6 ms·

I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair few years. I still pay £30 or so a year

by srmarm 5y ago

I can't think of anything in my office usage that wasn't available in 2000. Admittedly I've not used Outlook for a fair few years. I still pay £30 or so a year for the annual licence when it comes on sale just to be able to open docs natively though!

fomine3 5y ago
Overall: saving history, collaboration editing, ribbon (I like it), HiDPI support, better shape handling Excel: multiple conditional formatting, over 65536x256, sparksline, new functions like COUNTIFS,ENCODEURL
quietbritishjim 5y ago
* Drawing canvases * The new fonts (Calibri etc.) * Proper biliography support (not as good as BibTeX etc. but good enough for many reports) * Proper math support (not as good as LaTeX but better than the old equation editor and good enough for many reports) Certainly the pace of change is radically slower than in the old days (like Word 6.0 and Word 95) but enough that it's usually nicer to use recent versions rather than older ones.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.
  - quietbritishjim 5y ago
    > Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well. I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't commonly come across something that's so much better that I wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something specific in mind? The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years ago so if you feel that fonts "age" then you certainly won't like that one!)
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      I love Palatino, Garamond, and other timeless fonts. I just don’t think Calibri is timeless at all. Calibri actually wasn’t preceded by Arial; it was a replacement for Times New Roman, which was the previous default font in Microsoft Word. (They made the switch from Serif to Sans Serif.) Arial - apart from being the default font in Notepad and WordPad - was never really part of the Windows aesthetic. The new Windows font is Segoe UI (which I think has only improved with age) replaced MS Sans Serif, which was an altered version of Tahoma (introduced with Windows 95). If you use HN on Windows and are into fonts, I did a write up on two iconic fonts that are actually just one: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ For my personal ”brand”, I was using Publico Text for a very long time, but now it seems to be everywhere so that’s a bit of a bummer :)
      - quietbritishjim 5y ago
        I suppose it depends on how you look at it. It used to be that the two main fonts were Arial and Times New Roman (and Courier New), then they switched to Calibri and Cambria (and Consolas). At the same time, as you say, they switched Word's default from serif to sans serif (because sans serif are better for on-screen reading, and the assumption about how documents would be read had changed). I'm sure we can agree on all those facts. Whether Calibri is a replacement for Arial or Times New Roman is just a matter of what we each mean by the word "replacment" and is not interesting. I think Calibri looks extremely readable on screen (at least on Windows with ClearType, which is what it was designed for). At the end of the day it's a matter of opinion. Your article on Tahoma and Verdana was very interesting! To veer a little further off topic: I was under the impression that those fonts, or at least Verdana, was primary designed for great readibility for very short text labels in dialogue boxes, so it does make me wince when I see them used for long documents, especially printed ones.
        ComputerGuru 5y ago
        Thanks, and yes, we’re in agreement. Have a look at Sitka [1], it’s flown completely under the radar. It’s specifically designed for on-screen readability and especially in longer texts with some studies done to boost comprehension (some tiny amount, I’m sure) as compared to Calibri and others. We’re using that for our school’s memos and letters to students and parents. I personally find it a nicer in-box alternative to Calibri, which just looks off to me. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/sitka https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/sitka
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as Word's default font, because TNR had become ubiquitous (and because docs were starting to be read on-screen more than in-print, so switching to a sans-serif default made sense). But TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Most of the commonly recommended alternatives (e.g. Baskerville and Garamond) pre-date it by decades or centuries, so it's hardly an "age" thing. It's just that readers don't see them as frequently as they do TNR. Even Calibri came along simply because Helvetica/Arial were "old". But Apple (well-respected for typography) still use Helvetica as the body text default in their office apps. And only the most pretentious of font snobs, who have carefully studied the capital "R" and "G", could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. I still think that Arial is a much nicer font than Calibri for body text. It just feels "old" because people have seen it on Wikipedia pages a million times.
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      No, I meant dated as in “the novelty of it wore off and without that it doesn’t stand on its own two feet.” (If you read my other replies, you'll find that we are probably in complete agreement.) I probably qualify as a font snob (although hopefully not a pretentious one). Either/both of Arial or Helvetica are better designed than Calibri. Arial is available with some “fixes” as Arial Nova for free on the MS Store. Georgia, used everywhere as it is/was, will never be old or dated in my lifetime (but there’s a Georgia Pro with more weights and some changes to hinting available for free on the MS Store). Tahoma/Verdana [1] has aged beautifully and remains excellent for the web (as evidenced by its use on HN) - it's also permanently associated in my mind with being the MS Encarta body font long before Wikipedia was a thing. All but Arial were designed by the one and only Matthew Carter. (Times New Roman was certainly overused and elicits some unpleasant gut reactions thanks to its guilt by association with poorly formatted and improperly typeset Word documents but is nevertheless still a classic - and of course its core origins long predate the web.) [1]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/
    - 5y ago
zamadatix 5y ago
Real time co-authoring with the cloud save locations is a killer for me as it got rid of a bunch of "<x> final copy (3) FINAL - Jim's edits" crap. I think that was 2016 initially I think but it's gotten improvements since. But for single user "I want to edit a document" there isn't much to add since 2000.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  True, that and the "Who has the shift schedule excel open on the server???? Close it please, urgent!!" emails all day :)
agumonkey 5y ago
some cute things have been added - pre emptive auto fill based on context - sparklines (tiny graph in a cell) - cute conditional formatting UI - some web data fetching can be of use if your sheet is dealing with external / world data
GloriousKoji 5y ago
PowerPoint's automatic subtitles is the only new thing that actually really impressed me.

