

Office 2013: Microsoft's bid to win the future - sp332
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/office-2013-microsofts-bid-to-win-the-future/

======
lmkg
> _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.

~~~
vj44
You can script Excel with Python using IronSpread, you can get it from
<http://www.ironspread.com>. It's free and it's super easy to import/export
data.

~~~
wlesieutre
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.

~~~
vj44
A free non-commercial version will remain available, fear not!

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lazyjeff
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.

~~~
jberryman
so if you were using a font with kerning information, Word would just ignore
it by default? Astounding.

~~~
lazyjeff
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.

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Avitas
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?

~~~
jmpeax
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.

~~~
einhverfr
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.

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krschultz
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.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Well, at least it isn't XP. Windows 7 will be able to run IE10.

~~~
mitchty
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.

~~~
robryan
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.

~~~
mchusma
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.

My first twinge of sympathy for them.

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cabirum
Customer Preview download page: <http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview>

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frou_dh
"Hello Sean! How would you like your Office to look? Dropdown: [None,
Calligraphy, ...]"

One "None"-looking Office for Sean, please! You gotta sweat the details.

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buro9
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.

~~~
pithon
At work, Office is the only reason I use Windows (when I do).

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jiggy2011
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!

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acqq
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.

~~~
sp332
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.

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danielford
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.

~~~
ghurlman
Don't upgrade.

~~~
danielford
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.

~~~
Jare
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)

~~~
darkestkhan
LaTeX Beamer is very good for presentations.

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reedlaw
> 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.

------
stephengillie
Wired article discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252005>

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demoo
Any news about Outlooks rendering engine yet? I hope the integration of Office
365 made them adopt webkit vs Word.

~~~
untog
Zero chance of adopting WebKit outside of the Mac version. I'm assuming it'll
just use the machine's default rendering engine (so, Trident on Windows)

~~~
pippy
It would a dream if they adopted webkit for office. Outlook is keeping the
email rendering in the 90's.

However it's to Microsoft's benefit to keep their file formats rendering in
obscure ways, as it makes it difficult for competitors to edit them.

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figital
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?

------
hk__2
Okay, that's pretty, but is there one new functionality, or is this the same
as Office 2003 with some shiny buttons, for $119.95?

~~~
sp332
There are some new features. Since Office already does everything people need
it to do, most of the new features streamline common workflows. Outlook should
be a lot nicer to use, even though Office 2010 already has more features than
most people will ever use. Excel: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/07/first-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/07/first-look-excel-2013/) Outlook:
[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/07/first-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/07/first-look-outlook-2013/) Word:
[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/07/first-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/07/first-look-word-2013/)

~~~
Spearchucker
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.

That aside I'm looking forward to trying it out.

------
banachtarski
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.

~~~
r00fus
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.

~~~
hk__2
There is an equivalent to M$ Access in LibreOffice.

Open source alternatives use _standard_ formats, so it's really better than
xls/doc files, for short and, above all, long term.

~~~
justinpeet
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...](http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately-seeking-info-
pad.html)

(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)

