Mac Office 2008 Hits Private Beta

[matticus008]

This isn't really true, admittedly with LaTeX you can't change the font and stuff easily (but I'm sure you can if you want to), but it produces an output PDF, which you can then send off to be printed, or whatever you want to do with it.

PDFs are useless as an output format for collaboration and drafting. LaTeX does not produce meaningful output containing figures and tables, nor does it conform to required layout standards for documents in many industries (government documents and court pleadings, for example). It is not intended to be a word processor--it is a content engine, which then goes to the layout designers or publishers. It's the "send off" part that is called document finishing, and LaTeX doesn't do it at all.

You don't use Word or something with the result, otherwise you might as well write the document in Word in the first place.

You don't go straight from LaTeX output to the reader. Of course you don't use Word, but you're not done once you've got everything down in LaTeX. If you're writing a scientific article that can go in a simple FDF or PDF layout instruction with coordinates, that's great. But if you're working with complex layouts and in documents where the body text itself is all uniform (and therefore you start with templates), LaTeX doesn't save you any time, since all you're doing is replacing the text.

 

[dr_lha]

am i one of the few people actually looking forward to this?

i use Word. a lot. and i share my files. a lot. so i'm looking forward to an update to the app.

No you're not, trust me. I use Office every day and I am very much looking forward to this upgrade which looks much more "OS X" like than the current Office 2004. Intel native will be fine too, but with my current machines (apart from the mini maybe), Office 2004 runs great under Rosetta.

For those who don't need Office, fine, use NeoOffice (which is great, but still has the millstone of the old StarOffice around its neck in its odd way of working) or iWork. Sadly for those of us who use Macs at work those apps simply don't cut it yet, especially iWork (I tried once producing a galley proof paper for publication on Pages, what a joke).

Of course my anticipation of Office is probably due to the fact I won't have to pay for it as my work has a site license!

 

[Eraserhead]

PDFs are useless as an output format for collaboration and drafting. LaTeX does not produce meaningful output containing figures and tables, nor does it conform to required layout standards for documents in many industries (government documents and court pleadings, for example). It is not intended to be a word processor--it is a content engine, which then goes to the layout designers or publishers. It's the "send off" part that is called document finishing, and LaTeX doesn't do it at all.

You can format the margins and stuff, but I suppose you can also export from LaTeX to postscript and then use another application to finish it off if you want to, which is your point and is correct.

 

[dr_lha]

the ribbon is collapsible. moreover, it can adjust its size according to the size of your screen so that it won't take too much screen space. the ribbon interface, although i can't say it's innovative, but there certainly are a lot of new and powerful features in it. please dont judge it if you haven't tried it.

what i've observed is that, people who haven't tried MS Office 2007 but only seen screenshots of its interface, especially "Mac" people, are usually the ones who complain the most about "ugly interface" or "unfriendly interface" and so on.. and talk about the superiority of the alternatives, and keep wondering why other people (who obviously is using or have tried MSO2k7) love it.

Yeah, I have to admit I tried Office 2007 under Parallels and thought it was pretty nice. Took a while to get used to, and I'm not convinced about the huge "Office button", but the ribbon is pretty cool. The only real issue is that MS seem to have designed this interface only for Office, where they should use it across the board on Vista.

 

[NorCalLights]

I haven't done anything with VBA scripting yet, but I am very much uneasy about the idea of Excel without it and and doubly so about non-Excel spreadsheet software, so as long as it keeps working, you can pry my Office 2004 from my cold, dead hands.

I could be quite happy with another presentation program -- Keynote works for Al Gore and seemed nice on the demo -- and any responsive, Aqua-native word processor is sufficient for 90% of what I do, but Excel is the standard spreadsheet package to such a degree that there really are no practical alternatives if you need full compatibility. I use Apple Mail and Lotus Notes, so Entourage really isn't any concern.

From the NeoOffice website:

NeoOffice 2.1 Early Access contains a number of unique features including:

•Opening, editing, and saving of Microsoft Office 2007 Word documents
•Execution of Visual Basic for Applications macros in Excel documents
•Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets

I have a number of very complex Excel spreadsheets with lots of scripting that all run fine.

 

[irbdavid]

PDFs are useless as an output format for collaboration and drafting. LaTeX does not produce meaningful output containing figures and tables, nor does it conform to required layout standards for documents in many industries (government documents and court pleadings, for example). It is not intended to be a word processor--it is a content engine, which then goes to the layout designers or publishers. It's the "send off" part that is called document finishing, and LaTeX doesn't do it at all.

Firstly, revision control etc are generally done within the scope of the LaTeX source rather than the PDF output - there are several common tools to do this. I personally use a combination of an SVN repository and the 'latexdiff' command.

