marypcbuk | Entries tagged with office

Office 15 will be here next year. And, what's more, it'll be getting the Windows 8 look. There will also possibly be a Windows 8 authoring tool as well as HTML add-ins too.

I take a look at everything we know or can deduce about the Office 15 release date, interface, beta and other details

Use Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 to speed up common applications - with your own cluster or bursting up to the cloud, with Excel, Mathematic and more. Supercomputers are for the office as well now
http://www.softwareknowhow.info/Buyers-Guide/Supercharged/302

The disappointing thing about the OpenOffice.org suite (to give it its correct and non-trademark-infringing name) is how small its ambitions have been. Subsequent releases have done nothing but emulate Microsoft Office features and interfaces; there's been no vision to say 'what could an office suite be that Office doesn't deliver already?' - it's just been a very sincere form of flattery. Love the ribbon or hate it, at least Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 have taken a radical new approach to presenting features (although, please for the love of Murphy, could we have Excel spreadsheets opening in their own windows again? please? pretty please, with sprinkles on?)

Now OpenOffice 3.3 is out (missing its planned release date of 2010 after 10 release candidates and being pipped at the post by the newly-formed LibreOffice); should you be using it? See my review on ZDNet UK for all the details, but if you want to skip to the punchline...

This is a welcome update, but it's definitely a point release: unless you're looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office on financial or philosophical grounds, 3.3 may not be the version to make you switch.

PDF is phenomenally useful, and phenomenally irritating when you need to do more than read it. I wasn't at all surprised when Adobe told me they had user research saying people spent more time looking for features than using them in Acrobat 9; I either have to leave the Tyepwriter toolbar for filling in forms that aren't coded as real forms (so, every PDF I have to fill in) up on screen all the time, or I hide it to get more space to see the document I'm filling in and then spend ages trying to remember what the Typewriter is called and where it's hidden. I spend hours every month making and reviewing comments on large PDFs for IT Expert, wondering why my cursor sometimes is allowed to insert text and sometimes isn't. To be fair, any tool that's powerful is going to be complex. Let's say it's just not a fluid, intuitive experience - and I'm looking forward to Acrobat X next month.

The beta was announced this week: here's what I thought of it.
Acrobat X: a first look
Adobe's Acrobat X offers a cleaner interface and a welcome selection of feature improvements, some of them long overdue

Acrobat X: gallery
Check out Acrobat X's streamlined interface, guided Actions, enhanced Portfolios and other improvements

OpenOffice 3.3 gets a new look and some new features.

There's been a lot of controversy about the Renaissance project to develop a new user interface for OpenOffice.org, with some users thinking it will be too similar to Microsoft's ribbon interface (which has caused plenty of knee-jerk responses and a few just-jerk reactions too). Leaving aside copyright questions and discussions about the popularity or otherwise of ribbon interfaces, the apps in the OOo 3.3 beta have the traditional menus and toolbar interface rather than something radically different. However, icons have been redesigned and the menu and toolbars have a shaded, 3D look that's much more attractive than the old-fashioned look of previous versions.

OpenOffice 3.3 beta in pictures

Initially we were amazed by the number of people writing that the OSC beta crashed their copy of Outlook, because the information that you had to uninstall the first beta was right there on the Downloads page, and briefly referred to on the Download Complete page that you got directed to. They were easy to miss - Simon didn't spot them first time around - because if you just clicked Download instead of reading about what you were about to do, you only got a brief one line that again, your eyes could glaze over. After a bunch of us pointing this out, Microsoft has made the instructions on the second page much harder to miss - though I'm sure some people still will. The problem is that the monkey is already trained.

Read the instructions? The manual? The FAQ? For years the Web has been training us to click that button! click it! click it now! Click for the survey! Click for the download! Click away the security warning! Click! Click!

All those people who said a Windows Update made their system blue screen, when it actually blue screened because they had a rootkit (and for all those people who insist that there are no security improvements in Vista over XP or 7 over Vista, the reason the systems crashed is that the rootkit was patching the kernel and telling it to load a legitimate executable to disguise itself but the code wasn't in the same place when the PC rebooted - that's part of the address randomisation that Microsoft introduced in Vista and extended to basically all the kernel pieces in 7); at some point they probably clicked on something without reading it...

