The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Microsoft Office dependency"

Yeah, good question. I'm

aprill — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:54:58 +0000

Yeah, good question. I'm still using Office on my Mac. I'm finding I'm using it less and less. Though, I have had powerpoint open for months. I found Powerpoint better looking to work with than Keynote. Google Docs seems to cover word and excel type stuff well enough. I should give the Google presenter a go.

office 365 compatibility

skeptic — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:31:06 +0000

I have been meaning to try Office 365 but my understanding is it lacks features of the desktop version. Therefore it is functionally equivalent to Google Docs: it will open most things most of the time. office 365 would have to have much higher compatibility with Windows Office than Google Docs does to justify its monthly cost.
Anyone have insight?

Interoperability

Werner — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:24:17 +0000

Hi Skep,

you are absolutely right. Beside this classic big battleship office suites, there are more suitable tools out there. Especially all those slim line "Cloud"-"Web 2.0"-Office solutions.

As you say in real life interoperability, struggles with missing fonts, missing add-ons, paper sizes, wild clicking users and so on. Even if we talk about Microsoft Office different versions.

Also this big function-prone suite approach which was developed in competition of office suites is IMHO very bad in companies environment. It develops usually into an ugly "tool" landscape of macros hell, with poor functionality and even more interoperability issues.

Imagine a small team of young IT professionals walking around for 3 years in a big company environments, checks all the .XLS-Tools and turns them into central (Web-2.0-) out of this. The cost savings would be tremendous.

Especially in the BYOD idea IMHO users want to use there native tool to e.g. perform a quick edit. No matter if this is an phone, tablet, notebook or workstation. Also no matter what operating system. So all this modern fresh developed web-office-versions would help.

But even here the usual competitors interoperability barriers would apply: "Yes, you can do everything on my platform!".

Users want to their device and work collaborative. It is a shame for the IT industry.

I think it's acceptable now

Scott Wilson — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:17:56 +0000

In my circles, at least, PDF is becoming the default for anything that isn't going to be collaborative, and if it's collaborative, it's easily uploaded into Docs and it hasn't been terribly difficult to convince the collaborators on the other end that it's easier than e-mailing the file back and forth constantly anyway.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm seeing fewer and fewer documents with fancy formatting or advanced macros in the first place. I think that was, in 90% of cases, worthless glitter introducing needless complexity. All those elaborate, macro-driven forms you used to see have been largely replaced by either web-forms or just plain old fill-in-the-blank PDFs.

There was a point where you had to assume that the folks on the other end were so technically unsophisticated that any file option that didn't come pre-installed on their Dell was going to be hopeless to explain and so you were better off just giving in and using the formats they sent you. I think the general level of experience has improved to the point where it's not just acceptable, but actually POSSIBLE, to request they spit you out a PDF or save as RTF or whatnot.

Office 365

Chris York — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:33:19 +0000

Have you tried Office 365 and using the Web versions? If someone sends you an Office doc, you can open it in these Cloud versions to read and perform editing. This covers documents that are sent to you.

The End of Office

ITSMinfo — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:15:24 +0000

Skep,

I fought for the end of Office several years ago. When customers resisted licensing costs, I advocated OpenOffice.org. I tried to use alternatives where possible. eventually I postponed trying to swim against the currents. However, we are now at a point where the currents are shifting rapidly and we will stop associating Microsoft Office with monopoly. Existing customers will defer upgrades. iDevice users won't bother. Cloud services will suffice. Distributing documents in PDF will be good enough in many cases. As with most technologies, it won't be an either/or proposition, but a both/and. (Exception: 8-track tapes.)

To address your specific question, I think it would be unwise eliminate backward compatibility with Office for the next couple years. Maybe five years. But our need for band-aids and workarounds will decline. As I type this, I am sitting in an environment where MS Office is the du jour standard for everything, and clouds are only seen on rainy days. Clearly, the future is not evenly distributed.