Microsoft Office 2013

[Reaper]

Originally Posted by elvis

Substituting in "Windows XP and Office 2003" would be an equally valid statement. Ditto for "Windows 2000 and Office 2000".

Seriously, show me a corporate office drone who's gained an ounce of extra productivity with all of these new releases?

Microsoft: re-selling you the same stale crap for over a decade.

Sorry, I can't fully agree there. Windows 7 was a huge fix over windows xp. Much more stable, secure and useful.

[power]

Originally Posted by Reaper

Sorry, I can't fully agree there. Windows 7 was a huge fix over windows xp. Much more stable, secure and useful.

Also Office 2007 was leaps and bounds ahead of 2003. 2010 was a refinement of 2007, I think 2013 might be another leap especially in the tablet space.

[stewbiee]

Originally Posted by power

Also Office 2007 was leaps and bounds ahead of 2003. 2010 was a refinement of 2007, I think 2013 might be another leap especially in the tablet space.

yeah for sure, i agree with that comment. but just hope that microsoft will add more themes into this version of office than just white.

[MR CHILLED]

Originally Posted by the scotsman

TO be fair, the ribbon interface introduced into Office 2007 definitely increased productivity, in my opinion at least.

I have not met one single person who actually likes it, so far. This is absolutely no lie, they say they are accustomed to the traditional menu system, like it and saw no reason to deviate so much. They will eventually get used to it of course because it will be forced on them in a corporate environment.

[elvis]

Originally Posted by Reaper

Sorry, I can't fully agree there. Windows 7 was a huge fix over windows xp. Much more stable, secure and useful.

Are you able to qualify any those statements? I'm genuinely curious to know the objective points to any of those metrics you just mentioned.

Having run both in production for a long time, the stability of them was never an issue. Security wise, I've always had things tied up nicely by AD and GPO (UAC was useless in that regard). And the usefulness of them was identical in that they were a functioning OS that ran applications for low end users.

I really didn't see an ounce of difference in any of those three metrics you just mentioned when it came to the literal thousands of users I've rolled out both versions for over the years.

Can you give me real world examples that you saw in a real production environment where there were improvements in those three items you mentioned?

[DavidRa]

Originally Posted by elvis

Can you give me real world examples that you saw in a real production environment where there were improvements in those three items you mentioned?

I'm fundamentally in agreement - for a normal user, there's really no big difference, and even for a power user the differences can be minimal. AD+GPO for 99% of the win, UAC adds an extra 1% (user has to be admin for a POS app because the company wont pay to reverse engineer the required permissions and it doesn't work with redirection).

However, I definitely noticed a reduction in my own effectiveness when I reverted from Vista/Win7 to XP - mostly around task switching, activation and creation (but then I know how to use the Windows key and Search). Nothing in Office, really, except the Ribbon - going back to the menus now is hard - but everyone is on one side or the other so I think that's a wash.

There was nothing stability-wise that I can recall - unless you want to count the 250+ XP patches vs the 100-odd Win7 patches - but it's not a fair comparison.

Now having said that the maturity of x64 Win7 (compared to the godawful hybrid XP/2003 mess that was XP x64) has certainly enabled a tiny subset of "big" applications to run a lot better. But that's a 1% or less group of users.

[Ethan W]

For some reason, Outlook 2013 doesn't load more than the oldest 120 or so emails from my Gmail account under IMAP. If I change it to sync only the last 12 months, it grabs the first 120 after this time last year and stops there. ...strange. Neither Outlook 2010 or Live Mail have this issue. Still have some work to do, I guess. Also, they seem to have removed the option to test an email account during the setup wizard. Which means every time I want to make a change, I have to send myself a test email...

Otherwise, I find the interface very nice to use and snappy, if not a little white. It also seems I'm not the only one that can't stand the capitalised ribbon headers.

Also, the cursor isn't lagging, it's a smooth slide as you type. Whereas other apps instantly move to the right of the current letter, Office 2013's cursor slides along. I quite like it.