When you're installing software, yes the installer should say one more time what you need to have done - or even check that you've done it. When you're building beta software that's not intended for the general public (a public beta doesn't mean the software is for everyone, it means it's for those who feel comfortable trying something that by definition is not finished), the temptation not to add extra time and work that you could spend fixing a bug or writing another feature must be huge. But these days, I guess we all have to assume that no-one will read the instructions if they can just click and expect the system to do the right thing.

Or maybe nobody will read anything longer than 140 characters now...

And the only people who would have had to uninstall the previous version are those using the beta of Office 2010. And, er, that's 2.5 million people. If they all buy it Office will have the same quarter Windows 7 just did...

It's hard to make my mind up about the Office Web apps. They're a long way behind Google Docs and Zoho and Microsoft's own view of what Web apps should be at this stage; Word Web is just a viewer, OneNote Web isn't there yet and only Excel Web has the promised co-authoring - which I found really confusing when I tried it with another journalist without a back-channel (it's crazy that there's no 'IM your co-author' button because you can just overwrite each other). It's a different kind of frustrating from Google Docs; the last time I used that in anger, boy was I angry - we both wrote a paragraph and it asked us which one we wanted to delete. Wave-style character-by-character collaboration is going to be just as weird; totally ADD, but with labels for who-done-what. OneNote 2010 has the who-did-what labels, which I wish I could turn off (I expect I can, I left them on for screen grabs); I wonder what proportion of 'shared' OneNote notebooks are shared with the author's alter ego on another PC? (For that matter, I wonder when I get a OneNote client for Windows Mobile as good as the one for iPhone?)

But just as I think 'oh, Microsoft has over-reached massively, trying to develop Web apps and SharePoint apps and desktop apps all at the same time' and decide to go back to shouting at the Office team about the Protected View bugs or the way Offline Files with Win 7 and Office 2010 doesn't let me *save* any of the files offline (and I don't blame Win 7 for that), I click on something in PowerPoint Web and discover I can create SmartArt diagrams. Perfect for designing the architecture of our new Web site in a lovely clear diagram. And Excel has a huge set of functions in the Web app. And it's very like Office as an experience and an interface.

I'm going to take a while to make my mind up. I was saying to

ianmcdonald that I couldn't give up Word because of AutoCorrect but it's also the keyboard shortcuts and a dozen other little things. If they're not in the Web version - if they're too hard to do in the browser, which I suspect they will be - will I still want to use Word Web in the random emergencies when I don't have a PC with Word on to hand?

For a more hands-on, less fluffy look at the Office Web apps, my first look is over at TechRadar.

Microsoft unveils Office Web Apps Technical Preview

Invite-only versions of online Word, Excel and PowerPoint launch today - read the rest at TechRadar

this is the [REDACTED] we've been working on today - and the usual embargo-breakers only broke the embargo by half an hour this time. Amusingly, we've beaten the official Office Web Apps blog to the punch ;-)

Hands on at Tech Radar

Microsoft is finally letting people try some of the Office 2010 applications. The Technical Preview code includes the main desktop applications, but not the web apps or the SharePoint server that you need to run those web apps and enable live collaboration; we haven't seen the improved Windows Mobile Office apps, either. Without those key features, how much is actually new in the new Office? We got our hands on the code to find out. Read on for our early Office 2010 review.

The Office 2010 versions
Microsoft has confirmed that it has simplified the lineup of its verious Office 2010 SKUs and that all versions of the software will contain OneNote. So what do you get?

Don't like the ribbon? You will!
You have to get used to the Office 2010 ribbon - and now it’s a lot easier to get used to.

If there is something going wrong in the software you use, you should always file a bug report. The best way to do it is to explain the problem, provide and example and say what *should* have happened. But sometimes it's more fun to be creative. With the syllable-counting help of co-conspirators sbisson and elimloth, I have just filed this bug for Word 2007 (and I had 123 characters left in the submission field):

AutoCorrect bug:
Not the word I expected...
Please fix it!

