which is free for you and your students, forever) and with Apple's iWork, which is very expensive, but comes free with a beautiful computer. If you already own a computer beautiful enough, it's quite cheap.
Note: actually, iWork doesn't come with every new Mac, but I felt the joke irresistible.
A mix of google docs and libre office sounds appropriate. They can interopt on a lot of data formats, so you can keep your powerpoints available anywhere via google docs (and do rapid fire editing with the web interface) and download and edit them locally. Google drive streamlines that all even more, and it would take a lot of tables to fill up the free gigabytes Google gives.
Not an option. Moving my teaching materials to other programs would be a mountain of work at this point, but in five years it will be exponentially worse.
PowerPoint is the main issue. I've made a lot of animations for my courses that I'll have to remake from scratch if I switch programs.
If you accept that you will be switching at some point in the future, the sooner you start migrating to an open optionlike LibreOffice, the better. It feels good to know that nobody is going to pull the rug from under your feet.
(that said, I don't love LibreOffice and I don't know of any truly solid presentation solutions that are open, cheap, multiplatform and reasonably future-proof. I'm a coder so I've ended up in HTML5 + Sublime Text for my slides, but tooling for this option is rather limited)
> The consumer experience with Office 2013 will work something like this: when you purchase Office 2013 or any of the individual applications from a retail store, instead of getting a box with a DVD, “you’ll essentially buy a coupon or card” with a license code and a Web address, said Hough.
Um, what about allowing the customer to purchase online? Seems like they could cut out the middleman that way.
No, he meant he wanted Office to use WebKit instead of Trident (IE's engine) or 'Microsoft Word' (the rich-text editing framework that it uses currently).
Making Outlook use Word as the default rendering engine was a pretty huge effort back in Office 2007. There was some underlying work that happened in this time frame that also led to Word Services in Office 2010.
The reason why Office made the switch to using Word as the default (and not even allowing Trident as an option) was to unify the layout results between authoring and reading emails. A common complaint "back in the day" was that users would write emails and they would end up looking different, since IE and Word render things differently.
While Word will read and render HTML, making it a standards-compliant rendering engine was and is not a priority (HTML is a convenient storage format that happens to also be rendered by other programs). So, the decision was made to make Word the default email renderer, and cut Trident from Outlook as an email renderer.
(I work on Word, but I don't and have never directly worked on wordmail, but I've heard this explained in hallways over the past few years when I complain that Word doesn't render animated gifs, I am not an official MS representative, etc. etc. etc.).
It's not a priority compared to WYSIWYG results between composing/reading mails.
The flip side of the coin is fixing HTML rendering in Word such that we can pass Acid tests, but considering the sort of mail people send, what sort of tasks Word is used for, and the fact that a working renderer is a mouse-click away, and you can see that it's just not cost-effective to take on this work.
I guess the third side of that coin is to take out Word and use something else as an email composer, but that would break all sorts of things I can't even begin to think about and is even harder than making Word a great HTML renderer (which I think is completely doable, but again, not ultimately worth it).
I'm also not on the Outlook team, so they likely have a different perspective than I on this topic, but that's how I see things.
I don't understand how composing results can be more important - who sends e-mail to themselves? I guess MS is willing to sacrifice general compatibility for it's business clients who use Outlook internally.
Word being added to the mix in the first place only reinforces that.
I feel bad for the guy sitting at the campus table in that Silverlight "preview" movie splash image. Poor chap can't figure out Linux, GDocs, etc. What school is that?
Waiting quite eagerly for this. I've used Windows and Office since both came out (and DOS before that). I started a new job recently, and this new gig gives me a MacBook Air, an iPhone and a Gmail account. Talk about a culture shock.
Anyway, I use my Windows 8 tablet rather than the MacBook, so it's all good. Except that when I accept a meeting invite from Gmail using the Metro Mail app, it puts the meeting into Outlook. WTF?!?
I get that cloud is cool and all, and that everything talks to everything else. I just really hope that Outlook 2013 cleans the accounts confusion up because I'm missing meetings.
Oh yes, you're right, there is a lot of new functionalities, like pretty colors, shiny buttons, M$ Cloud and… oh, that's all. Just a M$ Cloud, like Google and Amazon ones, except that for using M$ Cloud, you must use M$ products. Great, I can't wait to see that. Btw, with Google Drive, I have same functionalities, but I can use it on every OS with every browser, and it's almost free.
I've hated everything Office for years. Every single piece of software they offer has a much more powerful (and free) open sourced alternative. I don't see any of this crap changing my mind any time soon.
Excel (at least the 07 version I'm using now) has useful features that are not existant in opensource equivalents (pivot charts, etc), and some of the usability is much improved in Excel as opposed to say, OO.org Calc.
MS Access has no open source equivalent. Some small businesses would flounder without it.
If you don't need to share xls/doc files, then yes, more power to you, but if you do, you will run into problems using opensource alternatives.
More than anything else there needs to be an open source alternative to OneNote. Ironically, it's always been the least popular Office app and the most likely to be supplanted by an open source file format. Once tablets finally become mainstream I believe OneNote will be the most important in the Office suite. OneNote has the potential to replace paper; it'll be the default note taking app for students! It frustrates me no end that we don't yet have a digital replacement for a moleskin notebook.
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately-se...
(Google should have staked out a spot in this inchoate note scene when they introduced pen support in ICS, and Samsung launched the Galaxy Note, but stock Android doesn't even have a bundled Notes app much less something to compete with OneNote)
> Microsoft is not abandoning Visual Basic for Applications; the VBA engine is still fully supported within Office 2013. But it’s clear that Microsoft wants to push office toward the same development frameworks that it is using for the Metro environment in Windows 8.
VBA macros getting replaced by JavaScript+HTML (or probably XAML)? That's potentially a game-changer right there. I have at least half-a-dozen data sources available online that I would love to get into Excel, but VBA/Excel isn't a good language for consuming data sources. Being able to build a web client into Excel would make my life drastically better.