From the commercial, it appears 14 year old boys are the target audience for the new Office suite.
Or maybe the MS marketing department is run by 14 year olds.
Makes you wonder if they are actually going to deliver a usable product…
The default font in Excel will be Wingdings, but there will be a separate compatibility pak for earlier versions?
Jim Cone
So much hype for 2 major and 1 minor Change in Excel.
1) Big Colorful Blob Becomes smaller Green Square -This should take care of people complaining about waste of space
2) Slicer
3) Sparkline
Microsft, stop wasting money and time on this crap
Put the effort into improving and extending your products
C’mon, where’s your sense of humor guys? “Don’t laugh, don’t talk, work!” is sooo pre 1900-01-01.
“C’mon, where’s your sense of humor guys?”
It disappeared when they tried to tickle us in the Rib-bone
This may be meant to be humourous, but if so it is a very poor attempt at humour. I am amazed that Microsoft still have the gall to even mention clippie, I would have thought that the embarrassment was so acute that they would just let it die. Even as a joke, it is embarrassing.
And to mention Powerpoint second, which any reasonable person knows is a waste of an application, shows that MS’ priorities are now all about glitz and superficial gloss, and less about real functionality. 2007 took many backwards steps in terms of functionality, efficiency and usability, and far too few forward steps (CF was NOT one of them). Word and Powerpoint seem to drive the direction of Office, and Excel and Access have to just fall in line because they are part of ‘an integrated Office suite’ (whatever that means), not the fearsome stand-alone apps that cut into the hearts of IT departments. I fear that 2010 will accelerate that trend.
Ok, allow me to so totally disagree.
This may be as simple as “is silly funny?”. Some, maybe quite many, think so. I think so. Everyone involved in the film knows it’s silly beyond reason, how can they not.
Some of you have been inside Microsoft and encountered the surprising amount of self irony in there, with very expensive videos to accompany. I read this as an attempt to test it out externally, and I for one do love both the humor and the idea of taking it to a broader audience. It is anyway absolutely not “instead of a better user interface” or whatever one might want, it is instead of yet another lousy toothless commercial. “Ding.wav, Oh, here’s a picture of my multi cultural grandson visiting the zoo, on my Windows Mobile, I’ll beam it up to the HP LCD picture frame on the counter via my intuitive Media Centre running Windows Vista …”
Outlook was pretty much rewritten in v 2003. Excel was pretty much rewritten in v 2007. It should be expected that Word and PowerPoint are next in line. Not my favorite apps either, Excel geek as I am with lost hope for vba and vbe, but sure, improve Word and PowerPoint!
And one may hate the concepts of the shared components, like graphics, smart art, the ribbon. Ok, that is at least good raw material for a reasonable discussion.
I’ll stop now :-) Best wishes Harald
I guess there is a reason Google has come so far so fast. MSFT used to be a company run by programmers. Then they thought they could break into (even control) content distribution. That’s when they became a company run by marketeers.
I don’t doubt there’s a lot of irony in MSFT. There was a lot of irony in the UK as it gave up its empire. For all I know there was a lot of irony in Rome just before the nice Germanic tribes came for a visit. Irony tends to go with self recognition of decay.
As for Excel rewritten, if so, they left a lot of legacy mistakes in place. For example, are there any compelling reasons the range arguments to SUMIF etc can’t be multiple area ranges? Or 3D references? Other than having no clue how to deal with workbook codenames in VBA projects, is there any reason Excel alone among all Windows applications (not just MSFT ones) can’t have multiple files open at the same time with the same filename? Since the Lotus Development Corp DataLens patents would have expired by now, is there any reason one can’t create named queries against external data sources then use those named queries in any function like it were a range or array WITHOUT having to load the query results into a worksheet range? How about lingering 2D functionality like being unable to use an advanced filter to populate a range in worksheet that isn’t the active worksheet? Or use references to ranges in other worksheets as data validation lists without having to refer to them using defined names? Or even something as basic as fixing Excel’s MOD function so it could return, say, 2 for =MOD(2^33,3) rather than #NUM!, bringing it up to IEEE 754 capability which every computer capable of running Excel 8 (97 for Windows, 98 for Mac OS) has supported via hardware FPU.
