Office 2010

[Dark Black]

Horrible interface, more from the Microsoft anti-productivity suite.

LibreOffice / OpenOffice for me (or if I reallyneed to use an MS product, Office97 - which works fine).

[John Antell]

To my mind the problem with Outlook (all versions) so far as email is concerned, is that it has no equivalent of Gmail's conversation view.

I.E a view where messages are presented in chronological order with quoted text suppressed to avoid duplications.

The only client that I know which has this is Thunderbird with an add-on.

[AtW]

In the case of the ribbon, most people who use it and don't deliberately not learn it seem to end up liking it, so MS probably have got it right. For people like AtW who take 20 years to learn how to use menus, well there is no helping such people.

I am the customer - I pay Microsoft for that work and it is me who decides whether to upgrade or not - Office 2003 works fine for me, there are no good reason to upgrade to 2010 at all, full stop.

Even final addition of Excel's ability to handle more than 64k rows does not tempt me since anyone who has got that much data should not be using Excel in the first place.

There are no reasons whatsoever why not to have optional old menu styles - it's none of Microsoft's business to make me learn their new days - at the end of the day it's just interface mapped to execute same functions.

[Sysman]

I am the customer - I pay Microsoft for that work and it is me who decides whether to upgrade or not - Office 2003 works fine for me, there are no good reason to upgrade to 2010 at all, full stop.

From what I was reading last year a lot of corporates think the same way. They aren't buying because they don't want the cost of retraining.

Even final addition of Excel's ability to handle more than 64k rows does not tempt me since anyone who has got that much data should not be using Excel in the first place.

In the corporate world you will always come across some numpty who will use Excel like that, so I can see the value here. LibreOffice can do a million rows.

There are no reasons whatsoever why not to have optional old menu styles - it's none of Microsoft's business to make me learn their new days - at the end of the day it's just interface mapped to execute same functions.

More nannying from MS I'm afraid. One could expect it in the Win7 Home editions, but you get the same nannying in Ultimate.

[Spacecadet]

If you want to do ad hoc analysis on a lot of data and you need to do it quickly - i.e. not wait for a full BI implementation, then the later versions of Excel give you the tools to do it. Excel 2010 plus power pivot is a very powerful tool for getting results quickly. Combine this with the data mining functionality and you've got a feature rich data analysis tool
I'd love to see you try to do that with 2003

And there is a perfectly good reason why microsft shouldn't give you the old menus - they would then have to maintain and support twice as many menu systems!

[TykeMerc]

right click on the ribbon and select "Minimise the ribbon"

That hides it, it doesn't make it narrower.

And there is a perfectly good reason why microsft shouldn't give you the old menus - they would then have to maintain and support twice as many menu systems!

Alternatively they could have stuck with the 2003 menu system and not implemented the ribbon at all, just added to the menu's. Same effect and no need to spent ages developing the ribbon.

[doodab]

What's people impressions of office 2010 so far?

Seems exactly like the last version to me, except that OneNote is much improved. With Excel & Word I can't tell the difference.

[AtW]

And there is a perfectly good reason why microsft shouldn't give you the old menus - they would then have to maintain and support twice as many menu systems!

That's trivial task considering they have all commands documented - a few interns could do that job.

In fact there are plugins that show old menues - very very close to original, but not good enough sinc eyou have to bloody switch to menu tab on this stinking ribbon.

Ribbon tulip should have been optional, maybe turned on by default with old menues available at click of a button.

[PAH]

Open Office has everything I need or want.

I think it's been about 10 years (Office XP) since MS Office became feature complete and all the newer versions are just to milk the mugs that have to have the latest and 'greatest'.

Now they're trying to get people 'to the cloud' with their Live Office stuff, so MS can charge them to access their own information, and worry about who else is also getting access unintentionally.

Just because they polish a turd and call it a truffle doesn't mean you should swallow it.

[doodab]

I think it's been about 10 years (Office XP) since MS Office became feature complete and all the newer versions are just to milk the mugs that have to have the latest and 'greatest'.

I'm inclined to agree with that, I only bother to upgrade cos it's in the MS action pack. I think one of my machines now has 3 different office versions on it. it does seem to have got cheaper though,

Now they're trying to get people 'to the cloud' with their Live Office stuff, so MS can charge them to access their own information, and worry about who else is also getting access unintentionally.

Office live actually quite handy for some things, and it's better than Google docs IMO, especially for spreadsheets, and it has OneNote which I use probably more than anything else in the suite.

I think with regards to data security you're always going to have a cloud hanging over the cloud, although as someone who signed up for hotmail before MS bought it, as well as having had at least one machine continuously online and publicly accessible since before it was feasible to have it located in your own house, I think I've pretty much decided the risks are worth the convenience.