new in Office 2003

[Jake the Dog]

nothing spectacularly funny, but I did like #3.

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Microsoft recently announced it had finished work on Office 2003. Here are the top 10 most interesting features.

10. - The number 3 in the name. (yawn)

9. - Folders are no longer free, they must be purchased from the Stationery Cupboard.

8. - For your personal security, Microsoft does not wish to collect your name or address as part of this product registration process. Instead, enter your credit card details.

7. - To save everyone time, the viruses and worms are pre-installed.

6. - Seamless integration with Explorer allows you to easily post confidential memos to your company website without the hassle of leaking them to the press.

5. - New macros increase the size of a document so that even a one-line blank page cannot fit on a floppy disk.

4. - Once installed it cannot be removed and insists on being called Hal.

3. - Special SCO mode allows you to claim ownership of other people's documents as your own.

2. - Microsoft Word spellchecker will treat the phrase "open source" as a spelling mistake.

1. - Each box comes with a gun and Clippy now sports a bullseye.

 

[EdwardK]

Oh grief! That is funny Jake! :lol:

 

[The JoJo]

THAT was GOOD! :mrgrn:

 

[Tea]

Especially #3.

 

[Buck]

 

[blakerwry]

#2 and #3 were good... I also liked the reference to 2001 a space odyssey

sometimes I don't find computer humor very... humorous. Maybe I'm too geeky.

 

[Mercutio]

The place where I work does TONS of Microsoft Office training. Yet the other trainers would only get maybe 3 or 4 of those jokes.

Besides, you can't say whether or not you're too geeky until you've found the "Top X Signs that you are a geek" thread.

 

[blakerwry]

The place where I work does TONS of Microsoft Office training. Yet the other trainers would only get maybe 3 or 4 of those jokes.

Besides, you can't say whether or not you're too geeky until you've found the "Top X Signs that you are a geek" thread.

Are you kidding? I'd expect most techy type people to get every one except maybe the 2001 space oddyssey as that is somewhat cultural, and the #10 one (it just left me wondering).


Office is getting pretty bad, Word Perfect 2000 seems like a better overall program, too bad it was not more widely adopted... I guess Dell and some other manufacturers are including it.. We'll see where that goes.

i'll search for the geek thread.. I remember reading the one here (i think).. it's all too true... and funny.

 

[Buck]

I thought number 10 was the most appropriate.

 

[blakerwry]

in a "why did we make office 2003 when 2002/XP and 2000 were already more than adaquate?" kind of way?

 

[Buck]

in a "why did we make office 2003 when 2002/XP and 2000 were already more than adaquate?" kind of way?

It is the usual software update two-step. "We have made it bigger, better, and faster!" blows the advertisement frog of Park Avenue propaganda, yet all they did was change the version. Now they can charge more money and EOL previous versions.

 

[Howell]

in a "why did we make office 2003 when 2002/XP and 2000 were already more than adaquate?" kind of way?

It is the usual software update two-step. "We have made it bigger, better, and faster!" blows the advertisement frog of Park Avenue propaganda, yet all they did was change the version. Now they can charge more money and EOL previous versions.

When in fact it is bigger, might be better, and is definately not faster. But, its hard to sell software on "Buy it, its bigger."

 

[Pradeep]

I find Outlook 2003 to be a nice improvement over OutlookXP.

 

[blakerwry]

what, they made it more like outlook express?

 

[Mercutio]

Outlook 2003 - now with less suck.

 

[Tea]

I find it difficult to understand any sentence with the words "improvement" and "outlook" in it. But why use MS Office when I have Word Perfect Suite?

 

[mubs]

VoidPoifect, eh? Hmmmm...

I learnt word processing on it. Dos 2.x perhaps, CGA monitor, either 8088 or 80286. WP 4.2. Then 5.1. Then 6.0 for Win. Then 6.1. Then ... you get the idea. It was my staple wordproc till Word (Office) 97 was released. At that time I split 50-50 between the two. With Word (Office) 2000, I'm 99% Word, 1% WP 10.

