Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Totally OT: MS Office 2013

I am thinking of upgrading from MS Office 2010 to MS Office 2013. Did you do it, what were your experiences?

With so many knowledgeable individuals here, I am encouraged to post totally OT, asking for user experiences, and hoping that that is excused.

Outlook 2013 loses field heading (from, subject, received, size, etc.) and none of the solutions I've found on the web have fixed this. Quite annoying, and super confusing for people who are a bit less computer literate.

Editing styles in Word 2013 is more confusing, I liked the 2010 way better.

That said, you probably should do the upgrade, particularly if it doesn't cost you anything, just to be somewhat more compatible with the rest of the world.

2013 is likely the last version for me, when LibreOffice Calc is able to open my Excel simulations with VBA I'll probably switch over. If I didn't have so many ties to legacy MS software (it's a curse) I'd go 100% Linux in a second. Mint with the new Cinnamon UI is really sweet.

Nice to see there are a few fellow Linux users here.

Thunderbird does the same job and is free.

I use free Open Office, Writer, Calc and Impress, for business and personal use. Once over the learning curve I've yet to find something it can't handle. I no longer throw away money to MS. We shouldn't be using proprietary file format for exchange anyway but that's another OT debate.

How did you decide on Office 2013? Did you try some others and like this one best? Is there something 2010 can't do? Most people now days are looking for ways to get out of this paid upgrade cycle.

Others to try...
libre office
google docs
Both of these run under any OS, even Windows.

But Mozilla is kinda dropping support. They claim people aren't using mail clients much anymore. I personally can't stand the clunky web-based email tools.

Me neither ... and I don't want my address book on a web server either.

Anyway, I am after user experiences with MS Office 2013 as compared to MS Office 2010

ChrisA, welcome back - long time no see!

James
x

Any version of MS Office is fine for writing posts for the digital piano and synth forum -- you can write your post in Word, then copy and paste into the text box to post it on the forum (if you don't want to just type directly on the forum). For this purpose, either version of MS Office is perfectly fine...it doesn't make a lick of difference.

That is, unless MS has developed a new virtual piano or synth add-on for the latest version of Office. If this is the case, maybe you'd have all kinds of reasons to upgrade!

:P

Ugh, I know about cheaper alternatives for that purpose.

don't waste your money on 2013 - Microsoft makes me mad with all the "upgrades"

PS - if you still run Windows XP it will not install on there - i doubt you have that but just sayin'

I have even lost track of what M$ has been doing with Office. The company I work for has sort of an agreement with M$ to allow us to buy the Enterprise edition of Office 2007 at a significantly discounted price (basically for like 20 dolars instead of 800) and we're allowed to use it for as long as we work in that company so I nabbed a copy several years ago. It did come in handy every once in a blue moon in the past.

However, I was very annoyed by the "ribbon" UI they introduced in that release and to this day I have not understood the motivation for completely changing the old user interface that seemed to work just fine. Sometimes I think Microsoft has been making its "innovations" just for the sake of making them and to make it all look good in the marketing materials.

Thank God the people behind LibreOffice have no such whims.

I don't have any experience with the ribbon that many seem to hate, but in Word 2003 "Reading Layout" gives you weird squat pages out of nowhere (until you disable it), and some other newish feature that produces bizarre icon thingies that won't go away after you cut and paste.

But it's kind of weird to run across the same fundamental bugs again and again with a different, some might argue more annoying, UI in front of them. Couldn't they spend more time fixing them rather than monkeying with the part we already know and are accustomed to? Change for change's sake are speed bumps on the autobahn.

Thankfully I didn't have to battle that UI myself very often as I have been trying to avoid using the whole Office package as much as possible. I think, even though the old UI was not perfect, it was at least relatively straightforward to use and fairly "time-proven" (after all, pretty much all other Windows apps still use that sort of a user interface).

But it wouldn't be Microsoft if they didn't mess things up the way they did, all the while shouting out all these things about innovation and such. Heck, I bet they had that interface patented.

Just watching them do, redo and undo the system setting dialog screen with every Windows release since XP gives me a headache.

And bugs? What bugs? Who cares?

I happen to like the ribbon for instant access to lots and lots more functions than what was possible with a single strip.

Is the ribbon still there in MS Office 2013?

Me too.