Wanted 'depending',
Never expected 'didn't';
cloud on the mountain.

bug: when choosing AutoCorrect on a mispelt word, although the substitution is saved correctly the word substituted in the document is a *different* word - so asking for deoending to be AutoCorrected as depending puts the right mapping in the AutoCorrect options but the word I see appear in the document is 'didn't'. This happens randomly and not on all occasions in Word 2007 and Outlook 2007. On Vista and Windows 7 too.

I spotted this while travelling and I think it validates a lot of what people have been saying about how a tablet PC and pen is less psychologically intrusive. I type much faster than I write but I can't keep eye contact while I'm doing it as well so writing on screen let's me look as if I'm paying more attention. Decent note software like OneNote with the audio recording let's you think, secure in the knowledge that you can write down the key bits and your analysis but go back and listen to the whole thing if you need to.
June Entman, a law professor at the University of Memphis, has banned
laptops from her classes for first-year law students, telling them they
must take notes with pen and paper. "The computers interfere with
making eye contact," said Entman. "You've got this picket fence
between you and the students." She said she wants her students to spend
less time taking down everything she says and spend time "thinking and
analyzing" instead.
USA Today, 21 March 2006
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-21-professor-laptop-ban_x.htm

Mary

There are a few too many keynotes for MIX to feel like a grassroots developer camp; this is a conference that hasn't quite settled down to what it's going to be. There's plenty of interest. After Joe Belfiore's demo of Vista Media Centre, ebay in Outlook, MSN Money in Excel and the UMPC, I skipped between two sessions: one on search, marketing, advertising and branding, the next a technical view on writing bots and activities for MSN Messenger (natural language is back). And there are some spontaneous sessions springing up in the few breaks (from the 9am keynote to the party that went on till past 9pm, we were talking and taking notes for a good eight hours yesterday). I'm hoping to catch up with some microformats people at the Birds of a Feather session in the food court this evening.

Now that it turns out the iPod packaging video was an internal training exercise to help avoid all the flashes, splashes and checkboxes that splatter so much Microsoft packaging (although I still like the sleek Mac Office case), I can't quite make up my mind if http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~sallyjo/ms_screen_res.pdf is a real Microsoft advert from New Zealand or a spoof.

sethops,

micheinnz - have you seen it for real?

I found myself first agreeing and then disagreeing strongly (and out loud) with the Cult of Mac blog when I got to the last sentence of this paragraph. "For most touchscreen tasks, direct visual feedback is less important than careful integration and responsive software, as the limited market penetration for digital illustration tablets with built-in LCD screens has shown. For more innovative and cursor-free touch functions, such as virtual keyboards (typing, video-editing and musical), visual feedback is far more important. On a traditional tablet PC, that eats up serious real estate and negates many of the benefits of touch input."

'Traditional tablet PC' can't mean passive digitiser (dumb screen that you can touch with a stylus or a fingernail), because those are limited to industrial tablets and PDAs, and very few of them are PCs rather than embedded OS devices (Win CE and embedded Linux for the most part). The OQO and the Nokia 770 are the main exceptions (Windows XP and a reasonably standard Linux) and they're PDA size. You do need a virtual keyboard on most passive digitisers because of the poor smoothness; even when the OS lets you write anywhere on the screen, the curves of your writing aren't what they should be.

But the modern Tablet PC running the Tablet Edition of Windows XP is a bit of a different beast. The active digitiser samples more often than a graphics tablet (though it's the same technology, just a higher sampling rate), so it's very like writing with an ink pen. The only time you'll hunt and peck on a virtual keyboard is for passwords and URLs where 'usually right' isn't good enough. The rest of the time it's up to the application developer whether you write into an input strip - or anywhere on the page.

