The next version of Microsoft Office is coming in 2006 and will be called Office 12 (wtf?).
What’s new in it:
The default filetype for Excel documents is going to be XML. Other programs may also adopt it as well, from what I read.
You won’t need Office to open documents created with Office. MS will distribute a software which so far is going to be called Metro that will read Office documents, but not create them.
And you’ll be able to save your documents in PDF files in any Office Program. However, you won’t be able to open nor edit PDF files with Office.
Why should I care about this? (no offense to Ren or anyone, this is more directed towards MS, why should I, a consumer with a perfectly functional office, give a damn?)
I use Open Office if I absolutely need to do something office-based. Even that I hate though. Why do they bloat these programs up so much? Open Office takes something like 110 megs of memory and has all that auto-complete/auto-cursor-set crap that only annoys me. Well I know why they do it. They just feel the need to constantly add things.
I do like the idea of free separate viewers like they have for excel/powerpoint now. I never had any office installed on my machine for a long while. I still had to read .doc files. I’d always just try them in wordpad and sometimes it would give me something remotely readable, othertimes not. I also like the xml thing because it allows a program with a lot less bloat to use it.
Well, you can start by not using a word processor if you just need a text editor (if you’re doing that). I see people open up Word if they just want to type up something and print it out. I’ve even seen people edit SOURCE CODE in it. These people need to be <s>bitch-slapped</s> educated on using the right tool for the right job. Word processors are for making things look pretty and professional, anything else is left to plain text editors. Even Wordpad suffices for most word processing tasks that I have.
Now you can be protected from opening those evil OpenOffice files.
There’s probably very little reason. But then again, why do book publishers continue to make new editions of calculus textbooks? It’s not as though calculus has changed in the past 100 years. But as long as there’s money to be made, someone’s going to do it.
Oh, and Office 12 will natively support PDF files. Which is always nice, but it seems like MS could have gone a step further and just added native PDF support in their OS, like Apple does.
