office

Mac Office 2008 adds Excel templates, supports Exchange

Microsoft is revealing more details about new features in its Office for Mac 2008 suite, due for a release early next year.

Excel 2008 for Mac will offer worksheet templates with baked-in calculations designed to make it easier to balance household finances, manage inventory and other common tasks. The new Ledger Sheets features will include a gallery of elements, shifting formulas to the background.

In addition, the Entourage e-mail client will offer more support for Microsoft Exchange, which traditionally has enabled non-Mac PC users to make appointments and share notes and files with each other.

Each version of Office for … Read more

OpenOffice's apparent mission creep

Apparently, OpenOffice 3.0 is intent on picking a fight with Microsoft Outlook. Bonne chance, mes amis. I don't mean to imply that it can't be done, but am rather suggesting that this is not the right way to go about it. Zimbra, sure. Or Mozilla's Thunderbird (standalone), sure. But bundled into OpenOffice? I'm not seeing it.

This arises from a presentation delivered earlier this year at the OpenOffice conference:

One thing that really caught my attention was (a) reference to including a Personal Information Manager (PIM) (in OpenOffice). More specifically the presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an "Outlook replacement."

Bundling a runner-up PIM/e-mail suite with a runner-up Office replacement? Not likely. Disruption is the way to go, and the combination is not disruptive.… Read more

Sun opens up OpenOffice

Jim Parkinson of Sun has been listening to critiques of OpenOffice's governance policies and responds with a post that suggests that Sun plans to address the problems. Specifically, Sun will be using the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) for code contributed to OpenOffice (which ensures that any code contributed to Sun will also be licensed under an OSI-approved license); it may change the tools used to develop OpenOffice to meet community demand; and it will be forming a new Community Advisory Group and has invited people from outside Sun to participate.

All good news, and all welcome.

But I particularly like the aims of the new Advisory Board:… Read more

Weak communities and strong forks

Proprietary vendors sometimes point to the possibility of open-source fragmentation as one of its great weaknesses believing, as they do, that the vendor should always control its own destiny. What such vendors fail to see is that a community's right to fork a project is actually its greatest strength. The fork is the community's most valuable tool for ensuring the ongoing health of the project.

OpenOffice.org is feeling this now, as a cumbersome community process has led prominent members of the OpenOffice community to lay down the law (er...the fork) and declare independence, as Kohei Yoshida does:

If Sun insists on rewriting all the work I've already done just to ensure that they own all the code in OO.o, even though it is legally permissible to integrate my code under a pure LGPL license as an external component, then perhaps I need to re-think my relationship with the project.… Read more

Office of the future?

For most everyone working in the U.S. corporate world, Microsoft Office is a must: Outlook for e-mail/calendar; Word for word processing; Excel for spreadsheets; and PowerPoint for presentations. The 2007 release has been covered extensively on CNET Reviews.

However, a recent rise in free office suites has given end users much more choice in productivity software than they've had in many years. Just two weeks ago, IBM announced a free version of Lotus Symphony. Though it's still in beta release, the freeware includes serviceable word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, all of which support Microsoft Office … Read more

Waiting for Office Mobile 2007

We first reported on Office Mobile 2007 in June, the same time Microsoft announced the Japanese version of Windows Mobile 6 (WM6). The company revealed then that this new version of Office Mobile will be available in Q3 2007--but looking at today's date, it has not happened.

Last week, a pre-release version was mistakenly put up for download from the Microsoft site. This has since been taken down. The reason cited was that the file was meant for internal testing and not for public consumption. The upgrade is widely reported as being Office Mobile 6.1, but Microsoft has … Read more

Episode 572: AT&T, your world, censored

… Read more

Microsoft, Adobe launch document sharing services

Microsoft and Adobe are announcing, at exactly the same time, competing services for sharing documents from your computer. Adobe's Share converts all shared documents to Flash, so you can embed them in any Web page. It's like Scribd but designed more to share files with workgroups than the world at large. In its current beta form it supports PDF and image files only. Adobe plans to open up the Share API so the service can be used as a virtual storage drive.

Share is a natural counterpart to Adobe's new BuzzWord word processor (news; review), which it … Read more

Beyond Microsoft Office: We compare 9 productivity suites

Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and their Office allies can be great applications, but not everybody needs everything they offer. How do you know where to start when shopping for alternative software? You'll save money with a different brand, but will it do the trick? Should you buy boxed software, download freebies for your hard drive, access browser-based apps, or juggle all of the above?

We've reviewed nine productivity suites--including downloads and online services--and cooked up a jumbo chart mixing up their gumbo of features and file formats. IBM's release of Lotus Symphony beta added more spice to … Read more