Microsoft Office 14 Makes Its Way to the Market
By Harry McCracken | Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 8:25 am
Over at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft has begun to hand out an alpha version of Microsoft Office 14 to a few testers. We still don’t know much about the upcoming upgrade, which should ship either late this year or sometime in 2010, other than that it will be accompanied by Microsoft’s first full-blown Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Oh, and Mary Jo says there will be a new version of the suite: Office for Sales.
Office 14 will be the first update to the suite since the radical interface makeover it got for Office 2007; I’ll be intrigued to see whether Microsoft leaves the new look and feel pretty much as is, or reworks it further. It’s certainly got both huge fans and recalcitrant naysayers…
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A Very, Very, Very Early Look at Office 14 | Technologizer Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 8:32 pm[…] We still don’t know much about Microsoft Office 14 except that Microsoft has begun to give an early version to developers and that it will involve simple Web-based versions of its core apps. But Neowin has what seem to be […]
January 14th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Does anyone actually care about a new version of MS Office?
Have the cubicle drones of the world been clamoring for something new to learn?
Do we need new features in order to type a 2-page memo?
January 14th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Totally true that a lot of folks just don’t need new office apps–that’s a huge challenge for any product that’s been around as long as Office (and which was already so close to 100% market share) and presumably a big part of why Microsoft decided to make Office 2007 so strikingly different. I like Office 2007, but it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime approach to upgrading a venerable product–I’ll be interested to see what Microsoft does to make O14 tempting…
–Harry
January 14th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I couldn’t care less about Office 14. There are cheaper, some free, alternatives to Office. Therefore there is no reason for me to care about this bloated, expensive and troublesome software.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
That sounds interesting to me. I’ve tried formatting columns with the space bar and I used a freeware word processor. It lacked column formatting. Come on. You can do better than that. Now the only alternative to Microsoft Office I would consider is Word Perfect Office which there’s not much price difference. I normally stay away from freeware apps and if I do try them I see if they have the tools that have the functionality. I don’t listen to what others have to say about. I’ve done that more than once and ended up polluting my harddrive with useless junk.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:50 am
I agree with BM. The alternatives are not nearly as polished or full-featured. Besides, Office files are de facto standards; even the alternatives are graded on their ability to read and save to Office formats.
That said, I’d like to see the tabbed interface that debuted in Office 2007 be applied across the product line. Outlook, for example, could use a makeover.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I have heard from some developers that have got their hands on 14 that it makes great strides at correcting some of the issues they had with previous iterations. What those issues were they weren’t so willing to divulge. Here’s looking forward to a great new product from Microsoft!
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:55 pm
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