OneNote, Journal, Art Rage, Grafigo: applications that are designed to work on a touchscreen let you use the screen without needing to go back to a keyboard (virtual or not). Utilities like Sensiva Symbol Commander and ActiveWords let you trigger actions with gestures or individual letters instead of keyboard shortcuts. ritePen is a great handwriting recogniser for desktop and Tablet PCs that lets you write anywhere, even if the application isn't designed that way. A video editing or musical composition app that understands pen input shouldn't need the keyboard input that's designed to be faster than mousing through menus when your input with a pen is both fast and accurate. The next generation of touchscreens won't have the alignment issues that have made it hard to recogise input close to the very edges of the screen (which is why Word's write anywhere option doesn't cover quite all of the screen).

'careful integration'. Definitely important.
'responsive software'. Absolutely.
'eating up screen real estate'. Not when you design and integrate it well. Touchscreens aren't the problem; it's understanding how to use them to replace the keyboard rather than replicating the mouse.

This is another place where I'm impatient for Vista; it will have a cross-hair cursor to make it obvious you’re using the pen, on-screen ripples that let you know you’ve clicked on the screen and eight gestures called flicks that mean you can copy, paste, undo and delete just by flicking the pen in a particular direction. Vista can also learn what your handwriting looks like to make it easier to recognise what you write. If you want to use your finger to touch the screen to select something and it's a combined active and passive digitiser so you can, there will be a little magnifying ring to show you more clearly where you're clicking.

As to the form factors, the first is very like the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook with touchscreen sitting on my desk at the moment. Folding the screen down to use it without the keyboard is the principle used by any convertible Tablet PC, although I can't see room on the mockup for any hinges ;-) And yes, narrow widescreen is a little off when you rotate it to portrait. This falls in what Ken Delaney at Gartner told me he calls “the 1kg wasteland” because so many products of this size and weight have failed, compared to standard notebooks or smartphones and PDAs. “You don’t have the benefits of the larger devices or the portability of the smaller devices”.

The notebook using a second screen as a configurable keyboard looks huge fun. OLED would do that nicely. It would, as the blog remarks, be pricey. It's price that's held people back from buying devices like Wacom's Cintiq (a touscreen monitor that's a desktop Tablet PC) because everyone one I know who's seen one wants one but not enough to pay that much. And I don't think a screen would be comfy to use for typing - with no key action your fingers get tired very quickly on projection keyboards. We've been using pen and paper for centuries and we're good at it. Making software as good at it shouldn't take that long.

Just when you thought the Office interface overhaul was making sense, with incredible attention paid to simple details, here's a reminder of why we need it. To find commands in an application, they need to be arranged logically and consistently. They need to be in the same place on the menu every day for muscle memory to get you there quickly. They need to always be in the same place on every PC so you can easily give directions to people. That's why personalized menus in Office are so annoying, as I was reminded just now when i installed OneNote 2007 beta 1 on a Tablet PC and saw far less on the menus than I was expecting. Personalized menus might work if they turned on after six months, when the application could really know what features you use, but by then you'd know where to look for things without feeling that the other options were in the way anyway. or they'd work if the PC was psychic. Or if you were the mythical 'standard user'. As it is, they're confusing for novices, irritating for power users and on the way out in 2007 Office. They don't apply for apps with the ribbon interface; the question is will they still be on by default in the other applications like OneNote and Outlook, or will they finally vanish into the oblivion they deserve?

And it's Tools > Customize > Options> Always show full menus to get rid of the irritation.

So Simon is trying out the new Skype thing and I’m checking out Office Live and I comment that the site has only been live for seven minutes and it’s already slow (although as so often this week it turns out to be our DSL going down) and he says ’ah, bleeding edge of technology again"... and then I decide to try this new blogging client. Consider this an experiment.

There are many nice things in Post2Blog - though I’m not sure about the emoticons, I’m both amused and disconcerted by the feature that replaces certain words (like Post2Blog itself) with a snippet of stored text, it counts LJ user tags as a Web service and I’m not sure about seeing the tags in the post window as I compose. But it has a Word toolbar so I can compose in my favourite place (Word!) and I like the spelling checker. On the gripping hand, I can’t yet find any way to do LJ user_pics...

