But...they're adding VBA back in. GOOD! Because I actually love Excel. It's amazing what it can do. And Word even with the interface getting worse lately is still pretty nice.
For my needs, Excel has been so out of it's class for so long it would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
Honestly though, if it meets your needs, that's great, and more power to you.
For me though, it's crappy charting, weak statistical and mathematical functioning, and it's limited data manipulation features long ago made me jump to MATLAB. For what I do it is so much more powerful and so much easier to use, I have never looked back.
Yeah, not everyone needs to manipulate 100K spike train data points from neurophysiology experiments, or 50+ trials from an infrared reflectance eye tracker sampling at 1KHz, perform fourier series analyses, hierarchical logistic linear regressions, but I do, and for those things, Excel is a joke.
I like what they have done with it so far, but I would like them to go one step further and get rid of all the floating palettes. Perhaps if they were in a sidebar I would not mind so much, but you are often shuffling them around on smaller screens.
It is great to see that the formula bar in Excel has finally been incorporated. Some of the design decisions for 2008 were very strange.
The beta is available on bit torrent, but is very buggy and things like the equation editor do not work. I was able to install it parallel to 2008, so could remove it without problem. Might try on an external with a clean install.
I am pleased to see what they are doing with this. I have tried to like iWork, but it lacks so many technical features that I find it is almost useless in science and engineering.
Bowser I do concur actually. The charting in Excel is kind of weird and not the most intuitive. And it's ass-ugly. It's like a turd with a little spritz of Mac Aqua on it. I usually create in Keynote then import and save in PPT.
I'll be doing stuff with lots of data, e.g., lidar, remote sensing, GIS. I'll have to look into Matlab. I've heard a lot about it and seen things produced with it that must have required a lot of power and capability in statistics and mathematical programming for lack of a better term. It runs on OS X interestingly, I will probably be checking it out for my thesis at some point.
I am a consultant and work with msft office all the time. I have tried iWork but compatibility was an issue in excel, powerpoint and word. Moreover pivot tables are essential for me.
I still use iwork for personal stuff and love it. But at work sharing files with the team is critical.
The fact is that the 2008 version of msft office sucks. It's unstable, lots of compatibility issues with MSoffice for windows (Isn't it made by the same company?), doesn't have macros in excel and is very limited compared with the windows version. For the 2008 version I was expecting something better, but had just the same s***t with some nice colorful menus minus macros in excel. No innovation, no stability, no compatibility, nothing relevant.It crashes every day.
So in fact I don't really believe in the new office version. With microsoft track of vaporware I guess we will have just the same thing with some cute menus. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope so.
For the future I'm patiently waiting for apple to produce a version of iWork that will allow me to replace office and the just dump microsoft for ever.
I have already replaced msf project with Merlin and achieve the same results.
Comments
But...they're adding VBA back in. GOOD! Because I actually love Excel. It's amazing what it can do. And Word even with the interface getting worse lately is still pretty nice.
For my needs, Excel has been so out of it's class for so long it would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
Honestly though, if it meets your needs, that's great, and more power to you.
For me though, it's crappy charting, weak statistical and mathematical functioning, and it's limited data manipulation features long ago made me jump to MATLAB. For what I do it is so much more powerful and so much easier to use, I have never looked back.
Yeah, not everyone needs to manipulate 100K spike train data points from neurophysiology experiments, or 50+ trials from an infrared reflectance eye tracker sampling at 1KHz, perform fourier series analyses, hierarchical logistic linear regressions, but I do, and for those things, Excel is a joke.
It is great to see that the formula bar in Excel has finally been incorporated. Some of the design decisions for 2008 were very strange.
The beta is available on bit torrent, but is very buggy and things like the equation editor do not work. I was able to install it parallel to 2008, so could remove it without problem. Might try on an external with a clean install.
I am pleased to see what they are doing with this. I have tried to like iWork, but it lacks so many technical features that I find it is almost useless in science and engineering.
I'll be doing stuff with lots of data, e.g., lidar, remote sensing, GIS. I'll have to look into Matlab. I've heard a lot about it and seen things produced with it that must have required a lot of power and capability in statistics and mathematical programming for lack of a better term. It runs on OS X interestingly, I will probably be checking it out for my thesis at some point.
I still use iwork for personal stuff and love it. But at work sharing files with the team is critical.
The fact is that the 2008 version of msft office sucks. It's unstable, lots of compatibility issues with MSoffice for windows (Isn't it made by the same company?), doesn't have macros in excel and is very limited compared with the windows version. For the 2008 version I was expecting something better, but had just the same s***t with some nice colorful menus minus macros in excel. No innovation, no stability, no compatibility, nothing relevant.It crashes every day.
So in fact I don't really believe in the new office version. With microsoft track of vaporware I guess we will have just the same thing with some cute menus. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope so.
For the future I'm patiently waiting for apple to produce a version of iWork that will allow me to replace office and the just dump microsoft for ever.
I have already replaced msf project with Merlin and achieve the same results.
Miguel
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064PF4ZQ?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0064PF4ZQ&linkCode=xm2&tag=baesofamazon-20