Free PDF - “First Look: Microsoft Office 2010”

[BlackVoid]

I do not understand why this is news on Mobileread. It has nothing to do with books or reading either.

[HarryT]

It is a tool which many people use to create reading material, hence of considerable interest. If it doesn't interest you personally, just ignore it .

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by VicLavigne

I've used Office 97, 98, 2000, XP, and 2003

I still miss a feature that was dropped when Word for Windows 3.1 switched to Office 97. (I'm told by programmers that it was a "bug," not "feature." But I'd learned to use it, and nothing's come close to replacing it.)

I can't find anything in Office 07, and there's no "help! I've been using Word for over a decade and wheredahell did you hide the [x] settings?" helper.

Not willing to take a couple-month slowdown to all my DTP activities to learn a new program, especially since nobody's explained what makes it "better." Easier for total newbies is not "better." (Smaller filesizes, perhaps. But since a lot of my DTP is going to either RTF or conversion to PDF, the smaller filesize of the .doc files isn't particularly important to me.)

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Not willing to take a couple-month slowdown to all my DTP activities to learn a new program, especially since nobody's explained what makes it "better."

More accessible styles support makes it heaps better. Changing every italicized word, or every indented blockquote, or every heading has become a lot easier to do. While this feature already existed at least in office2003, the fact that they put it where people would find it (and integrated it into the spellcheck thing) is very nice.

Originally Posted by Lo Zeno

It speeds up the most common of tasks, but as a side effect it moved the less common functionalities to semi-hidden places.

I do hate to disagree with people, but in pre-Office2007, every function was hidden in a random place. Now only some of the functions are, and they are generally in a more logical place. Why is it bad that it's in a different place when the new place is at least more logical?
Also, I don't really get what you base your "office is meant for the casual user" comment on. One of the major points of improvement in office07 was that they put document styles front&center, whereas before you could pretty much never find them unless you knew they existed. This is a major improvement when it comes to generating consistent formatting for most people, and I'm very happy that they've done this.
Anyway, this thread has quite a few posts that seem to say "I dislike having to relearn stuff, even if the new way is ultimately more efficient/intuitive" (no offense to the posters).

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Anyway, this thread has quite a few posts that seem to say "I dislike having to relearn stuff, even if the new way is ultimately more efficient/intuitive" (no offense to the posters).

Not willing to take many hours/weeks to relearn stuff *to no advantage*.

What makes the new arrangement "better," other than "shallower learning curve," which is irrelevant to people who have already passed that learning curve? Are there editing features which are actually better arranged?

Can I make a dialog box that lets me edit font size & paragraph line spacing at the same time, or is that still multiple clicks no matter where they've hidden them? Have they fixed the screwball application of styles with find-and-replace? Have they fixed the way image anchors sometimes make a picture vanish if you move it too close to the edge of a page?

Does it create clean HTML output without all the Microsoft-specific baggage? Has it stopped saving the printer settings inside each document? Has it stopped creating an extra blank page after a full-page table? Stopped applying default paragraph settings if I use "delete" to remove a paragraph break, but not if I use "backspace?"

Word is glitchy. Word has a lot of problems. With Word 03 (and 00, which I have at home, and 97, which I'm considering installing somewhere just to get the cleaner HTML output), I'm familiar with the glitches, and know how to move around them. I don't need to trad familiar glitches for new, unknown glitches *and* an immense slowdown in my work until I've learned the basic layout.

Office07 may be a great program for new users, and it's likely that continuing users will have to learn it (or its future incarnations) at some point. But I haven't seen anything that explains why it's better for those users, other than "everyone will be using it in the future!"

For the amount of effort involved, I might as well install OpenOffice and learn to use something that's more universally compatible.

[dmaul1114]

It probably also matters whether your a power user or not.

I'm a pretty basic user, so I liked Word and Powerpoint 2007 more once I got used to them (just a few days of usage).

Especially word, the most advanced things I used were track changes and mail merge, and those are more easy to access on the ribbon than digging through the drop down menus IMO.

