PivotTable this video

And yet we still upgrade. From ’97 to 2000 to 2003. 500+ licenses for my corporate environment. We’ll upgrade to 2007 I’m sure.

My problem isn’t with the features. The end user’s knowledge and capabilities are overshadowed by feature set. I would rather reallocate the money for a 2007 upgrade and dedicate it to user training so they can take advantage of some of the advanced functions 2003/2007 offer.

Its true most users would be satisfied with an Office 97 feature set, only because thats all they are trained to use.

Brian’s comment nails it, does he have a blog?

Guys, whoever said that ‘web apps’ means ‘it has to be on the internet’?

This whole ‘no-one will trust their data to anyone else’ commentary is misguided.

When the wave of Office-replacing web apps comes, it will be in the form of intranet applications, as in, install it on your internal web server. That way, you have no need to worry about your data, or your internet connection!

I believe that something like Zimbra shows the power of web apps (in this case, for email / calendaring). The fact that the code lets you to make your own ‘power tweaks’ is a God send. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that Zimbra will take down Office. However, a lot of users see this: when your email client automatically recognises dates and when you mouse over it, it shows you a mini-calendar, users think thats cool. When they realise that they can quickly code up an ‘extension’ so that it automatically recognises a bug number and when you mouse over it, it shows you the summary and key data of that bug from your own internal bug database, users love it.

thanks for the video robert, glad to get a peek and office 12. In the future though, it would be more convenient if the videos were (at least) half as long and, say, twice the resolution

(it takes 9 min before we get to see screens and then they are almost entirely illegible)

Lincoln, what you described is Lotus Notes and its various competitors. That is nothing new. Installing intranet applications for your company to use is old hat. Besides, the entire idea of web apps in general is an evolution of an incredibly old concept: the mainframe and the terminal. This time, 2.0 junkies are clamoring for their computers to be turned into useless terminals and have the internet be their mainframe.

re: “There are already web apps that collectively accomplish enough of Office’s features to see that its days are numbered.”

That’s bogus and you know it.

And on pivot tables, I don’t buy the less than 1% statements. Robert isn’t so great at this argument because he’s using the political technique of naming a specific person rather than groups of people, i.e. “an accountant next to me used it.” The fact is that many businesses from small to enterprise use pivot tables. It’s an important feature in the business world, one that many couldn’t do without. And there is no where else to get it currently.

…I don’t use Office at home though

Richard,

Re: there’s nowhere else to get Pivot Tables

Have you looked at the DataPilot feature of OpenOffice? I’ve never used this, so can’t vouch for the quality, but OpenOffice 2.0 lets you analyse spreadsheets and databases using pivot tables.

Hi Richard. I absolutely agree with you: what is old is new again, and that’s a really good point about Lotus Notes (not something I’ve had any exposure to).

I guess my original point was that ‘web apps’ won’t be on the web, so all this discussion about data security and stable internet connections is stupid.

Again, I agree that that quote is silly (in fact, I don’t even think I saw it in the first place ). However, you also have to agree that most of the functionality that Office provides is wasted on a lot of home users. I think that’s where we’ll see movement. No, it won’t be of any use for most companies (and therefore doesn’t worry MS) but slowly and surely I believe the functionality will become available.

Me, I don’t use pivot tables. In fact, I had to ask a guy I worked with only about half a year ago what they were all about. However all around me in the office are people writing specs and so on that really don’t need much more than formatting and image placement: something that is available from things like the FCKEditor etc. No, it’s not the best interface right now, but it’s quite impressive.

Just a quick question re. Lotus Notes. How are things like that programmed? Is it one of those unique programming languages, or a generic one? I like the idea of not having to know the ‘Zimbra Macro Language v2′ to code up an extension…

Anyway, again, I just want to reiterate that my point really was that any ‘killer’ web apps won’t be on the internet so part of the argument is misplaced.