I don't understand your point about 'meaningful output...', what do you mean by this?

Does the software used by publishing companies to 'produce' books etc accept .tex files as input then? I could point you in the direction of many books that are, or appear to be, written exclusively in LaTeX, including statements in the forwards that confirm this.

I don't know of any journals, that explicitly DONT accept LaTeX documents for publishing, within the circles I frequent, while there are a minority that refuse to accept .doc files.

You don't go straight from LaTeX output to the reader. Of course you don't use Word, but you're not done once you've got everything down in LaTeX. If you're writing a scientific article that can go in a simple FDF or PDF layout instruction with coordinates, that's great. But if you're working with complex layouts and in documents where the body text itself is all uniform (and therefore you start with templates), LaTeX doesn't save you any time, since all you're doing is replacing the text.

I don't quite follow you here either - uniform body text? Surely though, a .tex file, because of it's nature as a markup language provides a much better starting point to generate a proper book/similar from than a .doc because it contains only formatting/stylistic info and not any content markup. An oversight perhaps, since it has that 'heading/subheading/section heading' stuff, but the kind of word documents that come my way daily never seem to use this, people just writing whatever formatting they feel like at any point in the document.

 

[irbdavid]

After saying all this, however, I'll still be buying a copy of 2008 when it comes out

OpenOffice is still kinda a mess, and 2004 is slow as a dog under Rosetta.

 

[matticus008]

You can format the margins and stuff, but I think I'm wrong, you can also export from LaTeX to postscript and then use another application to finish it off if you want to, which is your point and is correct.

Right. Of course all of that isn't to say that LaTeX isn't very good for authors (and particularly journalists and scholars), where it's probably better suited than Word, which I think was your point. It works very well for keeping authors off the publishing wagon and concentrating on getting their work done. This makes it faster for writers, and publishers also love it because they don't have to undo all kinds of strange formatting decisions made by the authors.

Also, being based on codes (like extremely old school Wordperfect or Wordstar), it's far easier to work with unusual characters or equations in LaTeX. I've never understood why Word doesn't allow simple keyboard entry like this. Alt codes and option-shortcuts aren't really the same.

 

[johnee]

now is this going to be the last office version for mac from microsoft?

 

[Freyqq]

the thing is..everything at my university is done in microsoft office format. If you've ever tried opening an office document in openoffice, you'd know that the formatting is never quite right. Therefore, people need microsoft office for that reason. Until they share formats or something I can't function without it.

Also, personally, office 2004 is a much better program than neooffice...worth 150$ since i use it every day.

 

[matticus008]

Firstly, revision control etc are generally done within the scope of the LaTeX source rather than the PDF output - there are several common tools to do this.

Right, but there's no advantage to this over a Word file, and a number of disadvantages.

I don't understand your point about 'meaningful output...', what do you mean by this?

LaTeX files don't give you a finished product if you're still editing them. What you see is NOT what you get (unlike in Word and InDesign). In my line of work, people need to know where pages and sections end in the finished formatting and work with drafts in the form they would be filed. Formatting is part of the process from the beginning, and not simply an afterthought, because the formatting affects content directly and internal referencing is done without direct quotes or anchors, where part of the content is a reference to page numbers and lines in the same document and others which are in parallel development. Furthermore, there's no need for the "time saving" markup of LaTeX, because nearly everything is produced from templates which are already fully formatted. LaTeX therefore offers no advantage, because we're already spending no time at all on the formatting, except a few tweaks at the end of the process. The medical, legal, government, and financial industries are all largely the same in this regard. LaTeX is not good with working within template confines, where certain sections are character-limited and others are physically length-limited, or where you can't rely on automatic breaks to distribute things properly. You need to see what the document looks like.

Does the software used by publishing companies to 'produce' books etc accept .tex files as input then? I could point you in the direction of many books that are, or appear to be, written exclusively in LaTeX, including statements in the forwards that confirm this.

Of course they do. But I'm not sure what your point is. LaTeX works great where authoring and publishing take place discretely. It does not work at all when you need to work with "production ready" documents at all stages.

I don't quite follow you here either - uniform body text? Surely though, a .tex file, because of it's nature as a markup language provides a much better starting point to generate a proper book/similar from than a .doc because it contains only formatting/stylistic info and not any content markup.

If you've already got a template and don't spend any time on formatting because it's wholly uniform, then there's no appreciable advantage to LaTeX, especially given the fundamental lack of WSIWYG quality to it. When a second group of people wants to control typefaces and layout, LaTeX is best. When the first group knows what they're doing and doesn't pass their work on to a finishing group, LaTeX is awfully inefficient and impractical. Switching to LaTeX in these professions would be a major step backwards.