EDIT: the LJ tags seem to need a little work

Could some kind soul explain what popular idiom I'm failing to understand here?
"As exciting as the new version of Visio is, the new version of Project is also a very exciting release. I was trying to – I asked Mike backstage, c'mon, between us chickens, tell me, so to speak, is this a breadbasket or a refrigerator or is it something in between, bigger than a breadbasket, smaller than a refrigerator. Mike says this is a sub zero, this is the biggest set of innovations we've done in Project in a long, long, long time."
Steve Ballmer

Current Mood: croggled

Too many solutions are half the answer and that can be worse than no answer at all, because you think you’ve solved your problem so you don’t do it properly.

I left my keys at home today. Two neighbours have keys; one of them was home but of course the keys he has are the old set that only let me into the hall and not the flat. The other neighbour has up-to-date keys but was out. Usually I'd just go to a coffee shop and work (I don't peg Starbucks as a globalising bad influence for having more branches in London than New York because 1. having Starbucks has improved the quality of coffee available generally and 2. they have sofas, WiFi and in some places desks with powerpoints - they're raising the bar on places to get something done when you're between places). This time I had to stay in for a courier, plus I wanted to use the WiFi to grab the files I'd usually have on my laptop or tablet, but this is my first day with a new ThinkPad. Great signal, but I couldn't get a network address; that’s the frustrating bit, along with the fact that the default setting on the ThinkPad is ‘optimise for performance’ not ‘optimise for battery life’ which I think is the wrong default on any portable, so by the time I started trying to connect I was down to 33% battery.

In other respects the ThinkPad seems to be a lovely notebook and a disappointing tablet, because no thought has gone into using it without the keyboard. For example: how do I turn the WiFi off? Software configuration, three levels down in a tab headed Device 3 (I missed the Beware of the Leopard signs). How do I turn screen brightness down? Flip the screen and use the keyboard function keys: pretty futile when I’m in a hurry because trying to quickly cut back on power consumption. Don’t expect me to have prepared everything in advance: give me the tools to work with keyboard or pen as I prefer.

I’m going to implement a half solution to the file problem; stick the basic files on a 1GB flash memory stick and try to remember to update them from time to time. It’s not the real synchronisation I want but it’s useful. To me the utility of a process or a device is not ‘what can it do?’ but ‘what will it let me do?’. Take the £1.50 apple corer and slicer we bought at Ike yesterday. Usually I’d say it’s plastic tat that duplicates what I can do with a knife because what it does is core and slice an apple. But I saw elimloth’s wife Selene use one last year and I realised what it lets me do is grab an apple and have it sliced up - so I’ll actually eat it rather than leaving it in the fruit bowl - in about 5 seconds. And that means I’ll start eating apples regularly again for the first time since I was 13!

The BlackBerry receives and sends email (except on Oxford Street where I can’t get GPRS for love, money or cursing); what it lets me do is not care if I have an urgent email and a good reason to be out of the house at the same time. Configuring the right soft-key on my Windows Mobile smartphone gives me one key access to my task list; what it lets me do is think of things and write them down really quickly and have them show up in Outlook (this is only wonderfully useful in Outlook 12’s ToDo bar from which I now run my life although I'm looking at add-ons that may do the same thing). Sometimes being useful for one little thing is better than being halfway useful for a whole bunch of stuff.

Current Mood: aggravated

"never mind the dotted quad, it's the thread that binds the Net together." For years I've been saying of online success that people come for content and stay for community. I've just had a long and fascinating conversation* with Marc Smith of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, nominally about the SNARF email triage tool and actually about the value and finite availability of attention, the value of interaction and current steps in detecting, visualising and using human relationships digitally. Ironically, talking about a tool that helps you with triage turned into a conversation that's sent me off in a lot of interesting new directions. I want to go to the Smithsonian folk music archive and find the songs from the first generation with choruses about how much people hate their cold, draughty, won’t-start-keeps-stopping, slow, dreadful, won't last wonderful new cars.

