Office Delayed, Too

turnitover writes "And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?"

Wait a sec!

[bogaboga]

> Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?

Not until there is reported improvement in load times. For God's sake, how can one be expected to wait for 47 seconds for OpenOffice.orgs's writer to load a 1.7Mb document with 23 pages and 6 images? It's insane! I will not say what the other application takes but I'm sure every slashdotter knows what I am talking about.

Re:Wait a sec!

[glasen]

I don't know, what you are talking about.

My OO.o2 loads a 10MB document with lots of images (~20) and 10 embedded tables, in under 10 seconds.

Have you ever tried the version 2.0.2 of OpenOffice.org?

Seems to me that you haven't

Not a fan of KDE but...

[mythz]

KOffice is looking pretty impressive aswell lately.

Re:Wait a sec!

[The Lerneaen Hydra]

How about disabling java in the settings, my OO.org used to take a painfully long amount of time to load, but after disbaling the time went down to something mroe acceptable (probably 1/2 to 1/3 of the time). AFAIK java is only used for advanced things that most people dont use, like macros ,live content or other stuff.

Re:Failures

[webagogue]

What are you talking about, "failures?" When was .net dropped? That MS didn't build Windows out of it is not a failure and it would be stupid to do so. People regularly, begrudgingly even, talk about nice and easy it is to develop applications in .net. MSN? Who do you think is running their Windows Live ambitions? That they aren't trying to get people to use walled-garden online services that are losing popularity isn't a failure. They are adapting to the market. And Windows on mobiles? Excuse me, but hasn't the share of WM on smartphones steadily increased year after year? Hell, there is even a Palm (rumored?) running Windows mobile. If that isn't raging success, I don't know what is. Yes, that Windows and now Office were delayed is crap and heads should roll (not so much for Office) but the things you are calling failures are everything but.

Who cares?

[Tim Ward]

Not all the people still happily using Office 97, which still does everything that many people need.

Re:Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?

[Nexum]

Um, Apple has not chosen anything of the sort [apple.com].

Delay bad news for MS?

[FridayBob]

Not really. As far as I can remember, major releases from MS have always been delayed. In case you forgot, MS were one of the first companies that the term vaporware was invented for. This the from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing:

vaporware

/vay'pr-weir/ Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). The term came from Atari users and was later applied by Infoworld to Microsoft's continuous lying about Microsoft Windows.

When it finally arrives, the faithful will take to it like flies to shit while others like myself will simply ignore it. Many big corporations will take years to warm up to it, even though Dell will soon be selling Vista and an Office 2007 license with almost every other PC that people buy from them.

Re:Collaboration

[rbarreira]

I think you met voice-over-air.

Re:At our office

[Hangtime]

If your like me and a power user of Excel some of these should catch your eye and almost force an upgrade especially the new row and column limits.

The total number of available columns in Excel
Old Limit: 256 (2^8)
New Limit: 16k (2^14)

The total number of available rows in Excel
Old Limit: 64k (2^16)
New Limit: 1M (2^20)

Number of levels of sorting on a range or table
Old Limit: 3
New Limit: 64

The maximum length of formulas (in characters)
Old Limit: 1k characters
New Limit: 8k characters

The number of levels of nesting that Excel allows in formulas
Old Limit: 7
New Limit: 64

Number of rows allowed in a Pivot Table
Old Limit: 64k
New Limit: 1M

Number of columns allowed in a Pivot Table
Old Limit: 255
New Limit: 16k

Not a bad thing, surely?

[exKingZog]

Why is everyone suddenly so keen to get Office 2007? Are there glaring bugs in 2003 that you want fixed? Wasn't the previous prevailing wisdom that IT managers hated frequent, pointless updates?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it; Office 2003 is good software and works well, so I'd rather wait until the upgrade is really worth it.

2000 - 2003 Migration Creating Problems

[MWales]

My employer just migrated all of our systems to Office 2003. I have already seen several problems. We have lots of documentation from the past few years created in 2000. I would say I'm having problems loading up 50% of our sizeable (ones that actually use styles, links, etc) documents in 2003. Fortunately, the Open and Repair feature has been able to open them for me (and point out a rather unhelpful list of errors that I have no control over). So this migration isn't a disaster, but it hasn't been seemless either.

Furthermore, while it looks different, I haven't even noticed anything really novel about the new version.

Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It might be cheaper just to buy a single version and upgrade every 2 or 3 new versions instead of having the latest one"

Yes, that's a better choice for many organizations. And there is seldom any need to upgrade everyone at once (too much red tape in my company to do that).

Alternatives to SA:

* You can buy Office via OEM licenses when you buy computers, and buy the new versions only when the machine goes obsolete.

* For years, we looked for volume discounts, only to be dissapointed with MS reluctance to give us a price break. For us, it turned out the best way to put Office on a computer was buy MS Works (with no intention of using it) and then buy an Office "upgrade" to upgrade Works. For whatever reason, MS offers the best pricing to customers who look like individual home users. So we did what individual home users do (several hundred times). Large/volume customers seldom get a deal as good as quantity 1 retail.

Re:At our office

[stecoop]

Yeah but you can't lock down a new Excel spreadsheet like you can an Oracle server. You know that a lot of buisness people live and die by Excel for the one reason, admins havent figured out how to hinder people from using it.

That's not hard to change, reminds me of bad stuff

[twitter]

An example of how easy it is to change such limits can be found here [gnome.org]. It's just a constant and entirely arbitrary.

Anyone who would want such a huge spreadsheet needs help. Typically, the problem is improper organization or lack of more appropriate tool. Better tools would be databases or batch processing of data streams. Help them early because the problem only gets worse with "advances" like this.

I've seen worse abuse of spreadsheets. The most God awful sheet I ever saw had tons of macros. They each got data from different sources, one still used a modem to call a local high school's weather station, and the results of each had to be "checked" by hand. That spreadsheet was part of the process used to set the local price of electricity. It had grown, like a cancer, for years. This is what happens without proper IT support. Far from being enabled and helped, the victim was lead down a path of inappropriate tools to a giant cluster.

Had the company used free software, they might not have had to fire their programmers. Someone convinced them that "computer programming was not a core business." That's true, but neither is accounting and the "off the shelf" solution they were sold instead will cost them many times more than their own staff. For all their money they could have had things that work right.