Introducing the Office Next Blog

So does this blog going live mean the rumors of a July 16th announcement of beta may have some truth to them?

Great looking site and I'm excited to see what's to come!

Can't for the upcoming details and maybe the first public preview on Monday!  ;)

Thanks PJ for the update!

[Hmm, kept telling me I needed to be logged-in to comment, even though it showed me logged in (with MSO-blog account) at the top banner.  So of course, when I actually posted a comment it required me to link with one of the available social-network options and then lost my comment.  It would be wonderful if there were uniformity among blogs hosted among Microsoft fiefdoms.  They might all improved together that way.]

I'm not at all clear what it means for a release to be "transformational."  It will be interesting to see how that shows up in practice.

If there is an imminent public preview, I will be very happy to see it.  I'm eager to exercise it in format-interoperability scenarios.  I want to be excited about it too.  Transformed, not so much.

Why would you open a blog for interacting with customers, and not set up the proper tool for the job, like a proper bug and feature request tracker? That's the proper way to provide feedback, not in the comments of a blog post! Just open up Microsoft Connect for Office products, the delay is already inexcusable. Excel is full of OLD bugs not solved, and part of that is the way you make it impossible to provide feedback. The IE team more or less answers the stuff that comes up in MS Connect (though they are still short of the response the Chrome team provides). Why can't you do the same?

It is even hard to post feedback HERE!! The "post" (and share) buttons are missing in Chrome!!! Way to build up confidence and excitement!

I am really looking forward to the new Office :-)

I just bought Office 2010 Home and Business around the first week of June. Should've waited for this. =(

Dear Mr. PJ Hough,    I admire and support Microsoft's work and direction in developing MS Office Applications that will make the Office Workspace in any Corporation a friendlier and happier place to work.   I suggest that you look at not only ways to improve functionality of existing applications, integration between say MS Project, Access and Visio that help in Project Management as a 'stand-alone' product, not just seperate applications.   Microsoft should keep in mind that Highschool/College students need your help in keeping the costs of the Student version of MS Office whereby it's affordable to them...give them the opportunity to explore the possibilities that exist..and make it a Win-Win situation to all.

Change your Microsoft Campus(Innovation Center)Bldg. 92 a place that attracts visitors from all around the World...just like another Disneyland but in this case with an opportunity to learn...provide the vision, innovation and spirit of your visitors..instead of just an MS Product outlet..without the opportunity to test..understand..and be guided of the possiblities in the future.   There's nobody there, "Self-guided tour" just doesn't provide what we need...and your Store should also provide off the self Software for visitors...not just for your MS employees like it does right now....

I took my 15 yrs. old son...and we were both interested in what we saw..but needed to see so much more that was available to the public/visitors to your Redmond Campus.

William Woloschuk

Managing Principal, SCS Consulting, International

http://www.nvo.com/scsusa

Project Management on Linkedin.com

www.linkedin.com/.../project-management-global-resources-3688687

waiting for the next Office :). I want seen how it will integrate with windows 8 workspace for PC and tablets

What you guys did with Office 2010 was amazing! I love the layout and simplicity.

Suggestion for improvement, It seems the publisher tools aren't as sophisticated as the Word and PowerPoint Tools. I would recommend giving publisher a combined Word/Powerpoint tool selection. Right now I can build better flyers with PowerPoint than I can Publisher, it seems it should be the other way around since publisher is for page layout and design.

To be honest I prefer the old style to the new one, 2003 is IMO the best Office ever, but 2010 is quite good (2007 is/was horrible on the other hand).

Anyway the most important thing for me, the number 1 request: please have excel open each file in a different window. Like Word does, like Excel did for at least 3 or 4 version up to Office 2010. It's so annoying sometimes I think about going back to Office 2003.

Dear Mr. PJ Hough, as an Office Pro Vet, I would like Excel to improve its statistics algorithms accuracy, in order to avoid some Add-Ins. Though I love its resilience, I'd rather keep things as simple as possible, Please check http://www.daheiser.info/

Thanks in advance, kind regards.

I would like to highlight a few issues that I hope will be fixed in the new excel:

- conditional formatting does not assign real colors to cells. Because of this there is no way to change the color of a cell without removing the conditional formatting from it.

- conditional  formatting has no API calls in VBA. Coupled with the previous issue that means that I can't use the colors from conditional formatting in a VBA script either

- the colors of charts should be editable so we can use conditional formatting on them too. A bar chart for example should allow us to set the color of each bar by using some rules

- shapes should also be easier to manipulate. Right  now dealing with imported shapes involves a lot of VBA hacking

- shape conditional formatting should be a basic feature

- a map API allowing us to interact with bing maps would be great

- figuring out how to point to certain data in a VBA script is a pain. Can we please have a tool that we can click and it takes us to the spreadsheet so we can select the cells we want to address just like formulas can be done? After selection the tool could paste in the appriate refference to the data (worksheet("blablabla").cells(2,4) etc. )

Thanks for reading

I hope the new Office 2013 will work as smoothly with Windows 7 and Windows 8, where it obviously as a brother or sister will cooperate. In any case I look forward to this beta ....