 

[SPUY767]

TUAW has some screenshots here.

Judging by the screenshots, it looks to me like MS took more than a few pages out of the Apple UI handbook.

 

[Roller]

Animation tools, flow chart design, embedding and scripting, drawing tools, layering, and text placement options are all lacking in Keynote compared to PowerPoint. If you're using basic pictures and text boxes with bullet points, none of this really matters. But if you're presenting a complex scientific data set, you often need to work more into a slide than Keynote currently will allow.

Like I said, I love Keynote. I use it for nearly all of my presentations, and everything it can do, I think it's both easier and superior to PowerPoint. However, it is not as feature-complete as PowerPoint in the corners and niches where 95% of people never go. It doesn't need to be in order to be a great product. But PowerPoint has its uses and benefits.

It's true that you often need other apps to prepare charts, graphs, animations and such, as I do with my scientific and educational presentations. But Mac PowerPoint isn't much better in this regard, and Keynote's UI is so much cleaner that my work proceeds more quickly once I've prepared all the content.

Other than adding some animation tools (especially path-based animation) and a few other features, I'm happy with Keynote as it is. I'm rather have an uncluttered UI than a bloated program that tries to pack in every charting and other function, since I'll probably still have to use other tools anyway.

Unfortunately, files exported from Keynote to PowerPoint often need considerable tweaking, especially in build timings. So I use PowerPoint for presentations that I give at meetings where I can't use my own computer.

To be fair to MS, PowerPoint was first in a number of areas, such as Presenter Display. Competition is good, and I'm looking forward to Office 2008.

 

[notsofatjames]

no vb

no visual basic scripting will kill any business users of macintosh. lots of businesss rely on vb to run applications. Removing support for VB scripting is just another way for MS to keep market share, without making it look like it is... if you get what i mean. they say that they we can use applescript, but hundreds of business rely on vb, so they cant use it on intel macs. the business is left with two choices. run windows, or re-create all your spreadsheets, macros, formats etc to run on a different office suite.

for average joe, Pages and Keynote are fine IMO. I only ever use TextEdit at home.

and for who-ever asked what visual basic is.. its a programming language that is included with office (well was as of 2008), which is used to perform more functions than the standard set, or to do complicated calculations.
I remember learning it in school to write programs for school work. One of the easist languages i have ever learnt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_basic

 

[SPUY767]

no visual basic scripting will kill any business users of macintosh. lots of businesss rely on vb to run applications. Removing support for VB scripting is just another way for MS to keep market share, without making it look like it is... if you get what i mean. they say that they we can use applescript, but hundreds of business rely on vb, so they cant use it on intel macs. the business is left with two choices. run windows, or re-create all your spreadsheets, macros, formats etc to run on a different office suite.

As much as I love an use the bollocks out of AppleScript, it is not even close to a replacement for VB, it would take MS giving Apple unabated access into the API of Office. You couldn't even come close to re-writing some of my macros in applescript. This is why I hate MS, they could easily write a port of office for windows but they chose to release a pared down crap version for the same price.

 

[mflender]

Will this likely be the last release for the Macintosh?

Microsoft wouldn't have went through the painstaking process of converting Office from Carbon to Cocoa if it was going to cancel it. Ofiice 2004 would have been the last one.

 

[CoreWeb]

no visual basic scripting will kill any business users of macintosh. lots of businesss rely on vb to run applications. Removing support for VB scripting is just another way for MS to keep market share, without making it look like it is... if you get what i mean. they say that they we can use applescript, but hundreds of business rely on vb, so they cant use it on intel macs. the business is left with two choices. run windows, or re-create all your spreadsheets, macros, formats etc to run on a different office suite.

for average joe, Pages and Keynote are fine IMO. I only ever use TextEdit at home.

and for who-ever asked what visual basic is.. its a programming language that is included with office (well was as of 2008), which is used to perform more functions than the standard set, or to do complicated calculations.
I remember learning it in school to write programs for school work. One of the easist languages i have ever learnt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_basic

It was the first language I learnt. Now, though, I only use PHP, C/C++, and (recently, only slightly, really, just bragging here - insert a dozen more qualifiers) a programming language of my own invention meant for traversing a specialized database. I did use VB.NET for awhile, though.

 

[sushi]

As much as I love an use the bollocks out of AppleScript, it is not even close to a replacement for VB, it would take MS giving Apple unabated access into the API of Office. You couldn't even come close to re-writing some of my macros in applescript. This is why I hate MS, they could easily write a port of office for windows but they chose to release a pared down crap version for the same price.

Yes, no VB support is frustrating.

Maybe all of us who feel affected should provide feedback to Microsoft. Who knows, they might take notice.