Marc is behind Netscan - software that measures and maps social spaces like Usenet; they're planning to turn it into a community reputation tool that could work for any threaded social space. Picturing Usenet - an article from the group in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication - has lots more visualisations and identifies various online personality types: questioners, answer people, trolls, locals, cynics, conversationalists... The treemaps that they produce apply to any hierarchical information - like the classic sales territories so many people track in Excel - so the Microsoft Treemapper with Excel Add-In they've made available could be handy.

Computers have the ability to slice, dice, drill and map so much data from the information we store of them and the monolithic way so much information is presented is a real waste. After playing with the colour categories and To-Do tags in Outlook 12 and the visualisation of conditional formatting in Excel 12, I'm rather hoping that 2006 could be the year of data visualisation. Marc mentioned the ClearContext Inbox Manager as a way of getting Outlook 12-style goodness now, and I notice it works with ActiveWords which I must make time to play with (I got distracted by being able to use shortcuts in the Windows Search deskbar to get verbs - so I can type lj or flickr and a username to jump straight to someone on either service).

I'm now looking forward to the two new versions of SNARF we'll get this year and the new features planned for them... luckily for me, some of the things I thought it would be neat to see (like tagging people who matter to me irrespective of the statistics of our email exchanges) are already on the list.

*best parts of my job, the conversations

**SNARF and the Treemapper have their own pages but they're also on http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx -another of those interesting places to browse through. GroupBar is available there (a tool for grouping and managing windows for large desktops), as is the Search Result Clustering Toolbar for grouping search results into topics...

Current Mood: drinking from a firehose

I'm writing about Office 12 beta 1 and as well as checking the software out and reading the Office 12 blogs by the developers I've been looking at the coverage by other writers. There's plenty of discussion of the new interface and whether it's just old wine in a new bottle, but the criticims of the persisting features aren't the ones I'd expect. I'm unhappy about limitaitions that I can't change. In Outlook 12 you still have to remember to explicitly check the spelling in the subject field in email, you can drag text into the subject of an appointment but not into the location and you still have to create appointments in a different time zone by working the time difference out yourself. I don't like that, especially as it would be so easy to fix those problems.

But PC Magazine complains that "Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect". I don't want software changing things behind my back without warning, but actually AutoCorrect hasn't worked like that since Word 2000 and even then you could press Ctrl-Z to change a change back and edit the AutoCorrect list to stop the change. Word 2002 (XP), 2003 and 12 all have the AutoCorrect Options Smart Tag so if you don't spot the change until afte you've carried on typing you can still undo it. Hover your mouse over the changed text, click on the tag that appears and either undo the correction or tell Word not to change it ever again. That works for anything AutoCorrect does, from fixing two capitals at the beginning of a sentence to changing hyphens at the beginning of lines into bulleted lists. It's a very simple way of using AutoCorrect; you don't have to go find the list or edit individual entries. No software is going to know what you want every time but this way you can stop the changes that irritate you without losing all the advantages of having mis-typings fixed for you. Same goes for PowerPoint and Excel. if you're going to beat up Microsoft about broken features, pick something like Outlook timezones that really is broken.

Something I didn't know before: some of my Office content is now, by the wonders of licencing, on the official Microsoft support site. There's a piece on Word 97 and 2000 and some PowerPoint tips. Hope it helps people ;-)

Current Mood: busy

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marypcbuk

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Page Summary

Office 2012: What we're expecting to see
Hard Copy: HPC scales applications to cloud and back
OpenOffice 3.3: still stuck in 'compatibility mode'
Acrobat X; now I can use it in less anger
I don't only do Microsoft; OpenOffice 3.3
Microsoft Outlook Software Connector; not for those who can't read?
Office 2010 in a bit more depth
Office 2010 Web apps: a very first release
Today we are made of Office 2010
bug report: poetry in feedback
Pick up the pen
Microformats at MIX 06: 5.45pm today in the Venetian food court
Self-mocking Microsoft?
Misunderstanding touchscreens
Office 2007 and "personalised" menus
Bleeding edge
Do you speak American?
utility, futility and fustration: but now I'm eating apples again
The thread that binds the Net
Hate something, change something; or hate something, exterminate?

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