
Office 2013: Just what on earth has the Office team been doing? - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/office-2013-just-what-on-earth-has-the-office-team-been-doing/
======
noibl
Surprised Ars didn't mention this:

 _"Microsoft switched to Word (from Internet Explorer) as its rendering engine
with the introduction of Outlook 2007 and hasn’t looked back (errr, forward?)
since. Despite the email community’s efforts and a well-intentioned response
from Microsoft, this means that HTML and CSS support in Outlook has remain
virtually unchanged between versions 2007, 2010 and now 2013."_ [1]

Nice.

[1] [http://litmus.com/blog/outlook-2013-still-powered-by-word-
no...](http://litmus.com/blog/outlook-2013-still-powered-by-word-now-
available-for-email-testing)

------
kvb
Is the argument that a touch version of Office is more important than a web-
friendly version? Moving to a JavaScript-based add-in model and adding native
support for SkyDrive seem like fairly big, worthwhile, and forward-looking
additions to me. In contrast, I don't think that touch-friendliness is really
very important - it would be nice to have, but I doubt most office workers are
going to be doing a lot of editing on tablets.

There are also plenty of nice new features too, like flash-fill in Excel and
PDF reading in Word. I really think Office 2013 is a nice, if not critical,
update.

~~~
nextparadigms
They've certainly used Office as a _major_ selling point of Surface RT. So
there's at least some conflict in the message they are sending there. Is
Office meant for tables or not? If yes, then why haven't they made it more
touch optimized? If not, then why are they making such a big deal out of it
with Surface promotion?

And don't think you're getting Office for "free" in there anyway. The hardware
specs are almost identical to a $200 Nexus 7. There's little in there,
hardware wise, that could justify a $300 increase. So obviously most of the
difference is to pay up for the Windows and Office licenses. They are included
in the price. they are not "free".

~~~
yajoe
The answer is pretty plain: The Office division cut the team that was supposed
to ship the Metro-styled Office apps for 2013 despite the Windows division
objection. Windows then relented and added 'desktop mode' for ARM just to keep
Office in the release. Office tweaked the existing UI to make buttons
'bigger.' The original plan called for the Metro UI to be available whenever a
user interacted with his hands -- Surface was the primary objective, but
Office 2013 should work great on the Toshiba tablet as well.

The decision to cut Metro support was made in Q1 2011 and distributed to all
Office managers by Kurt himself. The team that was working on Metro (called
Modern Office eXperience, MOX) shrunk and merged with OneNote. Hence, why we
see OneNote has Metro and no other app does. The reasoning was "the Win8 APIs
are not stable enough for us to finish on schedule with the team we have. We
either ship 10/11/12 or slip by a year to support Windows 8." They decided to
ship (RTM) on 10/11/12. We should see a 'surprise' SP1 that supports Metro and
iOS by the end of this year (this is pure speculation from me -- I have no NDA
knowledge about plans past 10/11/12).

You are seeing a classical "ship the orgchart" dilema from Microsoft with
Office and Windows this season. It's sad, really, but these tensions are why I
don't work there.

~~~
randomfool
Shipping WinRT support for all of Office within a year sounds aggressive if it
was only OneNote at the end of Office 2013!

------
tibbon
I couldn't tell you what the major "advancements" in Wordprocessing have been
in 20 years. I haven't had Office installed on my personal computer in about
10 years, but when I use Word or Excel they just feel like... well,
spreadsheet and wordprocessing tools. Excel still feels really inadequate and
slow compared for processing complex and large datasets. Word feels like a
slightly different UI of wordprocessing software I had on Windows 95.

The changes for so long have felt like they haven't done anything really
positive. If i need to write a letter, I just use Google Docs. If I need to
tabulate some simple data, I just use Google Docs. I just don't get it.

Powerpoint still feels smooth to me than Keynote, but Keynote looks better in
output generally. Pages almost always produces better looking output than Word
for me for some reason (although I'd rather just use LaTeX for real document
layout). Numbers by Apple is a mess compared to excel and not worth using.

