Office 2003

piersk

Anyone like to comment on this? And please no "Oh my god it's M$ so it must be bad!"

drawmack

It's a program

Norman_Graham

It costs about 500 euros (basic) or over 600 euros (with Access), unless you buy the student/teacher/pupil edition for 170 euros (no Access).

Norm

The_Chancer

Or one of those new office blocks that have just opened in 2003.....

Anyway... supposed SPAM filters in Outlook (would be good if they work... gonna have to test it) - the possibility of needing another couple of Gb to hold it all... (Bloatware here we come) and a whole host of new functions that the average user will never use, yet feel compelled to upgrade to lest they be left behind in the software race.

What're the chances of us upgrading here ? A big fat 0....until it is too late, and pointless, then we'll still be behind the rest...

(Back to Word 97...)

Moonglobe

Originally posted by Norman Graham
It costs about 500 euros (basic) or over 600 euros (with Access), unless you buy the student/teacher/pupil edition for 170 euros (no Access).

Norm

im stil confused as to why you would want access....

stolzyboy

Originally posted by Moonglobe
im stil confused as to why you would want access....

think he's merely stating the facts...

goldbug

It's at this point I sit back, relax, and take comfort in the fact that I use OpenOffice. 😃

Upgrade costs be damned!

piersk

Unfortunately, I'm kinda stuff using MS office. And I was kinda hoping for something along the lines of "It's great" or "It's crap" 😃

Norman_Graham

Hi Piersk

I'll state it here loud and clear - I think WORD is one of the finest programmes on the planet. I tried to buy it separately, and the price was over 400 euros. M$ doesn't want you to buy it separately - they have made this option as unnattractive as possible. B'st*rds.

Why would I want Access, Moonglobe? Well, I would actually like to find out about ASP and how it works. It's the thirst for knowledge, you see. Knowing that I can do almost nothing inspires me to expand my repertoire a little.

So ... I say it's great, Piersk. I just wish M$ would wake up to the fact that their software now costs more than a new computer. WinXP (home) and Office 2003 (basic) together will set you back over 600 euros ... for which you can get a 2GHz AMD with 40GB HDD, 128MB Nvidia card, 256MB DDR RAM, 52x CD-RW/DVD combi (all brandname products) and Suse Linux Pro 9 with a 10-inch high cuddly Tux to take to bed with you. I've already written to Santa asking for Linux and the biggest cuddly Tux he can find. His little helpers are on the case.

Hey, Billy! It's almost Xmas. Change your $%*&! pricing policy.

Norm

goldbug

Out of curiosity, what does Access have to do with ASP? Last time I used ASP (every damn day), you didn't need Access at all. 😃

dalecosp

Dunno if I can say much about it.

Originally posted by Norman Graham
Hey, billy....

Cost? yeah, if you're a normal user. I do lots of non-profits, etc. and we just bought 9 seats of the big version at a total cost of 582 USD. You can't beat that with a stick --- but, you also can't do that in business, or for personal use. I guess they decided to tithe your 600 euros to churches , activists, and the Red Cross.

The New Word is very BLUE. I did notice that the clients were opening WordPerfect10 docs with it, but they had to have a lil' help 'cause the "choose file type" dialog doesn't have '.wpd' in it.

Other than that, I dunno much yet. I imagine that as far as that office is concerned, we'll never know much about the new features.

I've got one of their boxen here, just finishing the XP install, so maybe I'll stick Office on there now and play a while --- after all, I need to if I'm gonna support 'em with it, right?

AAMOF, mebbe ... nah ... I'm liking FBSD on the desktop now, with TextMaker ($50 USD) ... dunno if I've got Java fixed 'til OO will install or not ... and haven't had time to try...

bad76

I'm sorry,
but i've just updated to office xp... :rolleyes:

(...and it's two day i'm searching any diffs... one) the buttons are blue...two)...two)... 🙁 )

drawmack

Hmmm, why would you want access?

