Where your Uncle Dave works, our IT department (a group who makes Mordac look like a saint) has us use Office 2003 on XP. At home, I still use a copy of Office 2000. I’ve tried newer versions, but am annoyed at the seemingly gratuitous UI changes MS loves to make, plus I haven’t needed anything the new versions add. I’ve tried the assorted free ‘replacements’ like OpenOffice and others and found them impressive but wanting. I just find MS’ offering extremely easy to use and well designed for the things I do. For now, I’m sticking with what I have.
What do you think of Office? What version are you using? Planning to upgrade? What about the online alternatives like Google’s? Will you try out/start using MS’ online version? Given this article’s final point, why would anyone buy the upgrade?
It’s difficult to overstate the success of Microsoft Office. Calling it one of the best-selling tech products of all time is a bit like calling Michael Jackson a very popular musician—it’s certainly accurate, but it woefully misses the mark. According to Microsoft, more than 500 million people around the world use the Fantastic Four of productivity apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
[..]
Office 2010 offers lots of new features and several user-interface improvements over previous versions. […] Still, as I tested out the new version, I couldn’t help wonder about Office’s future. In its last couple of earnings reports, Microsoft has reported rare declines in revenue from sales of Office. The company blames the sluggishness on weakness in the economy—a reasonable explanation, though one that perhaps masks a larger malaise. For one thing, Office’s success has bred a kind of inertia. Once you’ve grown used to a certain version of Word—and can do pretty much everything you need to do with it—why would you ever need the next version?
[…]
So the next version of Office looks to be an improvement on the 2007 edition—and with the Starter Edition and great new Web apps, it could even succeed in staving off competition from free online rivals. That sounds great for Microsoft, except for one thing: In trying to win the war against free apps, Microsoft will have had to emulate them. You used to have to pay several hundred dollars for a copy of Office. Now, you don’t really have to. Online and in new computers, Microsoft will give away a slate of productivity apps that, for most people, will be good enough. And thus, the question remains: Does anyone really need to buy a new version of Office anymore?
UPDATE: Commenter AC_in_Mich mentioned that in the latest versions, the majority of the changes to Office relate to collaboration on documents. Exactly how often do multiple people actually work on a single document? Is this really something that goes on a lot? I’ve never seen it in the wild.
31,
thats saying a lot about Office, considering the CRAP with windows..
#30 Your point is completely irrelevant. Other apps are free to do exactly the same, but you single out MS for making use of OS features that any other office and productivity app is free to also use.
ECA, maybe I overstated it, but I think Windows and Office are tightly linked.
Uncle Dave, you asked about collaboration.
Yes, lots of people use it. I worked in an area in our Engineering department for a few years where we did a lot of technical standards writing and prepared a lot of RFIs and RFPs. These were invariably group efforts with very large documents with large quantities of technical stuff in them. Collaboration functions are a necessity in such an environment.
Our sales department does a lot of sales proposals to large businesses and responses to RFIs and RFPs. They also live or die by collaboration functions.
Office 2010 makes my eyes hurt. Its interface is cluttered, it has a bazillion icons now, and oddly enough the important most used controls are tiny and out of the way, and the least important ones are bigger.
Its backwards compatibility with older sharepoint is ZERO, and of course its ridiculously expensive, just like the operating system it runs on.
34, qb..
TOTALLY..
Even in win 95 game makers would make games, and they would CRASH..
MS would buy the game, make a few changes(bad ones(mech warrior 4)) and it WOULDNT crash as often.
MS made the Language that MAKES windows work.
For every FAULT in the programming language, it ADD’s FAULT to windows. For every FAULT in windows, is a FAULT in OFFICE.
Work’s still running ’03, I’m still running ’03 at home. No need to upgrade.
I said I hated OO. OO had the look of page-setting software. I preferred the look of Word, as it did not show margins and empty space around it in normal view.
I use OO because it is free. If I had to use Word, I would use 2000 as that was the last version without activation and has all the required features.
Not a chance in hell. I’d rather eat my own gun. OS X comes with TextEdit and I’ve never needed anything else.
I get it through Technet, so yes.
I don’t think the average Office 2007 user should be in a hurry to upgrade, but it would be a good upgrade if you’re still running 2003 or earlier.
While I didn’t find the changes they made to Word very useful, and even counterproductive at times (losing the ability to customize the interface sucks), I’ve got to admit they worked miracles in PowerPoint. PowerPoint now allows you to create stunning art in seconds, and as a graphic designer who is often given the task of adding some visual gloss and finish to existing presentations made by our marketing people, I find it a huge improvement over Office 2003 and below, and expect the 2010 version to be even better.
I usually have kept up with the versions once I could buy them, getting the Student editions since I’m still in school.
The general point with the Ribbon is that it seems to make oddball features easier to find that were three or four levels deep in the menus.
#3
To be fair, the changes were not just to do things differently. MS claims that it was easier for people that had never used Office. Of course, it is 1000 times worse for people that have used Office but that is another story.
#22
RE: Excel. Sorry but you are wrong there. Many people still use Excel to analyze data that isn’t just accounting data. Excel has features that let it tap into OLAP cubes to leverage its Pivot table feature.
As with most upgrades of Office since ’97, generally the biggest reason to upgrade is Outlook. I like Outlook’s conversation settings and a few other features but I still hate the Ribbon. I’ve used every version of Office since Microsoft created the very first bundle. I *like* that the same feature from one version to the next was in a predictable place. I do not mind a little bit of work on a new version having to go search for where they put a few things but the Ribbon is an abomination in that regard. There are no visual clues as to where you might find something and there are a veritably invisible buttons that do stuff that you would never think to investigate. If given a choice between a menu bar and the ribbon, I’d take the menu bar.
