Office 2007

Please stop me if I am mak­ing a fool of myself by over­flow­ing with gush­ing praise for this thing, but, seri­ously, the best $75 I ever spent on soft­ware. (Yes, you can get the lat­est Office Ulti­mate for $75 if you’re a stu­dent. Legit.)

The new ver­sion of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is gen­er­ally a usabil­ity won­der. I’m sure some­one will pub­lish a study to the con­trary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is per­fectly intu­itive to a non-Office lit­er­ate user. Yes, that is myself – I’ve bat­tled with OO.org for years, and am utterly con­vinced it sucks. I have occa­sion­ally fought with MS Office prod­ucts in this time, and bat­tled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve writ­ten over the last eigh­teen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) for­mat: I’ve basi­cally not used a word proces­sor for any­thing seri­ous in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word proces­sor at home for three years (on a hor­ri­ble lap­top), and not on my pri­mary desk­top com­puter for four, or pos­si­bly five. His­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive: I started using Win­dows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good rea­son to be try­ing to bring me back into the fam­ily, because I’ve been away for a long time.

I am as upset as the next web devel­oper about the Out­look team’s brain-dead deci­sion to switch back to Word as the pri­mary rich email ren­der­ing engine, but will wax lyri­cal about the new cal­en­dar­ing fea­tures in Out­look!! For they are greatly beau­ti­ful. Observe my three cal­en­dars (Organ­ised into: Per­sonal & Work; Uni; Church) lay­ered together here:

Outlook 2007 week calendars layered

Groove makes me shrug enor­mously, it does noth­ing use­ful for me. Unless it’s like Share­point only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet col­lab­o­ra­tive thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing col­lab­o­ra­tive soft­ware, I should start with Adobe’s Ver­sion Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Fire­fox eats all my mem­ory as is (screeny from yes­ter­day… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be both­ered tak­ing another):

Firefox using the better part of 1GB of RAM

The only rea­son I still use that bloody browser is its exten­sions sup­port: Fire­bug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset down­load gra­phy thingamijig:

Firebug in Net inspector action

It’s even bet­ter than Chris Pederick’s tool­bar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Fire­fox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.

Speak­ing of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB down­load. It doesn’t down­load a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Out­look, Pow­er­point, Excel, Pub­lisher, … and all the other ran­dom crap I installed but will prob­a­bly never use. Fantastic.

Every­thing is pretty fast (but it emphat­i­cally encour­ages you to install Win­dows Live Desk­top, and see­ing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty will­ingly, I fig­ured I may as well, and when you first install that index­ing makes every­thing chug) which is excel­lent — but I’m still look­ing to buy a new dual core 939 some­time soon. Graph­ics are fine because I have no inten­tion of upgrad­ing to Vista (read: need­ing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graph­ics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still rel­a­tively expen­sive, though.

Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your soft­ware because it’s not that good, but thanks for the dis­count, anyway!

# by Josh on March 7th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Pricy Vistas?

I seem to recall a lot of peo­ple whin­ing about how expen­sive Win­dows Vista is. I didn’t pay a lot of atten­tion at the time because it seemed a long way off (for me, it still is — I’ll prob­a­bly sit out until the sec­ond ser­vice pack before spend­ing money on it) but kind of accepted that it was going to be hor­ren­dously expen­sive when the time came.

And then today I took a look at OEM pric­ing of it (inci­den­tally, I was look­ing for some­thing else) and won­dered what on earth all the fuss was about. Vista Busi­ness is $190, and Ulti­mate weighs in at about $250. It occurred to me at that point that those who had been com­plain­ing have prob­a­bly never paid for soft­ware in their life. News­flash: XP Pro OEM has cost around $200 for the last cou­ple of years and I don’t hear any­one whin­ing about the cost of that.

Maybe I’m get­ting older and grumpier, but it seems like a lot of the Internet’s self-professed geeks really don’t have the fog­gi­est sense of real-world perspective.

# by Josh on January 29th, 2007 Tags: ,
| 2 Comments »

Office 12 — new breath of life?

A screenshot of Word in Office 12

Microsoft have released a series of press images from their Pro­fes­sional Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence 2005, some of which give shots of the new Office plat­form — cre­atively code-named “12” (yes, 2003 was 11). Whilst there hasn’t been much sig­nif­i­cant change to Office in recent years (dare I say since 97) aside from UI enhance­ments (2003 did that prop­erly, with a lit­tle bit of group­ware stuff thrown in on the side), this ver­sion looks as if it’s going to break that pat­tern. Cer­tainly, Vista’s inter­nal font-rendering engine must have some­thing to do with it, but it seems to me from the released screen­shots as though Office has changed, also, in the way it han­dles graph­ics and lay­out. Per­son­ally, I’m dying to see what jus­ti­fied text looks like in Word.

So, I’m a sucker for graph­ics. Hope­fully this upcom­ing release will reflect aes­thetic advance­ment in the doc­u­ments it pro­duces, as well as the inter­face that sur­rounds this. (Alas, there appears no hope of Microsoft natively embrac­ing PDF for­mat, as they seek to make Word doc­u­ments the ubiq­ui­tous for­mat. Even if it doesn’t dis­play prop­erly in other ver­sions of the same appli­ca­tion, or have font embed­ding. Doh.)

# by Josh on September 19th, 2005 Tags: ,
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