office 2013 Office 2013: Annoying things

[Ambroos]

Hello!

I was just trying out Office 2013, been playing with it for a while. Aside the fact that it seems to be (much) slower than Office 2010 everything seems about okay. One thing that annoys me slightly is the cursor animation, it makes me feel like I'm a slow typist even though I'm absolutely not.

One huge thing I absolutely hate right now is the inability to choose another color for the user interface. The white is WAY too bright, especially when it fills your entire display. It's extremely uncomfortable to work with and it makes your page drown in the user interface - especially on bigger displays. I don't have it installed anymore, but the black theme in 2010 was really comfortable to work in, putting the focus completely on your content. But now everything is white, and there is no way to change it.

[Ambroos]

He's probably running a Pentium 4 with 256mb of RAM or something :)

Proper fast recent i5, 8 gigs of RAM, overclocked GeForce 300 series with 1GB of RAM and two fast SSD's in Raid0, so that won't be the problem.

Open Powerpoint, the Ion theme. Edit the subtitle. Text renders with a delay, you'll see. It's not everywhere but it happens from time to time.

[Jose_49]

I was going to ask on how to change the default interface to the sexy black, but I think we will have to wait.

[Jose_49]

Crap. I STILL FEEL LIKE THE TABS ARE SHOUTING ME BECAUSE OF THE CAPS.

[djdanster]

How is everybody setting up their hotmail accounts? The outlook connector for 2010 doesn't work. Is everybody putting in the server details manually?

[Noir Angel]

Proper fast recent i5, 8 gigs of RAM, overclocked GeForce 300 series with 1GB of RAM and two fast SSD's in Raid0, so that won't be the problem.

Open Powerpoint, the Ion theme. Edit the subtitle. Text renders with a delay, you'll see. It's not everywhere but it happens from time to time.

Haven't noticed it here yet.

How is everybody setting up their hotmail accounts? The outlook connector for 2010 doesn't work. Is everybody putting in the server details manually?

I didn't need the outlook connector for 2010, I installed it (alongside Office 2010) and it appears to be syncing my hotmail account just fine. Picked up the accounts I had stored in Outlook 2010 and downloads them without issue.

[PGHammer]

If you're document is so small that you have that much "white space" around it, isn't that just a sign that you're either zoomed out too much, or your window size is too large?

That said, when I first opened Outlook, the "flatness" and "whiteness" of it all did take a few minutes of getting used to. But I think I like it now.

I actually think the *whiteness* and *blandness* makes sense - this is, after all, supposed to be a productivity suite.

The other reason for all the *whiteness* is that Office still opens fullscreen (all applications) by default - this was 2010's default behavior as well. (Fortunately, closing any Office 2013 application in OTHER than full screen, sets that mode as the new default - that's how I have set both Word and Outlook 2013 to open windowed - something which Office 2010 does NOT do.)

Why do productivity applications need *bling*?

[Noir Angel]

The fact that it's a productivity suite doesn't automatically mean it needs to be designed in a boring manner. They don't necessarily *need* bling but there's no need to make them bland for the sake of it, and again Microsoft are taking all the choice away and forcing people to stick with that one colour.

[PGHammer]

Haven't noticed it here yet.

I didn't need the outlook connector for 2010, I installed it (alongside Office 2010) and it appears to be syncing my hotmail account just fine. Picked up the accounts I had stored in Outlook 2010 and downloads them without issue.

Same here - I have Office 2010 (x64) installed; because I chose the C2R, I can run applications from either suite. Because they share a common .PST file, Outlook 2010 and 2013 can't both be running at once; however, that is not true of the rest of Office 2010 and 2013. You can only side-by-side the C2R version of Office 2013 with Office 2010 - if you choose the locally-installed version of Office 2013, you have to uninstall Office 2010 first.

[bandit_liberty_rumble]

The way the cursor glides along as you type was one of the positives for me. I really like it. And it's nowhere near as slow to slide along as you describe.

It's a nice touch. Especially when it glides smoothly from the end of one line to the beginning of the next one once you press 'enter'.

[Julius Caro]

If you're document is so small that you have that much "white space" around it, isn't that just a sign that you're either zoomed out too much, or your window size is too large?

That said, when I first opened Outlook, the "flatness" and "whiteness" of it all did take a few minutes of getting used to. But I think I like it now.

some people might want the larger window to see more ribbon options.

