Amy Sedaris and some bunnies do some top-notch pimping for Microsoft Office.
Wow — Calculations in Excel 2007 that come to 65,535 get displayed as 100,000. “Oops”
“Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped, combining utility and minimalist elegance with reliability. Sadly for me … I “upgraded” to Word 98, and somehow the magic was gone.”
Upgrade
I’ve seen a bunch of links to instructions on how to install the Vista “Upgrade” edition on a PC without an existing Windows partition, something that theoretically shouldn’t be allowed.
I can’t help but feel that this is nothing new—It reminded me of something a friend at Uni was told by Microsoft support 10 years ago.
After a catastrophic PC failure, he was reinstalling software. He had the Office 95 upgrade disc, which required you to insert the installation disk from an earlier version of one of the Office tools to “prove” that you were upgrading. Unfortunately, he’d left all the old disks at his parents’ house.
So, after calling round friends in something of a panic (there was no doubt a paper due) to see if anyone had an old office disk (no-one did), he called up Microsoft support to ask what he could do.
“Oh, when you’re asked to point to an old installation disk,” he was told, “just point it to the Office 95 disk you’re currently installing from. That will work.”
And it did.
Sit through three “webcasts” on “exciting” “new” Microsoft “technology”, and get a free legitimate license for Windows Vista and/or Office 2007.
“Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all”
Hitting the ‘Insert’ key in Word 2007 will no longer enable the inexplicable document-eating mode. It had never occurred to me just how horrendous a usability experience the Insert key could be.
Microsoft-funded open-source plugin for MS Word 2007 which allows the opening (but not yet saving) of documents in OpenOffice’s Open Document Format.
The impending rumble of Office 2007 UI-a-likes is somewhat terrifying.
Microsoft make good on their promise — This download allows users of Office 2003 to save and open the new zipped-XML file formats.
The Office 2007 team have a cool feedback-collection tool for their beta (reminiscent of the old “Report a bug” window heading from the WinXP betas).
The first major public release of the next version of Office. Get your grubby hands on the shiny new UI for the first time, and try to imagine how you’re going to explain it to your parents over the phone.
MS unveil their new UI for Office. Curious to see how this works in real life, but the photos look like usability could go either way.
I’ve really been enjoying this blog, tellings stories about the planned (radically different) UI for the next version of Microsoft Office. It’s been many years since I’ve been anxiously looking forward to getting my hands on a beta copy of *Office*!
Visio: It’s not just for process flows
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