MSFT spends money on crap like this filmstrip rather than paying a few developers to fix functionality that Lotus 123 and Quattro Pro got right two decades ago. Why shouldn’t that anger Excel users?
And let’s not give MSFT undue credit for fixing the things in Excel that they did fix. The bigger grid? Unix/Linux spreadsheets had provided at least 512 columns and > 100K rows since the early 1990s. For that matter, WingZ had provided a default 32K by 32K grid which users could resize to grid with an equal or smaller number of cells, e.g., 1,024 columns by 1,048,576 rows (also from the early 1990s). For that matter, WingZ had an oversized navigation button on the right side of their menu, so even the concept of oversized buttons didn’t originate from MSFT. How about more levels of nested function calls, which finally allowed Excel to catch up with Lotus 123 Release 2 from 1986? Or more than 30 function arguments, also something provided by other commercial spreadsheets since the mid or late 1980s?
With the exceptions of lists then tables, Excel has been stagnant since Excel 97 (version 8) and VBA has been stagnant since Excel 2000 (version 9). All the other features added since Excel 97 have either been bug fixes (OLAP cube functionality and pivot table improvements in Excel 2000, statistics functions in Excel 2002 and 2003) or eyewash (colored worksheet tabs in Excel 2002, 8 years after Quattro Pro 5 had introduced them in 1993, full pathnames in headers/footers in Excel 2002, the ribbon in Excel 2007). In some ways Excel has retrogressed, e.g., discontinuing the XLODBC add-in which provided the SQL.REQUEST add-in function).
I suppose wise people have given up on MSFT making actual improvements in Excel, so expect nothing more than such silliness (and pointlessness) as this filmstrip. Such jadedness does make it easier to go along in this life.
At least this is better than MSFT’s Porn-n-Puke ad for IE8.
Seems MSFT had accepted the corollary to Mencken’s dictum that it’s impossible to underestimate the taste of the American people, then generalized that to the world as a whole. How else to explain the ribbon?
I agree with Harald that this may be an attempt to turn the internal MS twisted sense of humor outward. It is amuzing in its own way. But I’m not sure that it fills me with positive anticipation about the new Office release. Experience with the 2007 version, especially the things it cannot do, and the things it does wrong (i.e., incompatibly with previous versions), resets my expectations further downward.
wingdings? WINGDINGS!?!!
I love it. I’m such a geek…
Must be hard for MS though, Word and Excel users just don’t get passionate about the other’s product.
“is silly funny?”
Harald.. the reason it hurts is the same people when asked “Why cant we right click and customise the ribbon” – Answer back with “The problem is resources….”
So there are resources to produce 2 (and counting) filmstrips…to depict the “silly funny” side of a product before launch but no resource to give more functionality…
Hi guys,
Isn’t it funny ? Well I think it’s time to have fun for such kind of things, don’t u think !
We don’t care about the money spent (they’ve got so much, so who cares) or if it’s good or not. Well for me it is good.
But, did you noticed all the reference to so many good films (ok, I admit, for me at least):
– Men in black
– The Rock (last scene of the commercial)
– X-mens
– Matrix
Any others ? What do you think ? Tell me.
And, please just stop…thinking Excel for a few seconds (I admit this can be very very difficult), just have fun ;)
We will have time to discuss about pro and cons of this new (???) version of our favourite spreadsheet program.
Cheers !
Hi Dick/Experts,
This is off topic, excuse me.
Is there a way to get all the existing PDF drivers in a system and use one of them to convert to PDF?
Currently I have PDFCreator and I have to set a bunch of properties, declare variables of that class etc before I use them. Now if I wanted to do it dynamically how do I do?
Thanks for your time,
-dK
>>> We don’t care about the money spent (they’ve got so much, so who cares)<<<
Yes we care. MS are axing staff, and the ones they axe are developers, not many marketers. That means that less goes on improving the product even after the marketers have decided that more fluff is needed.
To Bill Gates
Never mind about the video clip, although a lot of what is said here is true. Maybe you should come back to your first love. Forget about the developing world and start thinking of the developers again!
I wish MS were run by marketeers, or better still developers, but actually its now run by sales people. There is a world of difference.
From the commercial, it appears 14 year old boys are the target audience for the new Office suite.