But I could see it being a lot more cumbersome for people who do more advanced stuff. And for those that like to customize software, toolbars etc. I never do any of that stuff, I just use programs at the defaults for the most part. I probably should switch to Mac sometime since that's their big advantage of being intuitive to use with no customization needed.

[rhadin]

zerospinboson, I like your Louis Brandeis quote. If you are interested in Brandeis, I highly recommend the new biography, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin Urofsky. I'm halfway through it and recognize that he was the kind of lawyer that lawyers today should be.

[Idoine]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

... I can't find anything in Office 07, and there's no "help! I've been using Word for over a decade and wheredahell did you hide the [x] settings?" helper. ...

Microsoft made it for you (flash anims)
Word 2007
Excel 2007
Powerpoint 2007
Outlook 2007

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

For the amount of effort involved, I might as well install OpenOffice and learn to use something that's more universally compatible.

/agree

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Idoine

Microsoft made it for you (flash anims)
Word 2007
Excel 2007
Powerpoint 2007
Outlook 2007

Thanks for the links!

[Idoine]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Thanks for the links!

You're welcome !

[hidari]

Amazed at all of the MS Word fanatics... Like a few said before..


I prefer Open Office since version 1.0

Originally Posted by Idoine

You're welcome !

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Idoine

Microsoft made it for you (flash anims)
Word 2007
Excel 2007
Powerpoint 2007
Outlook 2007

Ooh, thank you! (Am still considering switching to Open Office. I can run that off my flash drive.)

[Lo Zeno]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I do hate to disagree with people, but in pre-Office2007, every function was hidden in a random place. Now only some of the functions are, and they are generally in a more logical place. Why is it bad that it's in a different place when the new place is at least more logical?

What seems logical for you, doesn't seem logical for others, probably. I'm not an Office power user, but many colleagues of mine are, and their greatest complaint is that while the older arrangement in menus and submenus did follow a logical grouping of functions (and menu names were understandable), the new arrangement isn't as intuitive.
And I work in a software company, where learning to use new applications is everyday practice.

Also, I don't really get what you base your "office is meant for the casual user" comment on. One of the major points of improvement in office07 was that they put document styles front&center, whereas before you could pretty much never find them unless you knew they existed. This is a major improvement when it comes to generating consistent formatting for most people, and I'm very happy that they've done this.

Document styles is one of the most commonly asked features, not a specialized and high-level one. Also, my comment is backed up by Microsoft Italia's CEO's words: I attend sometimes to MS meetings in which they show new products and previews, and the words they used were "the new Office interface is meant to be simpler for the common people, to make Office more appealing to the normal PC while earlier it was more appealing to experts".

Anyway, this thread has quite a few posts that seem to say "I dislike having to relearn stuff, even if the new way is ultimately more efficient/intuitive" (no offense to the posters).

As I said, where I work learning and relearning stuff is common and happens often, but you probably won't change your mind.
As for efficiency, something is efficient also if it doesn't take too much time to learn and master. If you need too much time to re-learn to do something with the same level of professionality as before, it's not efficient: it's a time waster.
The right choice would have been to allow user to choose between the old User Interface and the new ribbon: new users would find the Ribbon, and old users could switch to the old interface. With time, people would get used to the Ribbon, but those old users who needed to be productive quickly could keep the old interface until they learnt the "new way".

Microsoft already took this approach with the Control Panel, with IIS (Internet Information Services), and with Visual Studio. And it worked fine. Don't know why they didn't take this same approach with Office.

As people said, if one is forced to re-learn things, one would be better learn to use OpenOffice, which supports all the Microsoft formats (now it supports even docx, xmlx, pptx) plus the OpenDocument open format. A huge plus in compatibility.

[fugazied]

Personally I don't 'hate' the ribbon. But I use windows only 15% of the time, I'm usually on Mac and spend more time using open office and iWork.

I think MS Excel is far superior to other spreadsheets but the rest of the MS office sweet is kinda meh.