Freigeben über

"Microsoft hopes younger eyes have Office vision"

  • Artikel

So, I've decided that the slashdotting after Dave Massey's Internet Explorer post wasn't enough. The Channel9 wiki pages of customer feedback about Microsoft products need some more traffic :-)

This time around we're focusing on Microsoft Office products. Why? Because CNet just ran an interesting article with the headline "Microsoft hopes younger eyes have Office vision". It describes how the Office team have recruited a bunch of young adults from around the world to explain how they use technology. And I thought, why should they have all the fun?

How do you integrate technology into your daily life? What are the new trends that you wish the Office team was paying attention to? What killer feature have you thought of that you can't get anyone to listen to? Tell us.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2004
    Well, I have to be honest - I'm just a developer (i say 'just' in reference to my use of office products). I use outlook for my mail, and word on the very rare occasion i need to write a 'real' letter. Excel is used about once every 3 months to play with a budget that i can't stick to anyway.

    For me, there's no point whatsoever in any sort of office integration.

    I just thought i'd get the ball rolling with some useful feedback grin
  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2004
    Ok, I use Outlook . . . like half the planet seems to.

    I use word occassionally, but mainly to paste in web documents (from either Firefox or Internet Explorer) that don't seem to want to print right from a browser. Word makes sure nothing gets left off the edges of the paper. Amazingly, I do this most often with the MSDN site which only seems to be able to get about 3 out of 4 of their articles to print correctly using the Print Article link they provide. Other than this, I usually find Word too non-intuitive to use as a text editor.

    I use Excel all the time. Way more than I even want to use it. I got involved in a project where I started learning Excel VBA a few years ago and now people from all over the company call me to do work with excel. It's not part of my official job . . . but it might as well have been. My only real complaint on my side of things . . . sometimes they demand solutions in Excel that I think are more appropriate in .NET.

    My only real complaints to Microsoft about office. The VSTO tools need to be able to be called from the application (Excel for instance) and not just from a .NET app calling the application (2 way communication). And the really big one . . . security for these apps need to be in place so that the security model can ship with the application. I'm reading about having to have the application on a network drive on an intranet and such, as a security model. I find that rediculous. If I want to send a macro/application to my mom (for example), who isn't going to get on my company's intranet, then I don't want to be invested in their tools. Let me put it another way . . . I've talked to a number of managers (I work in a very large international company) and the biggest reason we are staying with office instead of something cheaper like OpenOffice, is our investment in custom (ie VBA driven) solutions with office. Only one of the dozens of custom office applications that I've worked with, reside on/rely on, being on a network drive. People want to email these. They want to get at them on their home computers (which isn't allowed on the intranet). There has to be a better way.

    oh . . . why isn't InfoPath included in all versions of Office???

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    When can we have RSS and NNTP support in Outlook

    That's all I want :)