[PGHammer]

The fact that it's a productivity suite doesn't automatically mean it needs to be designed in a boring manner. They don't necessarily *need* bling but there's no need to make them bland for the sake of it, and again Microsoft are taking all the choice away and forcing people to stick with that one colour.

I was merely curious - and I remember the same complaint being made about Visual Studio 2012. Where it concerns *me* is how worrying about aesthetics could cause fewer resources to be devoted to functionality

[Noir Angel]

I'm not part of the Apple crowd, I don't think that aesthetics are more important than functionality, I just don't think it's necessary to go out of your way to make something ugly either.

[Raa]

I was looking for the ISO to download, the whole online installer thing didn't really inspire me with confidence. :/

[Denis W. Veteran]

I quite like the look of Office 2013. The whiteness isn't a huge bother, and besides I've always found the dark themes in Office 2007 and 2010 to be ugly from the get-go.

Though one really annoying thing about Word: after turning on Reading Mode for one document, Word insists on opening up every document thereafter in Reading Mode. Really annoying as it's useless on a 4:3 screen.

[Growled Member]

The more I see of the direction Microsoft is going, the more I dislike the new stuff. I shall not feel the need to rush forward with this.

completely agree. I'm not happy with this at all.

[Dan~]

I think people who don't like all the whiteness are just racist's to be hoenst... :p

[chrisj1968]

That's weird. Office 2010 is slower than Office 2013 on my machine. Office 2013 is very fast here.

Explain.

Yep, I looked around for that option too and couldn't find it.

I like Office 2013 a lot, but I do wish there was a little more contrast. That's all I would ask for.

What's really cool, though, is the consistency between Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2012. They now look like they were made by the same company. There are small differences, but they are very similar.

I agree. I think I like Office 2013 because I have grown used to the style... it's the same style that Visual Studio 2012 uses.

You might find some conflicts in some circumstances, but it should work. I have Office 2010 working just fine alongside Office 2013.

It conflicts terribly with office 2007. I thought i could just use 2007 and test out Office15 but, outlook 2007 wouldn't work until I uninstalled Office 15. probably some files. I saw a service(process) in task manager that I could stop for Office 15.

[chrisj1968]

I was looking for the ISO to download, the whole online installer thing didn't really inspire me with confidence. :/

on a positive note: it did install quite fast. and no errors

[Tarvis123]

Found out that Outlook 2013 doesn't support Exchange 2003 SP2 which means I guess I won't be able to upgrade because of work. :/

[PGHammer]

Yes, I like this feature. It's nice. It makes Office 2010 and before feel clunky in comparison.

I'm pretty certain I'm using the ClickToRun version... the file I downloaded was only 480kb. It takes about 1 second to open Word, on 2008 laptop hardware.

I'm really not certain what the deal it. I'll try the standalone version now, though.

My first experience with C2R is with that hyper-puny installer and Office 2010 Consumer Preview - the installer is so little that it could do laps in a 2GB thumb drive, and could fit on a floppy disk (if they hadn't been rendered obsolete) - a double-density (720K) floppy disk. I called it an amazing piece of software *then*.

Next came C2R 1.5 - this time with Windows 8's Developer Preview Actually a bit faster, and harder to differentiate from a standard install.

Now, it's C2R 1.7, and Office365 (I chose the ProPlus version - the likely choice of cloud-based SMBs) and - once the install is finished - it makes Office 2010 look slow.

I've uninstalled O365 (C2R) and Office 2010 and will next reboot so I can install the full Office 2013.

[HawkMan]

Does anyone of the people complaining about the white have their monitors set to anything else than 100% whiteness(and probably 100 contrast and overdrive as well). Set yoru monitor to a properly semi calibrated state and not the supr bright so I can see everyoen hiding in the darkest shadows on Doom3, and you'll see that the white is not only nice, but comfortable.

[mikeleo]

A few things that urk me

1) Too bland

2) Too bright

3) What is the internet is down?

4) What if the Cloud is down?

[dr_crabman]

3) What is the internet is down?

4) What if the Cloud is down?

Then you can use it as usual but can't sync stuff with Skydrive. Do you think O13 needs the internet to function?

[zhangm Supervisor]

3) What is the internet is down?

4) What if the Cloud is down?

The Skydrive app pulls down and stores local copies of everything in your synced storage pool. These don't magically get deleted when you lose your connection.

[xn--bya]

They should add more colour to them, white is too bland. They should have the option of themes like in previous versions, or colourise it by the app colour.