Microsoft announces Office 2019, scheduled for H2 2018

[scaryjim]

People still ask me how to "get" office, most of them are just writing the occasional letter so I tell them to use wordpad. ...

For really basic stuff like that - if they don't mind using cloud services - the basic free version of Word online is absolute fine (as is Google Docs, to be fair). Although Wordpad is one program that's improved quite a lot recently - it used to be fairly horrid to use (and could only save in RTF), but MS have done a lot of work in the last few years making it (and Paint, and a couple of other standard Windows Accessories programs) a lot more user friendly.

[Saracen]

You know, that's pretty much spot on ime. Moving from a 286 @ 12MHz to 486 DXes at Uni, then a Pentium (60MHz, iirc) at home, all felt like real sea-changes in what the technology was capable of doing. But since getting the first PC that I actually owned (a Duron 1200) every new computer and upgrade has felt very much incremental, and since ... ooh, around 2007ish, when we got to the point that even cheap Sempron and Celeron processors were dual core, I don't think I've noticed a single genuine improvement in my PC experience. That's a decade of each new generation of processors and software not really enabling anything new.

If you're a standard home PC user, a 10 year old PC, well looked after, will do pretty much everything a new one will. In fact, I should get my old Core 2 bits out of the shed and slap them together again, just for a nostalgic reminder of what I'm not missing

Of course, that probably goes double for software. There are only so many things you want to do in a Word document. I'm pretty sure that Office 2003 could do 99.5% of them. Office 97 could probably do about 80%; Word 6 perhaps 50%. There's really not been anything genuinely useful that you could add to a WP for the last decade....

I think the last HW/SW evolution that really made az difference to me was when PCs became powerful enough to support effective and efficient voice dictation/transcription. And that must have been 10 years ago, at least. I'd been using such software for several years before both it, and the hardware grunt required to run seamlessly enough that it didn't get in my way.

There no doubt have been a few other niche uses subsequent to that, including motion video rendering, but although I've dabbled, and certainly done a fair bit of both video and audio editing, rendering isn't really my bag.

I'd agree with your percentages on Word. And, for that matter, Excel, though I use a bit more of that than I do Word, Part of my calculation is that I'm not a heavy, expert user. I doubt I ever use much more than 20% of the features in Word and the vast bulk of my usage is probably the most basic 5%. Subsequent versions certainly have improved usability in some areas, like structuring ,ong documents, but has that been enough to justify upgrade costs? In all honesty, even for the last couple of upgrades I did, probably not.


The biggesst exception to all this is probably gaming, which does still seem to challenge even state of art hardware. But again, I don't do much high-end PC gaming these days ... Steam guaranteed that.

[spacein_vader]

You know, that's pretty much spot on ime. Moving from a 286 @ 12MHz to 486 DXes at Uni, then a Pentium (60MHz, iirc) at home, all felt like real sea-changes in what the technology was capable of doing. But since getting the first PC that I actually owned (a Duron 1200) every new computer and upgrade has felt very much incremental, and since ... ooh, around 2007ish, when we got to the point that even cheap Sempron and Celeron processors were dual core, I don't think I've noticed a single genuine improvement in my PC experience. That's a decade of each new generation of processors and software not really enabling anything new.

If you're a standard home PC user, a 10 year old PC, well looked after, will do pretty much everything a new one will. In fact, I should get my old Core 2 bits out of the shed and slap them together again, just for a nostalgic reminder of what I'm not missing

Of course, that probably goes double for software. There are only so many things you want to do in a Word document. I'm pretty sure that Office 2003 could do 99.5% of them. Office 97 could probably do about 80%; Word 6 perhaps 50%. There's really not been anything genuinely useful that you could add to a WP for the last decade....

I'd agree with you on the hardware front, with the possible exception of SSDs. While they aren't required for anything they do make any disk intensive task quicker by an order of magnitude.

Excel is what keeps me using Office. I'd call myself an intermediate user & unfortunately LibreOffice et al still can't match it. Word isn't required by most as you say & PowerPoint (and it's competitors,) are abominations of hateful sounds and animations these days.

I'd imagine what keeps most businesses on office is mainly Exchange/Outlook, nobody really has a competitive solution to it.

[DanceswithUnix]

I'd agree with your percentages on Word. And, for that matter, Excel, though I use a bit more of that than I do Word, Part of my calculation is that I'm not a heavy, expert user. I doubt I ever use much more than 20% of the features in Word and the vast bulk of my usage is probably the most basic 5%. Subsequent versions certainly have improved usability in some areas, like structuring ,ong documents, but has that been enough to justify upgrade costs? In all honesty, even for the last couple of upgrades I did, probably not.

I personally haven't seen any need for upgrading Word since Word for Windows. That got you something good enough for basic letter writing and knocking out a short document with interactive spelling and grammar checking. For long grown up documents, you want a proper authoring tool of which there are plenty.

