Microsoft Office 14 Makes Its Way to the Market

By  |  Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 8:25 am

Microsoft OfficeOver at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft has begun to hand out an alpha version of Microsoft Office 14 to a few testers. We still don’t know much about the upcoming upgrade, which should ship either late this year or sometime in 2010, other than that it will be accompanied by Microsoft’s first full-blown Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Oh, and Mary Jo says there will be a new version of the suite: Office for Sales. 

Office 14 will be the first update to the suite since the radical interface makeover it got for Office 2007; I’ll be intrigued to see whether Microsoft leaves the new look and feel pretty much as is, or reworks it further. It’s certainly got both huge fans and recalcitrant naysayers…

 
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7 Comments For This Post

  1. Dave Barnes Says:

    Does anyone actually care about a new version of MS Office?
    Have the cubicle drones of the world been clamoring for something new to learn?
    Do we need new features in order to type a 2-page memo?

  2. Harry McCracken Says:

    Totally true that a lot of folks just don’t need new office apps–that’s a huge challenge for any product that’s been around as long as Office (and which was already so close to 100% market share) and presumably a big part of why Microsoft decided to make Office 2007 so strikingly different. I like Office 2007, but it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime approach to upgrading a venerable product–I’ll be interested to see what Microsoft does to make O14 tempting…

    –Harry

  3. Jeff Says:

    I couldn’t care less about Office 14. There are cheaper, some free, alternatives to Office. Therefore there is no reason for me to care about this bloated, expensive and troublesome software.

  4. BM Says:

    That sounds interesting to me. I’ve tried formatting columns with the space bar and I used a freeware word processor. It lacked column formatting. Come on. You can do better than that. Now the only alternative to Microsoft Office I would consider is Word Perfect Office which there’s not much price difference. I normally stay away from freeware apps and if I do try them I see if they have the tools that have the functionality. I don’t listen to what others have to say about. I’ve done that more than once and ended up polluting my harddrive with useless junk.

  5. Ron Miller Says:

    I agree with BM. The alternatives are not nearly as polished or full-featured. Besides, Office files are de facto standards; even the alternatives are graded on their ability to read and save to Office formats.

    That said, I’d like to see the tabbed interface that debuted in Office 2007 be applied across the product line. Outlook, for example, could use a makeover.

  6. Microsoft Consultant Says:

    I have heard from some developers that have got their hands on 14 that it makes great strides at correcting some of the issues they had with previous iterations. What those issues were they weren’t so willing to divulge. Here’s looking forward to a great new product from Microsoft!

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