Displaying items by tag: Office

If you are student and your school does not use Microsoft's online productivity suite Office 365 for Education, your time has come and you will be able to get a 4 year subscription to the service for only $79.99. If you consider that you get all of the standard Office products like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access this is really a nice bargain. The Office 365 for Education online services are used by over 22 million students already. This University edition will also be available to faculty and staff, but it's not clear if they will be able to renew the license after four years like students can (but only once).

Microsoft has fallen from the position of the biggest technology company on the block. That title now belongs to Apple. As such, they have had to adjust their market strategy. As the PC market has matured, and aged, new technologies have come to replace the desktop, and even the laptop. Tablets, phablets, and smart phones are all the rage, and are good at what they do. To make a bad situation worse (for Microsoft), Apple now has a 12% share of the PC market, up from 3% 10 years ago.

Well we had a feeling that we would be seeing Microsoft’s newest versions of Office for both the “desktop” and for the cloud. The thing is that both of them are still geared toward the cloud. So far looking at the live announcements and the “reviews” of the consumer preview that a select group of web sites had access to we are both impressed and disappointed in Microsoft’s next productivity suite. At the top of the list of praises is a lack of “bloat”. Now it is true that Office is a large application install, but speaking as someone that actually uses the applications for more than their basic functions much of that is add-ons to make it more flexible you can chose not to install about ½ of that if you do not need it.

*** Update - All of the "preview" links for Office 2013 are actually for Office 365; Microsoft's cloud based version of Office. Although you do get the Office Applications you are also signing up to put your documents in their hands and also adding yourself to their mailing lists. ***

Today is the day that Microsoft is allegedly going to release Office 15 to the world (although most are galling it Office 2013 now). The rumors started to surface when it was announced that Microsoft would be holding an invite only press event today (July 16 2012) in San Francisco. Just like the debut of the Surface Tablet Microsoft is keeping quiet about the actual news they are going to give out at the event today so they could be announcing almost anything including their own phone, but we think that is unlikely. We know that Microsoft intends to include Office 15 with Windows RT so it is probably much more likely we are going to see something on their new productivity suite.

Not that long ago (when Microsoft was still hammer out the details of their Office 15 offering) there was a small stir on the internet about the possibility of Office for the iPad and for Android based tablets. At the time Microsoft completely denied the rumors and stated that they were not working on working on office for iPad and that the pictures floating around were faked.

In the IT world there was a time when we all feared the Marco viruses that could be embedded into Word, Excel and other Microsoft Office Products. It was bad enough at one point that I found a single system with over 3,200 counts of an Excel Macro virus (it replicated itself quite nicely). Back then it was common for IT to recommend the use of RTF (Rich Text Format) instead of .DOC for documents and there was even an option inside exchange to force the use of this format even if the end user has Word as their email editor.

Understandably the news has been filled with information on Google’s new product. We have heard about their typical tendency to copy and paste their terms of service along with how it is going to kill Dropbox and other storage providers. Along with these we have even heard how Google drive is signaling the death of Microsoft Office… ummm hang on a bit there. The death of what?

Microsoft is doing the hard sell on Windows 8 features and in particular they have made a valiant effort to push past some of the bad press (and consumer grumbling) about Metro UI and the way many of the apps are locked down. We have talked a little about this and even touched on it during some of our gaming coverage. Although you can launch “desktop” applications from the Start Screen (The Metro UI interface) you are not actually running them there. The only apps that will run in Metro UI Mode are ones that are downloaded from the Microsoft Store. This limits the functionality of the OS in many ways. Sure you can get some applications to interact with each other, but even then there are limitations.

After our initial report of an Office suite from Microsoft developed for Apple’s iPad it seems the company is trying very hard to deny the rumors and speculation, while at the same time leaving their options open.  What is the real story? We are not entirely sure, but we are convinced that something is going on that will allow Office functionality on the iPad and other tablets in the works.

There is a rumor (according to CNET) that says Microsoft might release a version of their popular Office Suite for the iPad. Before you start slamming Microsoft or make the comment that Apple’s iWork suite is better/ just as good, let’s take a quick look at why Microsoft would even entertain this idea.