Well I know you don’t think I ever say anything good, but I think Office 12 and OneNote 12 are great improvements, more of a real leap, over the incremental jumps from 2000 to XP to 2003. And not just in terms of the new UI. That said, they need better marketers and it will take awhile for some of the BI and OLAP data functionality to ‘impact’ average users. But it’s truly a significant release. Steve can AJAX all he wants, but I’m going Office 2007. And the always neglected, but ungodly great, Microsoft Project. And Erik Rucker’s blog been cool for Access info.

Better workflows, charting improvements, document content tracking, confidential information management (Office XML), SharePoint/InfoPath integration capabilities. Those are the things the marketers should be hitting on. With the UI ‘feature creep killer’ for Home Users. And the ‘Publisher-like’ functionality in Word, cover pages and such.

Christopher, if you’re praising Office, maybe it really is dead!

Lincoln: I understand your points about web apps and internet, but I do disagree to a point. You are right in terms of what is technologically possible (secure web apps served within an intranet). But I don’t think what you are suggesting is actually being developed. When you look at the apps like 37 Signals’, Google’s, Yahoo’s, etc. one common thread is keeping the application on their servers. This allows them to keep all users on the current version, keep them paying subscription fees (or viewing ads), maintain stability themselves, and I think most importantly it keeps their source code to themselves. At least in terms of the Office 12 launch timeframe, intranet web apps won’t be replacing Office.

Lotus Notes, since you asked, is not a pretty thing. It’s not EXACTLY what your idea is because a desktop client must be installed on each computer. But it puts all of your email, documents, calendar, address book, databases, etc. in one place and they are all served off of Lotus Notes servers. It’s a hideous application, but it is secure, it connects employees via the web, and gets the job done.

I have seen many say that web apps like 37 Signals’ are the replacement for programs like Lotus Notes, but that isn’t happening. It’s only going to take one company to have a data security problem and mention it publicly for a lot of people to jump ship. Storing your company’s data on somebody else’s servers is just not very secure, SSL or not. What if a hacker got into the database for Basecamp? Thousands of companies’ data is now available to that hacker.

But now imagine a company’s entire dataset is hosted on a web service. If a hacker gets in there, or even just a devient employee (I can’t imagine every single employee of Google/Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/whatever’s hundreds of thousands is an honest one), they have access to everything: orders, accounts, contact information, social security numbers, credit card numbers, everything. These are hazards that every company faces. But put many thousands of companies all on a central service and you are now talking about a ticking time bomb.

The smart ones wouldn’t do anything malicious with it though. If they were smart, they would get companies’ financial data before earnings reports are announced and invest accordingly.

True: it’s definitely not workable in the Office 12 timeframe. Damn I hate agreeing with people so much

There’s no reason why this won’t happen though, eventually. Companies will probably licence you the product with a nice way to add your own extensions, without allowing you to change their actual code. There’s no reason why people still wouldn’t upgrade to new versions when they are released, but in the meantime, you don’t have to worry about people using different versions of applications with different versions of data and so on. Yes, it’s the mainframe concept, but it just goes to show how right it can be, even now!

In reality, the product will probably be delivered as a standalone server, not unlike the Google search appliance.

Zimbra (note: I have zero to do with it / them, it’s just my ‘cool thing’ at the moment) is installable on your own servers and I believe it does a pretty good job of dating Outlook (even the client side interface). I don’t doubt that people will disagree with me here, though.

As an aside: I’d like to point out that although the smart ones would find out who to invest in, I’d say the smarter ones would work out how to get a working local copy of the code then delete their own remote data, to make sure that no-one else like them is doing the same

About 12 years ago I used to do third level tech support on MS products. There was one guy who would call all the time about pivot tables in Excel. I think the documentation on it back then was written in Hex.

Very happy those days are over.