To me what's amazing is that the two have traded places, little by littlle. Word started out stunted, crude and buggy. WP was way powerful, had almost no bugs, and was quite refined. Things started to go downhill when Novell bought WP. And got really flushed down the tube by Corel. The last clean release, IMHO, is 6.1. I don't have it (mine is 6.0); my brother did, but we can't find the disks. Besides it ain't 32-bit. I've bought almost every release put out, hoping it would be more stable. Nada. Yes, I'm upto date on the service packs and hot fixes. If I do any involved editing (if I didn't need to, I'd be using Word, wouldn't I?), I get a crash or a hang. The one thing WP was untouchable about - output quality - is broken now too. The other day I built a 2-column, multi-row table, and wanted to full-justify the text in the second column. Looked fine on screen, but when printing, the damn thing was breaking words in the middle!!! I ended up left-justifying instead.

The other thing I hate is the "I'm-going-to-second-guess-your-toolbar-needs" feature. I haven't found a way to turn it off. I know what I want, dammit, let me customize my toolbar myself, and yes, leave it alone!

Honestly, much as I detest MS, I think with Word 2000 they've done a very, very good job.

Anybody try WP-11? Old crap in new release, or is it better?

 

[Tea]

Actually, the main thing I like about Word Perfect Office is Quattro Pro. A good spreadsheet is worth its weight in gold. I use the Novel-one (which was actually all done by Borland and merely badge-engineered by Novel) - i.e., the last of the Windows 3.1 versions. Yup, I've tried 123, I've tried more recent versions (even bought the damn things) and (of course) I've tried Excel 97 and 2000. None of them are half as good as the old one, so I keep on using it.

As for WP, I grew up on WordStar with CP/M, switched to MS Word in DOS days, and finally graduated to Word Perfect for Windows. Ver 6.1, as I recall. Used that for quite a while, alongside Describe (which I still use fairly regularly). But I do my real work in HTML these days, so WP software is not really relevant. I use EditPlus instead.

 

[mubs]

Correction!

I'm so old I'd forgotten! I actually learned on Wordstar, Calcstar & CP/M! Started out with the dinner-plate sized 8" floppies, then graduated to the itty-bitty 5.25" ones.

At the time, there was a company here in the U.S. that made dedicated word-processing machines. Basically custom hw running their custom OS & wp combination. When the user turned it on, all they ever saw was the wp, never the OS. Had a tall & narrow green CRT. Was called CPT. Don't know what the acronym stood for. They were real "high-end" (compared to the Wordstar folks), but went bankrupt with the rising popularity of WordPerfect and Dos.

I did use Quattro for a while; I still have some files saved over from ~1991. But IMHO, the improvements in Excel parallel those of Word WRT releases. I use only Word & Excel in the Office package, and I think Off. 2k is the best release. I've heard of major quirks in Off. XP. Reviews of Off. 2003 indicate that Word and Excel have been pretty much untouched from the XP release.

The one thing I really missed out on was OS/2; never ever used it. When I wanted to, I found like Coug did, that IBM expects me to truck them a lotta cash. No way!

 

[Howell]

I really wanted Warp when I built my first computer back in the mid-nineties but it was so much more expensive than 95 I had to pass.

I cut my wordprocessing teeth on Win3.1 and Works and Word of windows 1.0; and what can I say, it had me at hello. Two or three years later in college they tried forcing us to write reports on WP5.1 but WP was so unintuitive to me by that time we never got along.

 

[Pradeep]

I find it difficult to understand any sentence with the words "improvement" and "outlook" in it. But why use MS Office when I have Word Perfect Suite?

The weather outlook for the weekend is improving? :mrgrn:

I have to use Office because it's the only thing my mobile phone syncs up with without me buying extra software.