Microsoft Office 12

I have used it for a few months. It really pumps up the usability. Was about time an office suite tried it. (I am, however, mainly a Word user. Can't really talk about the other products much.)

[Edited by - jfclavette on May 23, 2006 8:40:46 PM]

Downloading as we speak. Hopefully it can live side by side with Office 2003...if not, I dunno.

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Original post by Promit Downloading as we speak. Hopefully it can live side by side with Office 2003...if not, I dunno.

I was also hoping this. When when you install it you can choose from 'upgrade' or 'custom'. Upgrade does what you would expect and custom lets you choose from 'remove previous versions', install along side previous versions, and one other thing which I can't remember so you should be good.

Edit: all installed now! Oooh...Ahhh! So cool and sleek and new and easy to use! The new header footer system is really cool. Too much coolness to describe!!!

[Edited by - DigiDude on May 23, 2006 8:09:51 PM]

Wow. It turned out to be quite a bit different from what I expected. It's pretty cool, actually. I guess we'll see how it turns out in the long run with time.

Is installing this going to pooch my outlook 2003 pro install(along with word/etc)?

Woah, people praising Microsoft! What the hell is the 'ribbon' mentioned above?

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Original post by d000hg Woah, people praising Microsoft! What the hell is the 'ribbon' mentioned above?

This isn't slashdot; We aren't all MS haters [wink].

I think I may end up downloading this. My laptop has Office 2003, but I don't have anything on my desktop...

BTW Office developer Jensen Harris has a series of blog posts discussing the new UI. It's quite a fascinating description of the work that goes into Office UI.

My favorite new feature is the To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007 and the revised interface for managing tasks.

A cool new feature would be if the new Word could handle long documents without all sorts of problems and bugs!!! >_<

Oh, and of course, if it would use only open formats for all files.

Did you successfully activate it?
The 'Activation Wizard' keeps telling me that it can't find my internet connection and that i should try again later.

I heard last year that the new excel would give a major bump to the max number of rows (65k to over a million). Can anyone confirm this?

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Original post by d000hg Woah, people praising Microsoft! What the hell is the 'ribbon' mentioned above?

It's what replaces all the menus and toolbars. It has tabs and big pictures!

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Did you successfully activate it? The 'Activation Wizard' keeps telling me that it can't find my internet connection and that i should try again later.

I'm also having this problem. Maybe we aren't supposed to be ablt to activate it????

It realy does look very nice. Guess this is a good time to upgrade from Office 2000.

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Original post by DigiDude Quote: Original post by d000hg Woah, people praising Microsoft! What the hell is the 'ribbon' mentioned above? It's what replaces all the menus and toolbars. It has tabs and big pictures!

It looks like a normal toolbar to me. [grin]

Even moreso in this actual picture of it. Maybe it's just something I have to use to see if it's actually different or not.

I never thought I'd see the day where GDNet is excited about an office suite, personally.

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I heard last year that the new excel would give a major bump to the max number of rows (65k to over a million). Can anyone confirm this?

If you have more than 65 thousand rows in Excel, there is something wrong with you. You are probably using Excel as a Database.

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Original post by Ravuya You are probably using Excel as a Database.

While I agree that there is better solutions for databases that require more than 65k rows, I see no reason to why Excel shouldn't be used as such on small scales if it is done right.

you can't AFAIK, do financial reporting and analysis straight from Access. There are many times where 65k rows isn't enough (my job is the king of this). And contrary to thedailywtf crowd, I think Excel makes a good database as long as you aren't dealing with other apps (for the love of god don't import excel into a website or use it to access the company's DB). Considering most people are going to have to import into Excel anyway, might as well store your data there.

But believe me there are a lot of cases where you need more than 65k rows. In larger companies where everything is done on the international scale, doing an excel sheet on a simple invoice turns into a problem. I work with invoices with around 100k lines, if Excel upped their max I could do it all in one sheet without having to split anything into groups.

So back to my question, anyone know about the max upgrade?

Will things that I have currently installed, such as endnote 9, still work with word 12?

The "Welcome to Office 2007(Beta)!" wizard looked remarkably like the "Unresponsive program" one. I started Word 3 times to figure that out, guess I was biased about MS Betas [grin]

Anyway, it looks very nice and clean. Unfortunately the activation wizard seems to have some problems ove rhere too, guess the activation server is probably just overloaded today. As for the Excel question, you now have 1.048.576 rows to fill to your heart's content :)

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Original post by Ravuya I never thought I'd see the day where GDNet is excited about an office suite, personally.

Given all the usability discourse and enhancement that's gone into Office 12 2007, and how it's been documented via the aforementioned Jensen Harris blog, any software developer of client-facing applications (read: all of us, since even development tools and systems components developers have other developers as their clients) should be excited about Office 2007.

Coupled with the introduction of a fairly radical new widget in the Ribbon - context-sensitive, tab-based - as well as features like Live Preview and the Auto Toolbar (the little context-sensitive one that first appears very transluscent and grows more opaque as you move the mouse pointer closer to it), and a reorganization of Office functionality that should hopefully breed greater learnability and productivity (and who doesn't use Office, really?), Office 2007 actually is A Big Deal™.