Well, my personal opinion is that Office has already missed the point, when it could be useful. I use it little, but it’s all like nice beta version – from very early versions till XP, the Word is uncapable to format paragraph properly on page, sometimes you have to play like stupid inserting lines between paragraph because Word just puts sevenlines long paragraph on other page although half of the page stays empty. Special problem are with pictures+paragraphs. The excel environment isn’t better, my mom gets always some stupid excelsheets from government in which can’t be even copy+paste, in halfway of writing it the form changes in picture and she must quit it (undo doesn’t work) and start all over.. That’s combo XP version+bad excel sheet.
Also there are numerous errors in version compatibility, especially for nonenglish users, you can’t simply include font to document… noooo, and so on the other machine it will require some diferent font or it’s will be rendered bad.
Not to mention that the whole look of printed Word document looks compared to tex or adobe document quite unprofessional. You can’t do something like pdf in word. WHY?
Same goes to architecture of Office, it’s braindead, instead of making simple skeleton for adding plugins for different effects, it only adds and adds new unuseful buttons, without proper help to new version. Office can’t properly collaborate with any other application, I don’t know if macro section was somehow improved, but I always laughed at that you can get virus from document! The whole design of Office was simply said done unprofessionally.
Most effects I need I HAVEN’T found, last time, I searched for comments in several colors or something like that…. and fucking haven’t found it! All are in red or what, it’s worse than beta! 10 years of development and you can’t get comments in other than red bubbles. Or automatically pick up color from picture, so you can match it with headline. Firefox can do it… Or I wonder, if ESBN will be in next version of Office. Well in firefox it’s already. But maybe luckily, in version 2013 I will have comments in different colors, and in 2017 I can tag documents… Maybe in version 2011 I can even blog from Word. But probably in 2 years I won’t need it, cause I will have the better feature set in some free web application.

I’m pretty much an Office “Power User”, and have been for about 20 years. I’m also , by most accounts, a reasonably bright guy with a real knack for software and computing: I’ve built networks for Fortune 10 companies, and been the architect for ultra high performance storage-over-IP, Interactive Television and embedded networked real-world interface devices, but I have *never* been able to “get” Pivot Tables. I’ve spent probably a total of ten or twelve hours, but never yet understood how to build a pivot table, so I just don’t use them at all. I would like to, but the PITA factor is just way too high, even for someone that’s pretty comfortable with the bizarrely twisted mindset that underlies Excel. It’s a damning indictment of an execrable user interface, when even most experts can’t or won’t figure it out, even when the payoff is fairly high.

Hopefully, this new Excel will finally make creating and managing PivotTables easy enough to actually use them.

You know, if you do something like that, you *might* even give me a good reason to upgrade from the ancient versions of Office I’m still slogging along with now. (97 and 2000 – I keep wondering why I stay with these, since XP makes them worse and worse, especially now that secure and modern alternatives are available for free…)

Dub: Open up the excel sheet that has the data you want to make into a pivot table. In the Data menu, choose “PivotTable”. Put it in a new sheet, drag items from the “PivotTable Field List” onto the sheet. Done. Perhaps an oversimplified explanation, but if you are an “Office Power User” I’m unsure of why pivot tables would be so hard.

Whenever someone can’t open a word document because it became corrupted (happens pretty often for documents >30 pages), I can open it in OpenOffice, resave it as a .doc file and send it back to them as an email attachment and they’re happy again.

I enjoyed the video and I enjoy seeing all of the Channel 9 videos even if I don’t agree with where Microsoft is heading sometimes. I think the videos are valuable enough that a screen capture feed should be made during demos and the time is taken to edit the screen capture feed and live demo shot together. That way we can better see things like the comment tabs, quick sorting, and polished UI in products like Excel.

Well, I recently had to use Excel for a task at work (I’m a text files, scripting and RDBMS kinda guy by preference), and I have to say that Excel wasn’t nearly as quick at the sort of data mangling I needed to do, versus writing a little Python script to massage things. Which is actually what I ended up doing: writing a Python script which output my data in nifty little colon-delimited files, which I then imported into Excel so that I could submit the report in the preferred format.

I’ve recently been using postgresql for a lot of stuff here at the office, and having to go from a relational database to a spreadsheet is pretty painful!

Oh, the pain is coming back…

MS’s apallingly botched knock-off of Lotus Improv gives me a migraine.

