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Embracing and Extending Microsoft Office 14

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the filling-the-voids dept.
ReadWriteWeb writes "In an interview with ex-Excite founder and current JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus, Richard McManus explores the Web Office and how JotSpot aims to 'embrace and extend' some of Microsoft's office products. Kraus explains how JotSpot went about extending Excel's basic functionality in three ways: sharing spreadsheets, every row is a wiki page, and the ability to mashup data from your own hard drive with data on the Web. Although JotSpot won't challenge Microsoft's office software supremacy with a web-based office suite, expect Google to rise to the challenge of building an interconnected suite of networked office applications."
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Embracing and Extending Microsoft Office More

Embracing and Extending Microsoft Office

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  • In other words... (Score:5, Funny)

    by babbling ( 952366 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @06:51PM (#14928470)
    These guys are going to make MS Office even more incompatible with other Office suites than it already is. They're probably going to try and make it at least partially incompatible with itself, too.

    This is like adding another layer of Microsoft on top of a layer of Microsoft.

    • Re:In other words... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by croddy ( 659025 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @06:55PM (#14928498)
      Well, you know what they say -- the only problem that can't be solved by adding another layer of Microsoft is when you've got too many layers of Microsoft!

    • Re:In other words... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Theatetus ( 521747 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @07:02PM (#14928552) Journal
      They're probably going to try and make it at least partially incompatible with itself, too.

      MS Office is already incompatible with itself. Have you ever tried to open an old (say, '97) file in Office 2003? Ironically enough, Open Office is more compatible with old MS Office formats than modern MS Office is -- that's why my company has to use OOo, because we get a LOT of documents from people who are still using 10-year-old software.

      • Re:In other words... (Score:3, Informative)

        by babbling ( 952366 )
        You're right, but I meant same version of Office, but one with JotSpot's "extensions", and the other without. In other words, apart from the other incompatibilities that already exist, this will add yet another.
      • Ironically enough, Open Office is more compatible with old MS Office formats than modern MS Office is

        Borland's Turbo Assembler was more compatible with MS' Macro Assembler than Macro Assembler itself.

        Nothing new under the sun...
      • "MS Office is already incompatible with itself."

        Not only that, each version of MS Office is incompatible with itself.

        I don't normally use MS Word, but I've heard stories, and recently it happened to me. I worked for several hours on an MS Word document, and MS Word gave an error message that said there was something wrong with the file, that only it had touched. MS Word refused to go further.

        Luckily I had read about the solution. I opened the MS Word file in Open Office and saved it in MS Word form
      • Have you ever tried to open an old (say, '97) file in Office 2003?

        All the time. It works great.

  • Extending question... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @07:00PM (#14928538)
    Is it possible to "extend" MS office, by adding an OpenDocument filter?

    For those people that can't or don't want to install OpenOffice, it would be nice if they could just install a small plugin.

    No idea if microsoft provides any kind of framework for this sort of thing outside its own development staff.
  • Can start-up failure be predicted based on stupid names? JotSpot? Come on... Or is it just a machine designed to eat VC?
  • Can we add Extinguish to that as well?

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