I’m with you Thomas. I built some great apps in Excel years ago so I have a soft spot for it. In fact I think it’s the best piece of software Microsoft has ever built. I think there are superior (or at least practical) options to Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. There is nothing that can match Excel yet.
You said something very savvy which I hadn’t thought of before. The ribbon is for people who have never used Excel. Are those people all living on a Doukhobor colony? Office is almost “standard” on Windows, and that’s 95% of the market.
Apparently is a way to make Office look normal – no ribbons, old fashioned toolbars, normal keyboard shortcuts, etc. However, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to do, in fact they discourage it.
BTW, I know a lot of people who write technical books and articles. Not a single one uses Word, or any other word processor. These books have indexes, tables of contents, sidebars, diagrams, APA style references, etc. The books are published in multiple formats. They all use text editors, version control tools (Git, Mercurial, SVN, etc), and a “build pipeline” just like in software development. Go figure.
Ok, so MS Office, reproduces their proprietary formats better, is more integrated, and permits faster system developement. It is also more vulnerable to attack, more expensive, and worst of all contributes to MS’s hedgemony over the industry. Open Office continues to be my first choice for personal and educational use. But for professional use and systems integration you’ve got to use M$, nothing else developes faster or facilitates adaptation to exsisting infrastructures better.
As far as I can see 99% of folk were happy with what they used with Windows 3.1. I have seen three upgrades of MS Office since I first used it but yet to see anything in it that I would want/need to use that wasn’t in Word Star!
Outlook? Outlook Express is a better email client and Lotus Organiser was a better Address Book!
And like 85% (?) of the rest of MS Office users I very rarely use the other apps.
Back in the day, I switched from Office 97 to Office 2000 because it was ah…, “free”. Frankly, I was content with Office Ver. 6
The local school system got a free upgrade to 2007 but we aren’t going to get one to 2010 so forget that. Money is tight. There are free plug ins from MS that allow you to open files in 2003 that used the latest file types. A few people ended up being stuck with those though it doesn’t really seem to matter.
I installed a copy of 2007 on my latest machine which has 9 gig of ram but the old computers at school didn’t have any problems with 2007 as long as they could run XP. Okay they have at least 512 meg of ram. You can certainly make Power Point presentations that will choke these machines.
I stick Open Office on a lot of computers. It’s free and does just about everything most people want. It looks a little different. I haven’t had any major problems using Open Office created files with 2007 but I have Open Office save in the Windows formats.
One major reason is that I have found that sometimes files made with MS Office, that won’t open in MS office, will open in Open Office and I can then save them nice and clean with the glitch was gone.
My net book only has Open Office even though I could easily and legally install 2007. I can use Open Office or Google docs and that is enough.
I may upgrade MS Office at some point but not this year. Maybe not next year.
#46
I know quite a few people that write million and in some cases billion dollar proposals for government contracts and they all use Word. I’m not sure your point or mine proves anything other than there are different standards out there. Btw, Word can do ToCs, References, Sidebars and embed diagrams not that it matters. Word is word processor that is powerful enough to use as a desktop publishing application. Back in the day, it was Harvard Graphics that ruled the long document world but its word processing abilities were awful.
If you don’t use any of the features in Office, then don’t buy Office. But don’t claim that OpenOffice is just as good and then turn around and say you don’t use any of the features in Office. As someone once said, “A bargain isn’t a bargain unless you need it.” Paying nothing for OpenOffice when you won’t use any of the features is still a net loss IMO.
I don’t use or need Office; I make do with Open Office. Except for a few upgrades, I would be perfectly happy using ProWrite, which ran on my old Commodore Amiga 3000 with a 25MHz 68030 CPU. Today’s CPUs have one hundred times the clock speed, double or quadruple the data width and multiple cores — why doesn’t the software seem any faster? The only area where today’s machines are noticeably faster is in displaying pictures, animations and video. And they’re certainly not any more convenient.
I refuse to use Office, at home. So I won’t get dependent on it. But it strikes me that every time they come out with a new version. Microsoft ensures years worth of patches to fix all the new problems that brings along. Where, theoretically, an older version would eventually have 99.9% of the bugs and flaws worked out. New features almost always create new security problems. Because their beta testers aren’t told to be black hat hackers. To see what they can exploit. M$ is only interested in software hiccups.
All this revising, kind of reminds me of when I owned a copy of Chess Master 1000. And how ever year it got renamed to “2000”, “3000”, and so on. But I seriously doubted that much improvement was really be done. Mostly just the packaging was being “updated”. So shouldn’t MS Office, merely have simpler version numbers. Rather than glomming off of the year it happens to come out? M$ doesn’t do that with Windows anymore, because it might be too confusing to have more than one of their products so named. Which shows you it just all marketing crapola.
As a military sysadmin type, I have to say that despite the bluster of OO, MS Office with a Sharepoint Server has been the ideal solution. In an environment where multiple personnel have to access a document there really is no other option. SP is a broadly functional webpage-based SQL system that blows traditional sharedrive-based file sharing to the moon.
As the son of very un-tech types, I can understand the confusion that happens when things change.
52,
ditto..
Has it become any faster to type a letter?
Has graphic word processing REALLY changed or gotten better, THEN 20 years ago?
NOPE.
their newest version “Pages” seems to work the best