Microsoft: Office 365 is a "Google butt-kicker"

I'd settle for an Office 2010 killer

Since office 2003, it's all been downhill.

I sit looking at Office 2007 pondering where all the useful functions have been "hidden" on the "user friendly" (read dumb) ribbon bar.
Menus worked, so why ditch them in favour of an incomprehensibly-ordered pile of icons?
Searching help for "turn off ribbon" yeilded nothing. A bit like the interface.
A word processor or speadsheet is not a web-application or online game and exposing these applications to the fad, sorry, cloud, just makes them inherantly insecure. Surely the NotW hacking scandal and SONY's woes have taught everyone that ANYTHING can be hacked and simply not putting it in a public network in the first place would be a better idea.
We already have "cloud" email, it's called gmail, Livemail, Yahoo mail, AOL etc. so apart from making the top of the fad list and bottom of the data security list, what is achieved? Another version of Office not worth upgrading for.

By cheysuli on 14 Jul 2011

I disagree cheysuil, I think MS have done a really good job with office, they could go down the EA Fifa route and just keep releasing the same piece of software and raking in the money, it was a brave move to make such an overhaul, which I think has paid off for the majority of users.

I was against the ribbon at first but once you use it for a few weeks/months it really does become second nature, change is always difficult.

I wouldn't call it dumb either, available options change based on the context of use and I'd take a guess from my own experience and say 90%+ of people find all the functions they will ever need with the standard ribbon layout, half the people in my office can't use vlookup let alone anything more advanced!

In 2010 you have a greater ability for customisation though so you might try having a play with that and seeing what you think.

By Deano on 14 Jul 2011

Disagree too

I also disagree. The Ribbon is a fantastic piece of UI design.

For far too long UI design has been done by the super geek coding monkeys which results in total mess that only once you've spent years with it do you know how to find your way around.

Although I do agree with your view of the cloud. It's got huge advantages but even bigger disadvantages. We do like to overlook things such as data security in our rush for the next big thing.

By Grunthos on 14 Jul 2011

It still doesn't work for all documents

It failed on the first spreadsheet I uploaded, and suggested I use the desktop version of Office. This wasn't an particularly exotic spreadsheet, and indicates that they still have some work to do.
On the other hand, so does Google. Text boxes are a pretty basic Word feature, and not supporting them sends me back to Office on the desktop.

By tirons1 on 14 Jul 2011

Is the phrase "Google butt-kicker" meant to sell it to me? How can you tell Microsoft are going down the pan? They spend more effort selling their ideas to themselves than their customers.

By stuarthamlin on 14 Jul 2011

Yeah I have to agree on the disadvantages of the Cloud.

My details were stolen thanks to Sony and Codemasters, both were quite old accounts but still my personal data is now out there for all and sundry and it is making me seriously rethink the way I do things online.

All these companies are being shown to be bloody useless when it comes to securing customer data.

By Deano on 14 Jul 2011

We're not ...

doing the Chinese Communist Party's political censorship for them ... oh wait, we are!

By JohnAHind on 14 Jul 2011

Cheysuli said it better than I could have put it...

So I will have to do something I rather dislike and say...

+1 to everything she/he wrote.

(I am not a big user of office, but I have always had to use the latest incarnation for various reasons)

By Anonymouse on 14 Jul 2011