ActiveWin features a preview article of the upcoming MS Office 2003.
Office 2003 Beta 2 Preview
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
ActiveWin features a preview article of the upcoming MS Office 2003.
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
i hope it allows for change
I was suprised that in office XP MS did not give it the softer Icon look of windows XP, atleast in this one they have done that…and what is wrong with the blue?
Great advertisement, can’t wait till the final’s out…
Seriously, I’d hate to be a Linux zealot, but that crap is nowhere near objective…
must be…. all shades of blue ?
honestly, I know Windows user is suppose to be use the blue by now but this is just horrible to look at, I surely hope it can be changed to a more “eye friendly” setting.
It’s not like blue is the only color scheme that comes with windows. I use silver myself as I found it to be the most pleasing to MY eyes. There is also an olive color. And if you get sick of those there is always StyleXP and WindowBlinds which opens you up to thousands of other themes. Anyway, I’m sure the Office 2003 colors change according to your current color scheme.
I hope it’s really XML… I’d love to see more compatibility between OpenOffice and MSOffice… {evil grin}
I’ve got a comment to make..
“Microsoft’s ability to include a consistent interface in the installation of all its products is simply amazing”.. oh.. come on, it’s not really that hard…
Heh I don’t think writing to PDF will ever be included… you know, Adobe’s PDF format IS propietary, isn’t it?
Hmm I wonder how long PDFWriter for BeOS has been around.. heheheh
Does it really run in a Pentium 133 MHz machine?
With so many features, and requiring at least Windoze 2k.. I.. don’t… think.. so…
Doesn’t sound that great really, bar perhaps that CVS sounding type system whatever it was called. Is that new?
I wouldn’t pay the fortune they will ask for this, and I doubt many others will either. I still use Office 97 at work! And it’s awful. I wish they’d upgrade, it crashes all the time! That or let me switch to Openoffice.org..
PDF is an open file format, IIRC.
On word, the one app every (is forced to) use:
“Aside from the complete redesign of icons, there is not much change in the way Word works. But I am fairly pleased by that. Existing Word users (and there is really a lot of existing Word users out there) will not have to relearn the application just to type out the report they have to submit tomorrow to their bosses. One feature I really hope for would be the ability to save Word documents as PDF format, a feature that should have been included years ago.”
Can’t use pdf because MS don’t own that (i.e, “must kill”).
No competition = stagnation, overpriced.
MS are ripoff artists.
Office ’97 is the last version of Office that I will ever buy. I like it much better than recent versions of Star Office. We have Office 2K and XP on various machines at work, and there really isn’t anything innovative happening in those new versions.
All of the “user friendliness” features like autofill and menu hiding get turned off quickly. Everybody here hates the corroboration/proofreading features in Office XP because we have no use for them…it’s just more distractions on the screen.
Btw, if you work in financial services, autofill can really ruin your day when entering a couple hundred ticker symbols into a spreadsheet. Some tickers have similar letters and autofill will fill-in the last similar symbol entered. It’s virtually impossible to email spreadsheets to clients because of dead links to other files referencing other clients in the sheets (major confidentiality issues).
If you are using the “classic windows theme” Office is not blue. As for the 133MHz system requirement, I can say for sure if you attempt this you will smash something. Although still faster than some “other” office products, the beta is noticeably slower than Office XP. Word is slower, the Task Pane on the right takes up screen space, but it offers some cool features like the “research” panel with an Encarta lookup, better thesaurus, and a translation engine. It also has a new clip art search tool and support for a “shared workspace” feature that allows a central copy of a document to be worked on by a group of people. As the review said Outlook has been changed quite a bit, the “new account” wizard is more user-friendly, also including a “test account” button that will send itself an email. The new .pst format has better language support, Outlook also uses the same new “research” panel as Word. Overall most of the new features are aimed at better connecting corporations and project groups. It will probably prove to be useful.
“Microsoft’s ability to include a consistent interface in the installation of all its products is simply amazing”.. oh.. come on, it’s not really that hard…
well… its something the linux crowd have yet to achieve
It isn’t “impressive” anyway. Microsoft means a single company. One entity.
Linux is really a lot of people working asymmetrically, most of them on their own, and offering it free to anyone (although I’d really appreciate consistency).
well, the only reason for me, to use ms-products was the office suite, but taking a look on the new interface, I´m really scared using this office. If you have so many agents, so many colors… aso. Could you still work with that? What most people do with theire office, is to write letters.. is this still posible with office 2003?
🙂
the only thing I like about the new version is the new logo, in terms of the looks. As I don’t use Outlook, it practically nothing of interest for me. And as long as they can promise that the new XML format would take less space than it did with OpenOffice.org switch from binary formats – I would upgrade. Otherwise, I’m happy with Office XP.
Just one thing I don’t like about Office, although not that important, is that it doesn’t use native Windows widgets. Pre-XP, it was kinda a pain the arse when you use Windows Blinds or something of that sort, but with XP, it really look out of place. How about using native Windows widgets like Adobe did for Photoshop 7, Microsoft? Surely it would be too hard – you manage to do that for the Mac version…
or do large sections of this “review” sound like they were copied from a Microsoft press release?
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2.0 Beta 2 enables enterprises to develop an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can leverage relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently. The program provides a secure enterprise business solution that integrates information from various systems into one solution through single sign on and enterprise application integration capabilities, as well as flexible deployment options and management tools.
Didn’t they just ship Office XP last year? Do we really need another lump of bloated shiteware from the Evil Empire??
…wishing that Microsoft, just like Java, would go away…
I am thinking the same about native widgets. Although I turned off themes in XP, it’s just a little different look & feel than other windows apps.
One of the most annoying things is, that menu does not respect my MenuShowDelay setting, and so I need to wait 400ms (or click) before a submenu opens when hovering.
AFAIK, Outlook is (apart from toolbar and menubar) the only app which uses native widgets in its options dialog. So you can try to use a manifest file for it.
However, I don’t get it, why the Microsoft employees can’t use their own widgets and need to reimplement everything.