Other companies can make comparable applications that run on both platforms. Evidentially, right now anyway, it is in the too hard box for Microsoft.

 

[72930]

Judging by the screenshots, it looks to me like MS took more than a few pages out of the Apple UI handbook.

Is that a good thing?

 

[deejemon]

*

 

[Onkelskrue]

Where do I sign up?

Thoughts? I don't need word since I use Neo Office, but a new Outlook client would be more than welcome.

Thougths?

Cheers,
Lars

 

[Evangelion]

A "lot" of Mac users are going to go sell their MacBooks and go buy a cheap HP, install some flavor of Linux and have to recompile their kernel to get wireless to work

What do you mean "recompile their kernel"? When was the last time you used Linux? 1998? Last time I recompiled my kernel was maybe in 2002, and that was because I wanted to do it, not because I had to do it.

They will simply continue to use the existing released version. Mac users (and average Windows users) don't use Linux for a reason.

What would that reason be?

For all but IT geeks and masochists - Linux on the desktop is a failure.

I beg to differ. Linux on the desktop works very very well indeed. It's very easy to use, things "just work" etc. etc. If Linux on the desktop is a "failure", then Mac on the desktop is a failure as well, since the two have more or less same number of users.

That said; I currently use only OS X, but I still like Linux as well.

 

[Evangelion]

I used Linux for many years, and finally gave up. Hardware support was a big issue no matter which distribution I used.

Actually, OOB, Linux has BY FAR best hardware-support of any OS out there.

Linux is a great OS, but it is not like OSX where everything just works.

Last time I used Linux everything "just worked". I had no problems with anything. But then I suffered a hardware-failure, so I went back to my Mac Mini, and that meant that my wife had to move from Linux to Mac as well. End-result? She hated it. It was too hard to use, everything was strange. She is tolerating it these days, but she still occasionally asks me "why is this thing so hard, when it was so easy in Linux?"

Most people do not want to compile anything to make things work

Where does this idea of "compiling" come from? I never, EVER compiled ANYTHING when I used Ubuntu. whenever I plugged some piece of hardware in to the machine, it just worked. No hassle, no problem.

and do not want to download a program to find later that it is missing a library that they now need to hunt for, and later find out that it clashes with something else. It is a nightmare.

Um, what you are describing is called "dependancy hell". It was solved years ago. It's like if I called Macs crap because I hated OS 8.

 

[dr_lha]

Actually, OOB, Linux has BY FAR best hardware-support of any OS out there.

Legacy hardware (i.e. OLD) maybe, but for new hardware Windows XP has the best support, and that is what really matters. Wireless "N" work on Linux? No. Accelerate Graphics card support? A mixed bag at best. The fact is that you can't just install Linux on any newly purchased PC and expect everything to work out of the box. If you believe that you are simply misguided. I know this because I administer 20 Linux boxes at work.

Last time I used Linux everything "just worked". I had no problems with anything.

OK. Try this: Plug a second monitor in. Does it "just work"? It does on a Mac and Windows.

How about changing monitors, does the automatically change to the best resolution if you upgrade? If not can you fix this without editing a text file?

Ubuntu is a great Linux OS, but its just not there yet in terms of "just working" compared to Windows (I'm specifically not bring Mac into this because we all know it works on a small subset of hardware).

 

[Evangelion]

Legacy hardware (i.e. OLD) maybe, but for new hardware Windows XP has the best support, and that is what really matters.

Windows has crappy support for even never hardware. Plug something in, and it will propably prompt you to feed it drivers.

Wireless "N" work on Linux? No.

Yes

Accelerate Graphics card support? A mixed bag at best.

I had no problems with 3D-graphics in Linux.

The fact is that you can't just install Linux on any newly purchased PC and expect everything to work out of the box.

Can you do that with Windows? No. I HAVE installed Windows on PC's. And if I don't prepare a driver-CD beforehand for all the components, it will simply not work. I don't have to do that with Linux, since it has built-in support for the hardware.

If you believe that you are simply misguided. I know this because I administer 20 Linux boxes at work.

Good for you! But that doesn't change the fact that my findings differ from yours.

OK. Try this: Plug a second monitor in. Does it "just work"? It does on a Mac and Windows.

I don't have Linux or second monitor at hand, so I can't test that. OK, try this: Take a Matrox vid-card and plug it in your Mac. Does it work? How about that Creative soundcard? NVIDIA vid-cards in SLI-setup?

How about changing monitors, does the automatically change to the best resolution if you upgrade?

Since I don't routinely change monitors, I have no firsthand knowledge.

And why is it that you seem to think that I'm attacking Mac or something? I'm not. I use it every day, and I love it. What I AM attacking against is this notion of "you need to recompile your kernel to get your hardware to work in Linux!".