Well I once had a client say the following:
We want a database application to replace all of the excel spread sheet solutions we are using now. However, we want the smallest possible learning curve on the new software.

Okay, so I had them send me all of their spread sheet solutions. Then I used those as the input forms with a little macro magic to take the data from them into an access database. Then the output went straight to word and from there they could print, mail merge or what have you. It took me about a week to do the complete system from the ground up. That is the power of integrated office solutions and why stand alone word processors and spread sheet programs have fallen by the way side and been replaced by things like office and lotus notes.

Norman_Graham

Originally posted by goldbug
Out of curiosity, what does Access have to do with ASP? Last time I used ASP (every damn day), you didn't need Access at all. 😃

Hmm ... not sure. Perhaps I'm confused. I understood (from my friend who works for M$) that you can use Access as a back-end for ASP and the like. He uses SQL server, but he ain't paying for it. I must ask him again what he actually does - I'm completely lost.

Norm

goldbug

Originally posted by Norman Graham
Hmm ... not sure. Perhaps I'm confused. I understood (from my friend who works for M$) that you can use Access as a back-end for ASP and the like. He uses SQL server, but he ain't paying for it. I must ask him again what he actually does - I'm completely lost.

Norm

ASP is just an environment for scripting languages (like VBscript/JScript).. somewhat similar to PHP.

It's not inherently tied to any sort of data backend, really. You can use ASP/VBScript with a MySQL, MS SQL, Access, (whatever) backend if you wanted, heck, you don't even need a data store at all, technically.

Norman_Graham

Aha. Thanks for that, Goldbug. But PHP is a language, while ASP is just an environment - there's no such language as ASP, right?

However, good to know that Access is unnecessary.

Norm

goldbug

Originally posted by Norman Graham
Aha. Thanks for that, Goldbug. But PHP is a language, while ASP is just an environment - there's no such language as ASP, right?

However, good to know that Access is unnecessary.

Norm

I would say no.

When people write "ASP scripts", they are usually writing VBscript that will be hosted in the ASP environment on the server. The only thing the 'ASP' itself provides, is built-in objects for interacting with the client via the server, and vice versa.
For example, the Server object is similar to the PHP $SERVER array, the Response object controls output from the server to the client browser, the Request object handles input or form data, Session object, like PHP's $SESSION

Bah, enough of this ASP primer stuff, I'm soiling the purity of this forum 🙂

Merve

Originally posted by goldbug

Bah, enough of this ASP primer stuff, I'm soiling the purity of this forum 🙂

Bah! Don't worry. I already took care of that 🙂

Anyway, I think that newer and newer Microsoft products are actually less user friendly. Error messages are becoming more and more frequent. Word 2000 crashes very often!

I think it's the little things that make the Office suite not-so-great. There is no such thing as 'automatic negative' text, as in text that appears to be the exact negative colour of the background, pixel by pixel. Complex sorting rules for spreadsheets and tables are not available in any of the applications. Creating complex search rules for Access involves learning Visual Basic.

The relatively new addition (from 2000 on I think), Microsoft Visio, is a very good app. It has everything I could ever dream of to create. (Microsoft bought if from another company.) It's problems, are again little things that add up. Creating charts the way you want them to look is very difficult. The boxes are aligned for you. You can't tweak to get things the exact way you want them.

I have not tried Office 2003 yet, so I have no idea why I'm blabbing on, but I assume that they haven't added some of the aforementioned features yet (what do you expect, it's M$).

LordShryku

Ain't tried it. No real intention to. I'm with goldbug. Open Office does everything I need with an office suite.

cough cough Available for Windows too cough cough

piersk

Originally posted by goldbug
I would say no.

And I would completely agree. The language of ASP is usually VBScript, but you can also use JavaScript and even a form or Perl called PerlScript. All the ASP is is a group of objects (such as the response object) that you can add to as and when you need (like aspsmartupload).

And I don't know about soiling. I've grown to like ASP over the few months that I've been here. You can use it to do some pretty cool stuff.