I'd agree with you on the hardware front, with the possible exception of SSDs. While they aren't required for anything they do make any disk intensive task quicker by an order of magnitude.

I am convinced that Microsoft have become lazier in the latest Windows versions making them more disk intensive on the expectation that you will be using an SSD. I expect before long Windows will be back to hard disk performance levels on SSD, I wouldn't buy a hard drive for Windows now.

[virtuo]

I use Office 2016/365 in work and home. No issues saving to Onedrive. The applications also don't give me any issues.

" the desktop apps are garbage, I'm sticking with 2013 as long as I can." - Not sure why you think that they're garbage as they're pretty much the exact same version with added stuff?

Are the first three posts from authentic users?

My opinion that the 2016 apps are garbage is anecdotal. I used 2013 at work (and still do at home), it's a great suite of applications.

Upgraded to 2016 at work. The apps are sluggish, and constantly "hang" in an unresponsive state, where I presume it's trying to reconcile something over the corporate network. Outlook and excel are the biggest culprits, but Word can be just as bad.

I think saying they are "pretty much the exact same version" is not really true, and I also think it's the "added stuff" that is part of the problem.

Glad you don't have any issues with it, I guess.

[fuddam]

I'm an Office fanboy, and have been using 365 since it came out. I also train corporates how to use it, so not surprising.

Big must is for advanced use of Excel. Nothing else comes close. Relational databases in Excel, Power Pivot, Power Query, BI, some of the new functions. Plus little things like Slicers and Flashfill
If anyone uses Tableau, then they shouldn't think twice about investing in Excel 365

Outlook: definite improvements, speed, searching etc

Word: nothing major, and obviously could use Word 95/97 to write War & Peace quite happily. Not Wordpad since the long document tools are a must - for navigation, for formatting, for organisation, cross referencing.

PowerPoint: lots of things to like if incorporating video (BIG improvements), the rest is largely cosmetic. Faster tools, but not requirements.

OneNote: awesome app. Nothing comes close for power and integration with the rest of Office.

Access: used to train people on building databases but not any more, so don't really care how it's improved (or not).

OneDrive: I use it all the time over a desktop, a laptop, a Surface Pro 3 and a Lumia 930. Love it. No integration or data update issues.

Rest of the family use the other 4 licences from the 365 subscription, so works for me.

I also use Google docs for WP & spreadsheet sharing, since most people seem to like it more than using Office online.

[spacein_vader]

I'm an Office fanboy, and have been using 365 since it came out. I also train corporates how to use it, so not surprising.

Big must is for advanced use of Excel. Nothing else comes close. Relational databases in Excel, Power Pivot, Power Query, BI, some of the new functions. Plus little things like Slicers and Flashfill
If anyone uses Tableau, then they shouldn't think twice about investing in Excel 365

Outlook: definite improvements, speed, searching etc

Word: nothing major, and obviously could use Word 95/97 to write War & Peace quite happily. Not Wordpad since the long document tools are a must - for navigation, for formatting, for organisation, cross referencing.

PowerPoint: lots of things to like if incorporating video (BIG improvements), the rest is largely cosmetic. Faster tools, but not requirements.

OneNote: awesome app. Nothing comes close for power and integration with the rest of Office.

Access: used to train people on building databases but not any more, so don't really care how it's improved (or not).

OneDrive: I use it all the time over a desktop, a laptop, a Surface Pro 3 and a Lumia 930. Love it. No integration or data update issues.

Rest of the family use the other 4 licences from the 365 subscription, so works for me.

I also use Google docs for WP & spreadsheet sharing, since most people seem to like it more than using Office online.

Excel is NOT a database. I wish people would stop trying to use it as one.

It is however very good at extracting and presenting data from a proper database.

[fuddam]

I wouldn't use Excel as a place to store data that belongs in a database either, but now Excel can build proper relationships between tables, so for those users who have their data in that form (eg downloads of google analytical info), the functionality is amazing. No more need to move the data into a SQL or Access database before analysing it.

[badass]

Excel is NOT a database. I wish people would stop trying to use it as one.

It is however very good at extracting and presenting data from a proper database.

Data in Excel absolutely IS a database. In fact, so is data in MS word.
In fact a filing cabinet full or organised paperwork is a database

[peterb]

Excel is NOT a database. I wish people would stop trying to use it as one.

It is however very good at extracting and presenting data from a proper database.

It’s a flat file data base, it isn’t a relational database.

[spacein_vader]

It’s a flat file data base, it isn’t a relational database.

I was replying to someone saying they used it as a relational database.

Excel isn't a database. Yes it can be used as one but that's not what it's designed for and it really doesn't scale well. You're much better off using a proper database then pointing Excel at it as a data source to analyse and extract.