~~~
martinced
I'm using Google Docs for mostly everything. I've typeset one book using LaTeX
and several using QuarkXPress on Mac computers.

We're simply not the target for Microsoft Word.

But with less and less need to write letters (we've got emails now) and more
and more totally free and convenient solutions like Google Docs, the "target"
keeps shrinking for Microsoft Word.

The corporate world won't change anytime soon: MS Office is their way of doing
business.

But SMEs are fleeing fast: I'm seeing more and more shared Google Docs (both
text and spreadsheets) used inside SMEs and even to exchange doc with the
outside.

Want an invoice and you're on GMail? OK, I'm sharing the invoice with you so
you can print it. Why bother printing it and sending a letter? Why even bother
exporting it as a PDF and sending it as an attachment? Shared invoice (read-
only) just so that the recipient can print it.

I'm not saying it's "great" from a security point of view to share a Google
Doc with a customer / contractor but that's where we're at now: lots of SMEs
aren't even bothering with Word and its incompabilities (whether they still
exist or not not being the point: they do exist in the users' mind).

MS did a 180 degree with Office 365 because they know it's very real.

~~~
crazygringo
I realize that, 15 years ago, I used Word for things like writing manuals,
printing cover sheets, formatting resumes, writing newsletters -- everything
that was designed to be _printed_.

I haven't used Word in years. Every workplace of mine has used Google Docs
instead. And for the first time, I realize it isn't just because of Google
Docs collaboration and use-anywhere -- it's the fact that all the "power"
features of Word, particularly formatting and layout, are all geared towards
the printed page.

But I literally produce _nothing_ designed to be printed anymore. Everything
that used to be printed, is now thrown up the web. Fancy formatting is
_useless_ now if it can't be translated into HTML.

(For spreadsheets, there are still big reasons for power usage of those, so I
don't see Excel going away anytime soon. But except for producing PDF versions
of nicely formatted resumes, it's getting harder and harder to see why Word
should even exist. And of course graphic designers need to produce typeset
pages, but that's what page layout programs are for.)

------
rlu
Honestly the change from 2010 to 2013 is bigger than the change from 2007 to
2010 - particularly all of the cloud stuff. (It's actually quite cool to have
the same most recently used documents when you open up an Office app,
regardless of which computer you're on).

In any case - overall I somewhat agree with the article, though I'd be
surprised if Microsoft isn't aware of this themselves. I think Office 2013 is
a solid upgrade for the desktop - though a solid touch version is indeed
lacking. Here's to hoping they have one on the way, hopefully sooner than 3
years from now...

~~~
barista
Agree the cloud integration looks quite useful. I'd love to just open and save
files directly to SkyDrive and have that list of recent files available to me
in any office client I use. This is an awesome functionality. Worth 2.5 years
or not... don't know but I'm sure there is more cool stuff to office 2013 than
just that. Love the OneNote app on metro.

~~~
whyenot
Why is opening and saving files to SkyDrive superior to opening and saving
files to DropBox or Google Drive? Is the big benefit that the recently opened
files list moves with you from machine to machine? I feel like I am missing
something.

~~~
aarongolliver
It is because you can access your "Office" from any copy of Office 2013. As
long as a computer has 2013 installed, you can access your files. No
downloading and setting up the dropbox app, or logging into dropbox.com and
grabbing the files from there.

Just log in, edit, save, log out.

------
MichaelGG
Office 2013 is a visual nightmare. The lack of any dividing lines gives me a
headache; it feels like a snowstorm.

And just to be more insulting, the UI has random caps. There's no design or
reasoning for the caps. They don't indicate clickable things, they don't seem
to indicate anything. I spend a fair amount of time in Outlook and Lync - why
would I want to subject my eyes to this?

~~~
joenathan
There are plenty of dividing lines

<http://i.minus.com/ibm6UEFR5wXRGJ.png>

I personally like the new UI, I find it refreshing.

~~~
thomasbk
I agree, but only because the office installation in this screenshot is set to
use the darkest theme -- by default all that gray is just more white.