Or maybe the MS marketing department is run by 14 year olds.
Makes you wonder if they are actually going to deliver a usable product…
The default font in Excel will be Wingdings, but there will be a separate compatibility pak for earlier versions?
Jim Cone
So much hype for 2 major and 1 minor Change in Excel.
1) Big Colorful Blob Becomes smaller Green Square -This should take care of people complaining about waste of space
2) Slicer
3) Sparkline
Microsft, stop wasting money and time on this crap
Put the effort into improving and extending your products
C’mon, where’s your sense of humor guys? “Don’t laugh, don’t talk, work!” is sooo pre 1900-01-01.
“C’mon, where’s your sense of humor guys?”
It disappeared when they tried to tickle us in the Rib-bone
This may be meant to be humourous, but if so it is a very poor attempt at humour. I am amazed that Microsoft still have the gall to even mention clippie, I would have thought that the embarrassment was so acute that they would just let it die. Even as a joke, it is embarrassing.
And to mention Powerpoint second, which any reasonable person knows is a waste of an application, shows that MS’ priorities are now all about glitz and superficial gloss, and less about real functionality. 2007 took many backwards steps in terms of functionality, efficiency and usability, and far too few forward steps (CF was NOT one of them). Word and Powerpoint seem to drive the direction of Office, and Excel and Access have to just fall in line because they are part of ‘an integrated Office suite’ (whatever that means), not the fearsome stand-alone apps that cut into the hearts of IT departments. I fear that 2010 will accelerate that trend.
Ok, allow me to so totally disagree.
This may be as simple as “is silly funny?”. Some, maybe quite many, think so. I think so. Everyone involved in the film knows it’s silly beyond reason, how can they not.
Some of you have been inside Microsoft and encountered the surprising amount of self irony in there, with very expensive videos to accompany. I read this as an attempt to test it out externally, and I for one do love both the humor and the idea of taking it to a broader audience. It is anyway absolutely not “instead of a better user interface” or whatever one might want, it is instead of yet another lousy toothless commercial. “Ding.wav, Oh, here’s a picture of my multi cultural grandson visiting the zoo, on my Windows Mobile, I’ll beam it up to the HP LCD picture frame on the counter via my intuitive Media Centre running Windows Vista …”
Outlook was pretty much rewritten in v 2003. Excel was pretty much rewritten in v 2007. It should be expected that Word and PowerPoint are next in line. Not my favorite apps either, Excel geek as I am with lost hope for vba and vbe, but sure, improve Word and PowerPoint!
And one may hate the concepts of the shared components, like graphics, smart art, the ribbon. Ok, that is at least good raw material for a reasonable discussion.
I’ll stop now :-) Best wishes Harald
I guess there is a reason Google has come so far so fast. MSFT used to be a company run by programmers. Then they thought they could break into (even control) content distribution. That’s when they became a company run by marketeers.
I don’t doubt there’s a lot of irony in MSFT. There was a lot of irony in the UK as it gave up its empire. For all I know there was a lot of irony in Rome just before the nice Germanic tribes came for a visit. Irony tends to go with self recognition of decay.
As for Excel rewritten, if so, they left a lot of legacy mistakes in place. For example, are there any compelling reasons the range arguments to SUMIF etc can’t be multiple area ranges? Or 3D references? Other than having no clue how to deal with workbook codenames in VBA projects, is there any reason Excel alone among all Windows applications (not just MSFT ones) can’t have multiple files open at the same time with the same filename? Since the Lotus Development Corp DataLens patents would have expired by now, is there any reason one can’t create named queries against external data sources then use those named queries in any function like it were a range or array WITHOUT having to load the query results into a worksheet range? How about lingering 2D functionality like being unable to use an advanced filter to populate a range in worksheet that isn’t the active worksheet? Or use references to ranges in other worksheets as data validation lists without having to refer to them using defined names? Or even something as basic as fixing Excel’s MOD function so it could return, say, 2 for =MOD(2^33,3) rather than #NUM!, bringing it up to IEEE 754 capability which every computer capable of running Excel 8 (97 for Windows, 98 for Mac OS) has supported via hardware FPU.
MSFT spends money on crap like this filmstrip rather than paying a few developers to fix functionality that Lotus 123 and Quattro Pro got right two decades ago. Why shouldn’t that anger Excel users?
