Microsoft justifies lost Office 2010 upgrades Microsoft has briefly explained why it's killed a tried and tested way for loyal consumers to obtain a new edition of Office for a low price. The company is not allowing upgrades to Office 2010, released to retailers on Tuesday, from older versions of its productivity suite. The move means you must get a completely new copy of …
I found Omnigraffle to be several miles better than Visio, and as it reads/writes Visio files I can do things better.
I moved off Windows because it started to piss me off, but Linux didn't cover my needs (complex reasons, and I've been using various shaded of Linux since Slackware came on floppies). So I got a Macbook, which runs WinXP and Kubuntu under Paralles, and then I discovered Omnigraffle.
That alone was almost worth changing to Mac for (there's a lot more). I'm not a fanatic (not my nature), but I've certainly become a fan - I don't care who owns it and what they wear, I need to get work done. With a Mac it's a matter of opening the laptop and working (also long battery life). *That* has value for m - that is worth paying for.
Back to topic: I bought iWorks, installed OpenOffice (tried NeoOffice, but I guess I got too used to "native" OOo) and also installed a "home user" copy of MS Office (main difference apart from price is that Entourage -OS X idea of Outlook replacement- won't talk "Exchange" to anything).
To date I have used MS Word exactly once, and that was by accident. The ONLY thing MS Office offers that has no equal yet is Outlook. Buggy and crap as it can be at times, it IS a mature product, and there is no replacement I have seen that comes close to it, on any platform. I reckon that's where MS spends its money - it is the one barbed hook into the average business user that is impossible to undo. The moment MS loses that monopoly, MS Office will effectively be history.
Not Powerpoint (ugh), not Word, not Excel, not it's-not-a-standard-but-we-sell-it-as-if-it-is OOXML format, no, Outlook. Think about it.
There's not one feature that would make me want to upgrade. Not in this version, not in the prior one, or any of the others since Office 95. Even then I was beginning to suspect stagnation because the feature wars were over. If in 15 years they can't come up with a compelling reason to upgrade from that, it might be time to look at Open Office and the others.
I've had a look. It turns out that the science of putting glyphs on a page is well settled, and while WYSIWYG is way cool and all, for professional printing nothing beats the LaTEX., and for cross platform document production XML is where it's at. All the various document preparation suites do, well, prepare documents in the same ways we did thirty years ago. The spreadsheets do in fact calculate fields based on the contents of other fields in an array and offer methods of computation that normal people don't need to four sigmas - as they have since I was in high school two and a half decades ago.
The slideshow apps do, well, present slides and make the audience dumber thereby, using the exact same methods I used 25 years ago. It's a tool and we've reached the evolution of this tool to the point where the limit of what the tool can achieve is limited by the quality of movement of the handle end. Now they support video. That's cool. Let me know when you decide to use that. They support every other content mechanism and attachment method in existence too - and that's why Office gets more patches than Windows, and why it's the best vehicle for targeted exploitation. At this point there's no legitimate use for most of these, yet they persist in Office. Let me pick on one: VRML. This war is over. VRML is dead. Nobody is going to send you a VRML document. And yet the VRML interface affords at least 32 methods of exploitation that could completely compromise your computer - in Office 2010. VRML is only one of many hundreds of abandoned formats that evil people could use through office to own your computer.
At this point Microsoft Office is a swarm of productivity components flying in close formation. Although each of them has vulnerabilities, you don't get the full remote-manageability from any anonymous user on the Internet capability until you have the full suite.
What I'm wondering is: why is that feature worth paying money for? Somebody here educate me please.
stop whinging - just go out and get on of these £48 educational discount versions of office.
oh and several £100 for a pc that can actually run the bloated piece of crap on. An I guess you'll have to pay for some training so you can help your kids as well - and its probably illegal for you to use the software you got from the school that will be only for your kids use unless you are still a student - pay a few thousand to a lawyer to check that one for you just in case. You might be able to run your copy on the same pc so you'll have to learn how to dual boot as well,
Its easy - just a couple of months take home so your kids can actually enjoy the education you've already paid for. Nothing to complain about there that I can see.
All I have left is to complain about a shitty and corrupt corporation, that produces expensive piecemeal product that is fragmented into 10 different versions, and they run their customer cultivation campaign like a pedophile ring - by targeting children via their parents, through the school grounds.
Hmmmmmmm fuck them, their prices and the repackaged upgrade hype - where the only real upgrade is the new wrapping paper.
As far as I go, I'll keep using 0ffice 2000, and XP - which is the last upgrade I will ever do with Microsoft.
Everything else is Linux, Open Orrifice, Google docks, etc.
Open Office - has a brilliant drawing pakage, but the lack of embedding ones own font's into one's own documents, is total bullshit.
It only goes to prove that Microsoft are not the only ones doing particularly stupid ideas.
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