------
robomartin
Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07.

Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an
engineering user of these tools than a typical office worker. And, although I
have used it extensively for such things as invoices, purchase orders,
financial calculation, presentations and business documents I still think of
these tools as part of my engineering tool set.

Examples:

I devoted about three months to write an Excel VBA tool to help automate the
creation of components for the EDA package we were using at the time. Creating
a component such as a 1000+ pin FPGA went from almost literally days to an
hour or two after this tool was in place.

Use Excel and the built-in Solver tool to find solutions for programming a
clock synthesizer to output a given set of frequencies.

Use Excel + external voltage, current and temperature sensors to log and
analyze test data.

Use Excel to easily produce and maintain lookup-table-driven state machine
code in C, including all the callbacks for each state.

Use Excel to produce CNC G-code to run a Haas VF3-SS milling machine to
produce patterned holes and threads.

Automate Powerpoint with VBA to simulate the control panel of a piece of
equipment, complete with a small dot-matrix LCD display and functioning menu
buttons. This was used to for training purposes when the actual piece of
equipment was not available.

Use Word and VBA to automate parsing of documents and extraction of data.

Anyhow, just some examples that come to mind.

I had to install '07 when we switched to a Vista 64 to be able to run FEA and
other tools that would benefit from that platform. I remember going from being
a "power user" to feeling like an utter idiot. The UI change was brutal and I
am still not sure that it was an improvement. They also modified automation
and put in all of the roadblocks that just made it painful to use.

Office 2013? Nope. Thanks.

~~~
test001only
A bit off topic, but are you sure Excel was the right tool for communicating
with instruments, power point for simulating instrument front panel etc? I
think LabVIEW or any other appropriate tool with Excel used for data
presentation would have been better.

~~~
robomartin
Not sure it was the best, but they worked very well. Powerpoint with some
automation code under the hood can be absolutely brilliant in a presentation.
All of a sudden your presentation isn't just a bunch of slides but you have a
real instrument's control panel come to life and be usable on slide 59 (or
whatever).

------
politician
I'm not sold on the argument that customers even desire the ability to produce
long-form text content on a touch-based device, or that it's ergonomic to do
so. Touch-screens are great for reading and basic editing, but beyond that I'm
skeptical; the line-of-thought that leads to "word processing... on a tablet!"
seems haphazard and reactionary.

Additionally, I'm reminded of the old Dvorak-vs-Qwerty keyboard layout wars
that would occasionally flare up on Slashdot. Eventually, most people realized
that it was a neat idea that wasn't practical and moved on. I think that's
where this is going.

~~~
FaddiCat
> I'm not sold on the argument that customers even desire the ability to
> produce long-form text content on a touch-based device, or that it's
> ergonomic to do so.

Not with a tablet, but when you've got a touchscreen laptop it feels pretty
natural to go between touching controls with your fingers and entering text
with the keyboard.

------
clintdavis
I can't speak for the entire Office suite but the things happening in Excel
are impressive. First, Excel 2013 has the PowerPivot engine built in. If you
don't know about PowerPivot, it allows data analysis over very large data sets
(think millions of rows). It has other features like pulling data from
multiple sources, tabular data modeling, and others. Power View is another
option that is now built into Excel 2013. And there are a bunch of plugins
available like the Data Mining. They are throwing all of this into Excel for
no additional cost.

You have Office 365 now, is that not something? You can get a hosted version
of SharePoint now with it. Again, is this nothing?

Windows 8 has a new OneNote app available that has a very innovative
interface. Again, no recognition on this?

Like I said, I don't know what's going on with the rest of the suite but I do
not think this article is warranted.

~~~
kvb
Yep, and flash fill, too, which if it were introduced by Google instead would
probably be hailed as evidence that the strong culture of AI at Google gives
them an innovation advantage in the long run.

------
i386
In my humble opinion, Touch devices are "computers for people who don't need
computers" and their needs are much simpler and more generalised.