For anyone who’s ever tried “pivot tables” and decided that they suck, please, try out a proper N-dimensional spreadsheet, and see how they were supposed to be. Get your hands on an old copy of Improv somewhere, or try out “Quantrix”.

Oh, and Scoble: what you’re touting is NOT a NEW feature. It’s another botched implementation of Lotus’ invention from 1989.

I agree that the videos on ch 9 should have a bit of post production.
real screen shots, a bit of editing, chapters would e nice.

James: I agree there too! Problem is I don’t have time. All the evil in the world can be blamed on one thing: lack of resources.

When are you dumping the shitty WMV for a multi-platform format? Won’t watch these silly videos until then.

I agree that the videos on ch 9 should have a bit of post production. real screen shots, a bit of editing, chapters would be nice.

Yeah, and maybe a two, three or four camera setup, filmed linear, with the sync up in Vegas or Avid after (Vegas I prefer as more a dream for broadcast-event styled post-production, and boy did 6.0d clear up some bugs for me). Never ever do live-switching, unless you have an army of people and a director. Do the switching in post-production, lay and sync the tracks, and mark mark in preview and then cut a final track. You make better decisions in post-production. It’s elementary, but sooooo many people don’t do that, and get out of sync and pull hair out in editing. So if you don’t plan it right you, get one-cam rot or disjointed post-productional HELL. Cold hard water of experience was my teacher here. Events are not films, I had too much of a screenplay-thought-process and it killed me. The main event body, has to be broadcast style, only in post-production.

And the camera doesn’t have to be an expensive HD or 24P, found the Panasonic AG-DVC30 to be a dream, great in low light, and has a warm film tone. Amazing little bugger. And ‘chapters’ or rather snippets would be nice touch. Or could shoot in HD, but then contrast and gamma script to get the film tone. HD is too sharp, too white, needs warmth. Or a trick I like is shooting in PAL and using Atlantis 2 to convert, still experimenting with that technique tho.

Surely in all of Microsoft, they got some decent Screenwritingese Film School type of Video guys? Not really Scoble’s fault, he’s busy up to his arms. If not, I can send a resume, not that it’d ever get past the paper shredder

Isn’t it unfair to entirely dismiss a product/software before having thoroughly tested it?
Haven’t had the opportunity to work with the beta yet. But from the glimpses I had at several new versions of MS software, I did notice that the publisher seems to have made a real effort to make them easier to use.
Agree that there wasn’t much improvement in Office from 97 to 2003 version. Have a feeling it’s due to 2 factors:

1) MS has been reluctant to address and correct the basic flaws of some of the components of the suite, i.e.
• the unflexibility of Access when it comes to altering a database/application
• the file size of Powerpoint, hence the impossibility to use the files produced on the web
• the mediocre implementation of all Word features relating to handling long documents (outline, stylesheets, index, table of contents)
• the cumbersomeness of Outlook and the impossibility to use its data in all Office application
• the complexity of some of Excel advanced features.

2) MS has failed to realize that users’ needs have considerably changed during this period due to the extensive use of emails and internet research. Therefore a suite like Office doesn’t cover most people needs as it would have in the 80’s and early 90’s.
Do you write as many letters now as you did at that time? Do you print work produced in the same proportions as you did before?

Feel that 1 and 2 combined make quite a few people dissatisfied with what is supposed to be their daily tool set.

For myself, I do get enraged more or less every day when Outlook or Outlook Express still doesn’t recognized duplicate address entries ‘cos I have my own classification system which is different from the owners’ way of showing their name in the from box. I do get frustrated not being able to refer to an email by drag and drop in a report. I get mad that exporting/importing Outlook or OE data is still so unreliable and exploiting this data still lacks so much transparency. None of this would have bothered me in the late 80’s or early 90’s when sending a few messages through Compuserve was just a touch of fun. But it really does now that email communication takes a large part of my day’s work and that these flaws make me waste time every day and be less productive than I should be.

