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posted by Rob on 26 Oct 2009
Windows 7 is out. 'They' say it's better than Vista. But a lot has happened since Vista was launched. For instance, I've tried Mac OS and decided that I like it better. The pain is that if you want to do businessy stuff, you really can't beat Microsoft Office. I'd probably be fine with a word processor other than Word - just about - but if I'm doing spreadsheets, I want Excel. And Access, if you happened to get really familiar with it - which I did - is darned handy. Especially if you team it with Excel. But that big ribbon thingie in Office 2007 (and 2010) knocks me back to being a beginner again. I know the program has the obscure function I want, but I can't find it. So I'm seriously considering having a little Windows XP simulation running on my Mac, and in it, running my favourite Office application so far: Office 2003. It's fast, it does everything, and I already know how it works. It has to be the way of the future. (Although I'm sticking with Outlook 2007: no ribbon, and it almost works, unlike previous versions.)
Comments: 4
If Bill was still in charge, I reckon he would've sent out one of his famous 'tidalwave' memos, which would have said something along the lines of "we can't keep using a combination of herculean marketing effort and underhand bully-boy tactics to continue to foist a new-and-improved Windows OS on the world".
Instead, what he might have said was - most people like to use Office, let's offer to keep Office essentially the same (with the odd bit of under-the-hood tweaking, and the occasion extra bit of functionality) in return for a regular fee. OK, that looks like a protection racquet, but it's essentially an insurance payment that you make monthly, by DD, to ensure that you continue to leverage your knowledge of Excel, Access, Word, etc. - and we'll keep it supported and bug/virus free.
Microsoft then switches to a huge corporate fee-based revenue model with minimal support/development costs.
That's the way Bill would've done it. But I'm afraid Bullmer and Co. are trapped in their corporate ways, doomed to mutate into IBM, but without the lucrative patent-pending research to underpin it...
Posted by: Mark Thornton | October 26, 2009 11:23 PM
a couple of things I like about the version of new-office we ordered, first it comes with license to install it on 3 PCs, second it was cheap enough to fall into the buy-it-now instant purchase decision category.
I also struggle with the ribbon thing and learned most of my excel mad-skills from Rob, which have been more useful than all that nonsense about hidden Markov models
Posted by: Emma H | October 27, 2009 08:36 AM
@EmmaH - That will be the Home and Student edition, the licence for which specifically excludes it from being used for commercial purposes. If you are using Office in a business, the cost is still uncomfortably high.
Rob - I'm assuming you've checked out Office 2008 for the Mac. No ribbon, so it looks a lot like Office 2004, but runs natively so no virtual machine. Entourage is no Outlook, but it can talk to Microsoft Exchange if that is a requirement. Personally I prefer iWork or OpenOffice as they take up less space, but am fully aware of people not wishing to deal with file format compatibility issues.
- Neil.
Posted by: Neil Ford | October 27, 2009 11:16 AM
Neil: Excel 2008 for the mac doesn't run macros, and you can't create and export an xml schema. Those are the two things I use Excel for. Fail! Although a friend told me that the next mac excel iteration will be much better, phew.
Posted by: Em | October 27, 2009 01:22 PM