Building a full featured Office for touch is a waste of time and a waste of
opportunity for Microsoft. They could have breathed new life into Office if
they built a simpler touch based experience and kept the existing experience
for desktops.

Eventually you would probably want those advanced features as touch devices go
mainstream and replace desktops, but by designing for everybody (touch and
desktop) they've ended up with a shitty experience for both.

~~~
daigoba66
The exact same thing could be said for Windows 8 on tablets.

~~~
i386
Completely agree.

------
shaaaaawn
Good article and agree that Microsoft has been awfully lazy about upgrading
their bread and butter but i don't think Microsoft cares to appeal to the
hacker / bleeding or even cutting edge community with Office. Office is meant
for productivity; and despite the tablet sales figures, when you need to bang
out 1000 word essay or make a pivot table you're doing it with a keyboard
(maybe even a keyboard attached to a touch device)--anything else would be
silly. Input by touch is not productive yet; once so, this is a valid
discussion.

------
7952
The problem is that word is a flawed product from the outset. It is like a
very poor quality version of InDesign with a writing tool clamped on. Its bad
for writing and bad for design. Instead they should have users do writing in
OneNote and have a separate tool for turning the documents into print
versions. This would be much more natural in touch and be much easier to use.

~~~
joenathan
>The problem is that word is a flawed product from the outset.

That must be why Word is the most widely used word processing a program in the
world.

~~~
7952
And its a very good word processor. But word processing isn;t really a thing.
You can write, design, take notes, draw, calculate, and assemble print
documents. Those are real things. What ties the functions of a word processor
together are the fact that they are things traditionally done on paper. That
is a legacy issue.

------
robryan
At this point Office would be hard pressed to change anything without annoying
a lot of people. We see this all the time, people complaining about lack of
new features in mature products.

There are so many functions that need to be exposed via the UI that it is
always going to be hard to make something that works for everyone.

Making something like word touch friendly while maintaining the right level of
functionality is going to be very hard. Pages for iOS has been annoying to use
due to the amount of features it lacks.

------
jsz0
There was no new functionality in 2013 useful to me so I ended up going back
to an old version just because of the new UI. The layout is fine. I've always
liked the ribbon UI. The problem is the entire UI is this block of whiteness
dotted with icons. I had a very difficult time finding items that hadn't even
moved much or at all. I never realized before this just how important the
3D-ish look of buttons/toolbars/etc was to me. The whole flat UI look isn't
working well for me at all.

------
bdunbar
It is possible we've reached the stage, with office productivity software,
that there isn't really anything you can _do_ to one except put better cup
holders on it.

~~~
sixothree
As far as features are concerned, yes. But as far as usability is concerned,
not by a long shot.

~~~
bdunbar
I am not so sure.

For me, word processors have gotten progressively stupider and harder to use
since WordPerfect, circa 1996.

Excel is pretty good.

I may be biased - I've been using emacs for the last two years and keep
finding more ways to use it, and far less for Office or NeoOffice.

------
edandersen
They most likely spent 2 years porting the code to ARM. Can you imagine the
decade of legacy code they had to wade through to get that done?

~~~
chris_wot
See, I just don't get that. We aren't talking about an OS kernel here, we're
talking about a graphics toolkit. What is it about their libraries that
weren't capable of running on different versions of Windows capable of running
on different architecture?

Unless, of course, the issue is in porting the toolkit...

~~~
ygra
Remember the Excel calculation bug introduced in 2007? That was because of
assembly code that only then got updated to 32 bit. You can be fairly sure
that Office is a lot more than just a graphics toolkit.

~~~
chris_wot
Surely the amount of assembly code in an application like Word would be at a
bare minimum? Seriously question, please don't take this for credulity...

~~~
ygra
Even then I'm not sure Office is as portable as Windows is. As far as I know
it never moved outside x86.

------
pibefision
I work at a big company. This is hell. Really. People never understanded why
office upgraded it's interface since 1997.

------
justhw
This flat design madness has to stop.