by srmarm 5y ago

fomine3 5y ago

Overall: saving history, collaboration editing, ribbon (I like it), HiDPI support, better shape handling Excel: multiple conditional formatting, over 65536x256, sparksline, new functions like COUNTIFS,ENCODEURL

quietbritishjim 5y ago

* Drawing canvases * The new fonts (Calibri etc.) * Proper biliography support (not as good as BibTeX etc. but good enough for many reports) * Proper math support (not as good as LaTeX but better than the old equation editor and good enough for many reports) Certainly the pace of change is radically slower than in the old days (like Word 6.0 and Word 95) but enough that it's usually nicer to use recent versions rather than older ones.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
Office will use whatever fonts you have installed. Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well.
- quietbritishjim 5y ago
  > Calibri is already dated, it hasn’t aged too well. I think it looks great. Maybe I'm dated! It's certainly a lot better than Arial, which proceeded it, and I don't commonly come across something that's so much better that I wished I wasn't using Calibri. Did you have something specific in mind? The primary serif font, Cambria, is fine but I much prefer Palatino (which was originally released more than 70 years ago so if you feel that fonts "age" then you certainly won't like that one!)
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    I love Palatino, Garamond, and other timeless fonts. I just don’t think Calibri is timeless at all. Calibri actually wasn’t preceded by Arial; it was a replacement for Times New Roman, which was the previous default font in Microsoft Word. (They made the switch from Serif to Sans Serif.) Arial - apart from being the default font in Notepad and WordPad - was never really part of the Windows aesthetic. The new Windows font is Segoe UI (which I think has only improved with age) replaced MS Sans Serif, which was an altered version of Tahoma (introduced with Windows 95). If you use HN on Windows and are into fonts, I did a write up on two iconic fonts that are actually just one: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ For my personal ”brand”, I was using Publico Text for a very long time, but now it seems to be everywhere so that’s a bit of a bummer :)
    - quietbritishjim 5y ago
      I suppose it depends on how you look at it. It used to be that the two main fonts were Arial and Times New Roman (and Courier New), then they switched to Calibri and Cambria (and Consolas). At the same time, as you say, they switched Word's default from serif to sans serif (because sans serif are better for on-screen reading, and the assumption about how documents would be read had changed). I'm sure we can agree on all those facts. Whether Calibri is a replacement for Arial or Times New Roman is just a matter of what we each mean by the word "replacment" and is not interesting. I think Calibri looks extremely readable on screen (at least on Windows with ClearType, which is what it was designed for). At the end of the day it's a matter of opinion. Your article on Tahoma and Verdana was very interesting! To veer a little further off topic: I was under the impression that those fonts, or at least Verdana, was primary designed for great readibility for very short text labels in dialogue boxes, so it does make me wince when I see them used for long documents, especially printed ones.
      - ComputerGuru 5y ago
        Thanks, and yes, we’re in agreement. Have a look at Sitka [1], it’s flown completely under the radar. It’s specifically designed for on-screen readability and especially in longer texts with some studies done to boost comprehension (some tiny amount, I’m sure) as compared to Calibri and others. We’re using that for our school’s memos and letters to students and parents. I personally find it a nicer in-box alternative to Calibri, which just looks off to me. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/sitka https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/sitka
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as Word's default font, because TNR had become ubiquitous (and because docs were starting to be read on-screen more than in-print, so switching to a sans-serif default made sense). But TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Most of the commonly recommended alternatives (e.g. Baskerville and Garamond) pre-date it by decades or centuries, so it's hardly an "age" thing. It's just that readers don't see them as frequently as they do TNR. Even Calibri came along simply because Helvetica/Arial were "old". But Apple (well-respected for typography) still use Helvetica as the body text default in their office apps. And only the most pretentious of font snobs, who have carefully studied the capital "R" and "G", could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. I still think that Arial is a much nicer font than Calibri for body text. It just feels "old" because people have seen it on Wikipedia pages a million times.
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    No, I meant dated as in “the novelty of it wore off and without that it doesn’t stand on its own two feet.” (If you read my other replies, you'll find that we are probably in complete agreement.) I probably qualify as a font snob (although hopefully not a pretentious one). Either/both of Arial or Helvetica are better designed than Calibri. Arial is available with some “fixes” as Arial Nova for free on the MS Store. Georgia, used everywhere as it is/was, will never be old or dated in my lifetime (but there’s a Georgia Pro with more weights and some changes to hinting available for free on the MS Store). Tahoma/Verdana [1] has aged beautifully and remains excellent for the web (as evidenced by its use on HN) - it's also permanently associated in my mind with being the MS Encarta body font long before Wikipedia was a thing. All but Arial were designed by the one and only Matthew Carter. (Times New Roman was certainly overused and elicits some unpleasant gut reactions thanks to its guilt by association with poorly formatted and improperly typeset Word documents but is nevertheless still a classic - and of course its core origins long predate the web.) [1]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/
  - 5y ago

zamadatix 5y ago

Real time co-authoring with the cloud save locations is a killer for me as it got rid of a bunch of "<x> final copy (3) FINAL - Jim's edits" crap. I think that was 2016 initially I think but it's gotten improvements since. But for single user "I want to edit a document" there isn't much to add since 2000.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
True, that and the "Who has the shift schedule excel open on the server???? Close it please, urgent!!" emails all day :)

agumonkey 5y ago

some cute things have been added - pre emptive auto fill based on context - sparklines (tiny graph in a cell) - cute conditional formatting UI - some web data fetching can be of use if your sheet is dealing with external / world data

GloriousKoji 5y ago

PowerPoint's automatic subtitles is the only new thing that actually really impressed me.