And let’s not give MSFT undue credit for fixing the things in Excel that they did fix. The bigger grid? Unix/Linux spreadsheets had provided at least 512 columns and > 100K rows since the early 1990s. For that matter, WingZ had provided a default 32K by 32K grid which users could resize to grid with an equal or smaller number of cells, e.g., 1,024 columns by 1,048,576 rows (also from the early 1990s). For that matter, WingZ had an oversized navigation button on the right side of their menu, so even the concept of oversized buttons didn’t originate from MSFT. How about more levels of nested function calls, which finally allowed Excel to catch up with Lotus 123 Release 2 from 1986? Or more than 30 function arguments, also something provided by other commercial spreadsheets since the mid or late 1980s?
With the exceptions of lists then tables, Excel has been stagnant since Excel 97 (version 8) and VBA has been stagnant since Excel 2000 (version 9). All the other features added since Excel 97 have either been bug fixes (OLAP cube functionality and pivot table improvements in Excel 2000, statistics functions in Excel 2002 and 2003) or eyewash (colored worksheet tabs in Excel 2002, 8 years after Quattro Pro 5 had introduced them in 1993, full pathnames in headers/footers in Excel 2002, the ribbon in Excel 2007). In some ways Excel has retrogressed, e.g., discontinuing the XLODBC add-in which provided the SQL.REQUEST add-in function).
I suppose wise people have given up on MSFT making actual improvements in Excel, so expect nothing more than such silliness (and pointlessness) as this filmstrip. Such jadedness does make it easier to go along in this life.
At least this is better than MSFT’s Porn-n-Puke ad for IE8.
Seems MSFT had accepted the corollary to Mencken’s dictum that it’s impossible to underestimate the taste of the American people, then generalized that to the world as a whole. How else to explain the ribbon?
I agree with Harald that this may be an attempt to turn the internal MS twisted sense of humor outward. It is amuzing in its own way. But I’m not sure that it fills me with positive anticipation about the new Office release. Experience with the 2007 version, especially the things it cannot do, and the things it does wrong (i.e., incompatibly with previous versions), resets my expectations further downward.
wingdings? WINGDINGS!?!!
I love it. I’m such a geek…
Must be hard for MS though, Word and Excel users just don’t get passionate about the other’s product.
“is silly funny?”
Harald.. the reason it hurts is the same people when asked “Why cant we right click and customise the ribbon” – Answer back with “The problem is resources….”
So there are resources to produce 2 (and counting) filmstrips…to depict the “silly funny” side of a product before launch but no resource to give more functionality…
Hi guys,
Isn’t it funny ? Well I think it’s time to have fun for such kind of things, don’t u think !
We don’t care about the money spent (they’ve got so much, so who cares) or if it’s good or not. Well for me it is good.
But, did you noticed all the reference to so many good films (ok, I admit, for me at least):
– Men in black
– The Rock (last scene of the commercial)
– X-mens
– Matrix
Any others ? What do you think ? Tell me.
And, please just stop…thinking Excel for a few seconds (I admit this can be very very difficult), just have fun ;)
We will have time to discuss about pro and cons of this new (???) version of our favourite spreadsheet program.
Cheers !
Hi Dick/Experts,
This is off topic, excuse me.
Is there a way to get all the existing PDF drivers in a system and use one of them to convert to PDF?
Currently I have PDFCreator and I have to set a bunch of properties, declare variables of that class etc before I use them. Now if I wanted to do it dynamically how do I do?
Thanks for your time,
-dK
>>> We don’t care about the money spent (they’ve got so much, so who cares)<<<
Yes we care. MS are axing staff, and the ones they axe are developers, not many marketers. That means that less goes on improving the product even after the marketers have decided that more fluff is needed.
To Bill Gates
Never mind about the video clip, although a lot of what is said here is true. Maybe you should come back to your first love. Forget about the developing world and start thinking of the developers again!
I wish MS were run by marketeers, or better still developers, but actually its now run by sales people. There is a world of difference.
Please can we have a better chase sequence in the next clip? ref Italian Job 1 or 2, any transporter, See here for others (http://www.moviesforguys.com/articles/top10chases.shtml)