------
evolve2k
Id bet that the office team have been crazy busy overhauling the product suite
to deeply integrate touch. 2.5 years was not long enough, so this is a Metro
skinned release of office 2010 so that the gap is less (visually) noticeable
and keeps up with the change in branding.

Looks like a service pack release, 'cause it is one.

~~~
nextparadigms
How do you "deeply integrate touch" if the UI still doesn't look touch-ready?
Seems like they skimped on a pretty important.

~~~
dangrossman
Re-read the comment you replied to. It said that this UI doesn't look touch-
ready because it's just a reskin of 2010 while they make that touch-ready
version.

------
ChuckMcM
I've got Office 2010 on a machine, I use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Something I don't like is the impact this has on a 2G laptop. (I know they are
all 4G now, get with the program) Office 2013 continues the grand engagement
that Microsoft started on but didn't get a chance to fully consummate (in my
opinion of course) with a fully integrated Enterprise. They left people like
me, who want to do documents, spreadsheets, and presentations some what out in
the cold.

I wonder if the Libre Office stuff can take advantage of that. I wonder if a
group targeting the most resource efficient word processor, spreadsheet, and
presentation builder could find success in the burnt out landscape behind the
Office juggernaut. Something not 'cloud' based but simple. I'm probably just
suffering from nostalgia but sometimes ...

~~~
aarongolliver
You don't have to save things to SkyDrive though. How can you be "left out in
the cold" if that functionality is unaltered?

------
vaadu
I am a heavy office 2003 user. I tried Office 2007 and Office 2010. Neither
lasted more than a week. The non-standard, non-intuitive and inflexible ribbon
ruined Office. It has no redeeming value.

The only reason I can see for the change was marketing.

~~~
kvb
If you're not trolling, you may be interested in Jensen Harris's fairly
detailed blogs posts on the rationale for the new UI [1], which I found
informative.

[1]
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx)

------
searchergss
Excel has very useful increased functionality

(I know, I know... use R or something but shh)

~~~
whyenot
Can you give some examples? I looked into upgrading from Office 2007, but it
didn't seem like it was worth the hassle. Better data analysis functions in
Excel would probably tip the balance.

------
pinaceae
I am holding out for Office on iOS, which current rumors point to March 2013.

The current Office on OSX is quite nice, Excel performs really well and in
Powerpoint there is this nice 3d layer editor.

Office on Tablets needs to be re-thought. What do you really do on a tablet?
Looking at the use cases in the corporate world, it is not about creating
complex spreadsheets from scratch. It is about viewing, filtering and data
entry.

Hey, please enter your forecast numbers and send back. Hey, these are our
numbers, columns B, N and Z are super important, etc.

Excel and Powerpoint are key in corporate. Word is dying, killed by Outlook.

Tablet users need to be able to open an email attachment, browse through it
efficiently, maybe correct a bit and then send back.

This points to a separate Office for Tablets. MS had special Office viewer
apps in the past. Apple has Keynote, etc on iOS. If it is a separate team at
MS working on this, they just might have enough freedom to pull it off.

------
Eliezer
The ability to collaboratively edit Word documents in realtime a la Etherpad
would be huge. Our organization uses Google Docs and Workflowy because they're
real-time-collaboratively-editable.

Though I use Scrivener for most things these days because it has much better
modularity and change control.

------
forgotAgain
What are they doing? Justifying Software Assurance?

------
sixothree
I'm so tired of watching Microsoft flounder. I just can't stop feeling that if
they start at the top firing people and work their way down that they will be
much better off.

~~~
chris_wot
Aside from the reduced wages bill, a round of retrenchment will probably not
do wonders for them.

------
k3n
We just "upgraded" to office 2010 at work, and....it still stinks. I admit
that many Windows applications are very well designed, but the Office suite
suffers from the worst of the worst -- whether it's the horrid options menus,
where the menu layering goes 4-5 levels deep at times, or the complete
trainwreck that is the "ribbon" and everything associated with it.