[BalkanWarrior]

Originally Posted by MR CHILLED

I have not met one single person who actually likes it, so far. This is absolutely no lie, they say they are accustomed to the traditional menu system, like it and saw no reason to deviate so much. They will eventually get used to it of course because it will be forced on them in a corporate environment.

If you had never used any office products before and there were two computers sitting side by side, one with 2003 and one with 2007 interface I'm pretty sure you'd learn the 2007 one quicker.

I find the ribbon makes most things a little easier to find. I've also seen countless people bitch about new interfaces during my time in support roles but usually the main reason is that it's different and they don't know how to use it. People don't like it when things change, even if there are valid reasons for it to do so.

*Edit* On topic, I found that I couldn't open Excel files any more so I cracked it and uninstalled 2013, uninstalled 2010 then reinstalled 2010.

[MR CHILLED]

Originally Posted by BalkanWarrior

I find the ribbon makes most things a little easier to find. I've also seen countless people bitch about new interfaces during my time in support roles but usually the main reason is that it's different and they don't know how to use it. People don't like it when things change, even if there are valid reasons for it to do so.

That's true, people do not like change. But that doesn't automatically discount the fact that it may not actually be a better way to do things.

[BalkanWarrior]

Originally Posted by MR CHILLED

That's true, people do not like change. But that doesn't automatically discount the fact that it may not actually be a better way to do things.

It might not be however in my personal experience I use something like Excel very sparingly so never really learned how to do a lot with it. I find I can do more with it now then I used to because it's easier to find what I need and I don't have to Google so much to get my shit done.

[MR CHILLED]

If anyone is looking for a cheap 2010, this isn't bad...

"Micrsoft Office 2010 Home and Student 3 User Licence Family Pack - $104.50"

[NSanity]

Originally Posted by MR CHILLED

That's true, people do not like change. But that doesn't automatically discount the fact that it may not actually be a better way to do things.

I'm a fan of the menu's - because they encourage good document process.

And isn't Bill Gates famous for being called out on a feature that was in Office since 95 or something, that he was unaware of because of the nightmare of buried menu's in 2003.

Everything about the Ribbon created FAR less clicks to get to any option. Yes they moved, and yes 2010 should have been the ribbon that 2007 got - but hey, just like we had to go through Vista to get 7 - we had to go through 2007 to get to 2010.

Using 2003 now is like using XP. Its a step back in time and actually inhibits productivity due to the missing short cuts and the like. Yes you get the job done, it just takes a bit longer.

[soulblade64]

Originally Posted by the scotsman

Running it now. It's WHITE....EVERYWHERE IS WHITE.

It's just awful to look at

Yep, it looks like I'm looking at an interface designed in the mid 90's... Where there is spots of colour it's absolutely disgusting.

oh yeah, I'm also running on a Win 8 RP VM.

[darkanjel]

Originally Posted by elvis

Substituting in "Windows XP and Office 2003" would be an equally valid statement. Ditto for "Windows 2000 and Office 2000".

Seriously, show me a corporate office drone who's gained an ounce of extra productivity with all of these new releases?

Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Project, Infopath, PowerPoint, OneNote, from 2000 to 2010, you've honestly not seen a single extra bit of productivity? Never seen anyone use templates or table designs? Multiple Exchange mailboxes? Presence? Sharing? Sharing with Office Live? Email rules? Complex document properties? Search?

[HyRax1]

Originally Posted by darkanjel

Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Project, Infopath, PowerPoint, OneNote, from 2000 to 2010, you've honestly not seen a single extra bit of productivity? Never seen anyone use templates or table designs? Multiple Exchange mailboxes? Presence? Sharing? Sharing with Office Live? Email rules? Complex document properties? Search?

You must be one of the 1% of people that actually use those extra features.

All the third-party business integration I see with products suck as QuickR, Connections, OpenText, etc are all handled by third-party plugins anyway, and even then the vast majority of people out there adopt the email-style approach of double-clicking on a document in a CMS which detaches a temporary copy of the file, auto-launch into the default app for it such as Word and then when you make your changes and save and then close the app, the file is auto-checked back into the CMS, but that in itself is not actually a function of the app you were using - it's the CMS doing that. In other words, I could have used any Office suite to do that, not just MS Office.