Microsoft has made the Office System Beta 2 Technical Refresh available to its 15,000 technical beta testers. The final product is still on track to be completed this summer and will be available to customers later this year.
Microsoft Refreshes Office Beta 2
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Eugenia Loli
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By the looks of things, Office has reached its peak and very little innovation was made in releases beyond Office 2000. This will give OpenOffice a change to catch up with document compatibility as well as refining its UI.
Office 97 is still the best in terms of useability and usefullness. Office XP is a fussy piece of bloat that runs slower on a machine four times more powerful than what I used to run Office 97 on. Funny thing is, I’ve turned off all features that aren’t supported in the Office 97 document format. I look forward to the day when governments demand open formats so we can get some competition back into the market that the current monopoly doesn’t allow for. Maybe the small, slick, and fast application, might make a return.
I’ve been using Office 2003 beta 1 for about a month. Here’s a short quip:
1. Word/Excel/Powerpoint: I’ve barely noticed a difference, except that there is an option ot save files in the new XML format.
2. Outlook has a radically different layout. The default view includes the message list to the left of the preview pane. Increased HTTP handling and junk mail sorting is also included. Features are so complex that normal corporate end users will have no prayer at configuring anything by themselves. Adding a shared calendar is still a double-digit-click process.
3. OneNote is pointless and stupid. Anyone who uses this doesn’t deserve a laptop.
4. InfoPath, on the other hand, looks to be REALLY cool.
5. Access, which I admit I haven’t used, is apparently, once again, incompatible with previous releases.
6. There is no export to PDF as some have mentioned on this site. No doubt that’s a confusion with OpenOffice.org 1.1 beta, which can export to PDF (but it’s still buggy).
In my very humble and less than expert opinion, as I haven’t really stressed it, Office 2003 is not worth much money. It’s nice to have, and it’s probably worth an upgrade if it were, say, 50 bucks, but not worth purchasing if the upgrade is 189 dollars, as I expect. In my opinion, updated icons and slightly smoother layout does not an upgrade make.
Will there be a new version for OSX coming in the near future as well? Or will the new file formats and so forth remain a windows only feature? I know the two versions are basicly completely seperate for developement, but I don’t know if they follow the same upgrade timelines.
I am not a real power-office user and i do not use MS Office
but OpenOffice. Wordperfect and OpenOffice have this neat feature that makes it pssible to place your cursor anywhere
on the page, is this still not possible with Word?
Not? Its a very hany feature..they should add it.
Office 97 is still the best in terms of useability and usefullness. Office XP is a fussy piece of bloat that runs slower on a machine four times more powerful than what I used to run Office 97 on.
While I mostly agree with you, the one thing I dig about Office XP (Word inparticular) is the smart tags. This is especially true when I paste something into Word and it asks me whether I want to keep the source formatting or stick with the destination formatting – this comes in handy when you’re dealing with different fonts between source and destination.
5. Access, which I admit I haven’t used, is apparently, once again, incompatible with previous releases.
I know that Access 2k was not compatible with 97 because they changed the file format in 2k to give it unicode support. But, AFAIK, Access 2K and 2002 are compatible with each other, though I have never tested it personally.
My thoughts on Office 2003 – I’ll probably use, assuming the product activation is still useless so that I can steal it
As for OpenOffice, hmmmm … maybe next year.
“Office 97 is still the best in terms of useability and usefullness. Office XP is a fussy piece of bloat that runs slower on a machine four times more powerful than what I used to run Office 97 on.”
What are you smoking? 97 was a crash monster. That along kills any useability. Office 2k fixed the stability issues. I must say office XP is very nice. It’s the little things that do it like the smart tags. It just works much nicer, and is faster, though i don’t really know what faster would mean in an office app, but far as loading, it is faster then 97 and just seams very snappy. I can’t think of anything that would hurt usability in later versions of office, the same ground work is there, but there is new things added each go around for people to get used to. office 97 needs to go the way of it’s buddy windows 98. That combo is evil.
I’ve used each office version up the chain and never did a later version make me want to go back to a previous. I think office is just like windows to people. They will bitch about it and say it’s all this and that, when the newest version comes out, but once they use it for a bit they get it and relize how nice it is. The only people who bitch about windows XP are the ones who never used it, or ran away from it soon as they noticed it wasn’t the exact same as versions previous.
Regarding export to PDF, one thing I would really like is the ability to import PDF documents into OpenOffice and edit them just like any other format.
In theory they should release a filter upgrade for Office X. Thats going on what they did on previous releases.
You can import PDF files into Open Office and edit them natively?
As in download random PDF and edit it? Or you just mean that you can edit PDF files that you’ve saved?
Ok, lets say I ask for a document from you, You send it to me in PDF format, I then decide that I want to edit it. I want to be able to open up that PDF document, edit it, then save it as a PDF. In other words, treat the the PDF like any other document.
Adobe doesn’t like that.
The PDF format doesn’t always support load/edit. Sometimes, PDF’s contain text and build themselves as documents that could probably be editted. But PDF can also be a collection of images that don’t actually contain typeable text. PDF files are meant to be properly displayed or printed, and they work like a charm. .doc files are meant to be editted, but work like shit, because you have no real consistency with formatting or display control from PC to PC. That’s why they aren’t really competitors, they each fill a separate niche.
What are you smoking? 97 was a crash monster.
I could ask you the same. I can’t remember a single instance of Office 97 crashing on me. It handles large documents better than Office XP, starts up quicker, contains less eye clutter, the dictionary hasn’t been ‘tampered’ with, and it runs well on modest hardware. Office 97 is the all round better experience for many people.
Let’s be honest. No-one uses 90% of the features in Office, yet Microsoft has been pretty successful in getting people to keep on upgrading through the years. This version will probably be the same.
And though I’m the biggest Linux / open source fan around, I have to admit that Office is an excellent product, and it’s the benchmark that free software has to beat. Linux has world-beating web browsers (Mozilla) and groupware software (Evolution), but I’m forced to admit that OpenOffice pales in comparison to MS Office. If nothing else, Word loads in <1 second, OOo loads in 30 seconds on my Athlon 🙁
Office is our crucial target; not Windows itself or IE. Office is what keeps people on Windows, though for me, Linux running Office 2000 under CrossOver is a killer platform!
[…] yet Microsoft has been pretty successful in getting people to keep on upgrading through the years.
In my experience, the single most important reason for people to upgrade their Office version, ironically, is its incompatibility. Although people keep shouting that they need an office suite which is “compatible with MS Office”, the reality is that most people are forced to upgrade because they start receiving .doc files from people using the new version and can’t open them, even if the documents don’t use any new features. That, combined with the uber-evil feature “Send this document as an email to…” is the real reason everyone will upgrade sooner or later.
Has anyone seen this?
http://madpenguin.org/viewtopic.php?topic=223&forum=13
Looks like they ripped off Linux to me. Disgraceful!
Anywa,y the thing I miss most in OO.org is the clipart from OFFICE.
Anon: The only thing different with the way that screenie looks (as compared to previous versions of Excel) is the taskpane which is connected to MS’s Office site….
Looks to me like a bunch of trolls trying to bash MS.