They could certainly take some design cues from products like those from Apple
and Google.

~~~
monkeyfacebag
I think the ribbon is great. Prior to the ribbon, Word, for example, had all
of these different components, each with its own UI, all fighting among
themselves for screen real estate (the UI version of how this article
describes MS, I suppose). The ribbon came along with the expressed intent of
unifying all of those UIs so that people could actually use all of Word's
features without clobbering the space allocated for, you know, editing their
documents. I think it's pretty successful at that, but you have to go back to
those old versions of Office to remember just how awful it was.

Sure, it's different. It takes getting used to and that's unfortunate (if only
they'd gotten it right the first time!). Ultimately, I realize that some
people will never like it, and that's reasonable but I hardly think it
qualifies as a "train wreck."

~~~
corin_
In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none)
people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they
can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics,
but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word
and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of
the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand
why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for
years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first
beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked
out for me.

~~~
cowsaysoink
I think the ribbon is okay. I had just as hard a time finding things in
Word/Excel 2003 as I did in Word/Excel 2007 but after a while the design
started to make sense. I still had to google things but I also had that
problem with the older versions.

Word 2007 worked much better for mathematical documents than 2003 and once you
learned the shortcuts (it even allows some tex like functionality) short
reports work out much faster than emacs+auctex or lyx while still looking
generally good.

------
doppenhe
biased opinion here, i helped build Excel 2013. We did a lot of investments in
making it easier to work with your data. Off the top of my head here are some
of the top things we did: Flash fill : Automatically detects what you are
trying to fill/parse and does it for you. Suggest Pivottables: Select a range
and ask excel to aqutomatically create a Pivot for you. -Suggest charts: Excel
suggest what type of charts work best with selected data. Data model -
Although you need Pro Plus to use powerpivot and powerview, basic
functionality that "converts excel into a database" is built in. You can
combine data from multiple sources and create relationships between data. Apps
for Office : A new way of programming against the productivity suite in
javascript and html5 Chart enhancements: creating beautiful charts is easier
and the options are more accesible.

A lot of this information is on our blog:
<http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/> Twitter account: @MSEXCEL

and if your particularly inclined to data analysis and business intelligence I
blast cool features and how tos on my personal account: @doppenhe

------
davidmspi
"just what on earth has the Office team been doing?"

should read

"just what on earth has Microsoft been doing for the last 5 years?

------
niggler
Breaking backwards compatibility may be ok for windows, but it's pretty much a
nonstarter for office -- i still run office 97 on an old machine because of
some add-ins

------
corresation
Doing the standard "guess the conclusion" game with the title, I assumed that
it would pick on the devastating changes in Visio (the ERD has gone from the
prior weak state to the now disastrous), or the "move stuff around, call it a
day" tactic that has been the standard for every Office release. I did not
expect it to harp about tablets.

I do not expect Office to work well on tablets, and that isn't a reasonable
concern for every application to pander to. A rich mouse and keyboard
interface does not carry over to a meat-sausage interface without a profound
rethink of every aspect of the interface. We've already seen the worst-of-
both-worlds approach with metro, and it simply needs to stop.

I get that people want rich apps on their tablets. But they should be
_different_ rich apps that start from the ground up built for this entirely
different interface medium. Every desktop app should not be diluted to support
tablets, and personally I think that has already been a detour on a backroad
that Microsoft has found themselves on.

~~~
randomfool
Office is a $20 Billion business with a 60% profit margin
([http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/technology/business-
comput...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/technology/business-
computing/28soft.html)).

There is no excuse for leaving these vectors uncovered for so long.

Though I'm pretty sure they're caught up in a painful conversion to WinRT
right now.

------
cremnob
I have Office 2010, is it worth getting 2013?

~~~
dangrossman
All that's been seen was a pre-release preview version that came with Windows
RT. You can't get Office 2013 yet, it's not out.

~~~
cdh
I've been using it for a while. There was a beta version available for free,
and I believe most enterprise customers have had access to the final RTM
version for months. I know that some MSDN subscriptions include a production
license, and I was able to purchase a consumer copy from Microsoft's Home Use
program last week, as well.