When Office 95 came out, I still sent lots of letters every day and endless mailings once or twice a month, with printed newsletters and so forth. Do I do this now? No. One letter a fortnight is probably the maximum frequency. So I hardly use Word anymore, except for writing big reports. And again, I get frustrated that Word hasn’t improved much in this respect over the last 10 years.

And my Office tools haven’t taken into account the new needs that came with the internet and emailing. An Outliner (or note keeper) in which I could store notes but also links to files, websites, specific stored web pages, emails, rss streams, etc. A flexible contact database, with user-defined field and conditional drop-down/ lists which I can carry on my 2 Go usb stick and use seamlessly in all the modules of the suite , including mass emailing. This would make an Office 2007 worth twice its price in my eyes and daily work. But if it comes out as being just an easier to use version of a 20th century product, I very much doubt that I will bother. I’ll keep the version I have or switch to Open Office. Because now I hardly use it.

Gave up on Access years ago to use Filemaker. The latter had some flaws as well (creating entry screens and reports is more time-consuming) but altogether it was more flexible and compatible with the Mac some of my colleagues used and still use. New stuff runs on mySQL.

Gave up on Powerpoint (which I loved using in the early 90’s and so did kids as well when they practically built movies, with effects, sounds and their recorded voices) when Flash MX came up‘cos it more easier to use than previous versions and I could finally put the output on the web.

Use Word to write articles ‘because of its word and character count and it’s still on my machine. Until recently also used it to write reports but now I find that I’m using Tiddly Wiki more and more. It produces a single html file which I can easily carry with me on a usb, upload to my webserver for other people to collaborate on, etc.

Use Excel to do calculations but since I don’t work in accounting or finance, my needs are pretty limited in this respect. My basic sheets are not very different from those I built with Lotus 1-2-3 in the mid 80’s. New stuff consists in a few , sheets a year to compare several quotes and vlookup is about the most advanced function I use in this type of sheets. But I did greatly appreciate the inclusion of several worksheets in a workbook. Keeps the data tidy and better organized. Also makes it easier to track and handle data for consolidations.

Used Frontpage 98 and 2000 and then reluctantly switched to Dreamweaver which was (and still is) far less user friendly (and made me slightly less productive) due to some hosting requirements, to the fact that it did not run on the Mac and to the fact that a frontpage website could not be run locally without frontpage extensions even when one used page enclosures as the only “frontpage speciality”. Keeping site hierarchy from one machine to the next wasn’t easy either and we had to rebuild it manually several times. When a site has several hundred pages in 3 languages, it’s no fun. Now DW is mainly used to set up initial site templates and stylesheets, data entry is through a web interface.

Used Outlook or OE back and forth throughout the decade. Always found Outlook more suited to people who have a limited set of recurrent/predictable tasks and too heavy for people running one-person shows or startups and jumping from one role to the next. Tried to supplement OE lack of agenda and limited contact manager with various products, Chaos, Lotus Agenda to name just the 2 I used longest. Been watching Chandler but it’s slow to materialize. Had a look at Omea Pro but coupled with Outlook it needs a faster laptop that what I have got . Moreover Omea database is proprietary as well so I’m reluctant to file so much information and not be able to retrieve it should I want to use another software later on. So Outlook will be the module I will look at when considering Office 2007.
Is it preposterous to expect from a 10+ years old product?
 To be able to use the contact manager seamlessly with any Office (or even Windows/Vista) application?
 To be able to define custom fields in the contact manager with combo listboxes to streamline data entry
 To be able to set up/revise/list groups and set up email campaigns easily and getting a report of the results achieved
 To be able to synchronize contacts and mailboxes easily and reliably between a laptop and a desktop?
 To be able to create a link to a message within Office applications and those supporting drag and drop?
 To see it evolve into an information hub like Jetbrains.com is trying to do with its Omea layer.

In summary, If I use Microsoft software less and less, it’s not because I have anything against Microsoft, but because I get impatient that some flaws have not been addressed for a lengthy period of time or because my needs as they have evolved are different from those that Microsoft caters for.

P.S. The absence of MUI language files is a point I’ll mention separately