Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Office Online

office.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 120 posts

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#111

Post by greggman »

eropple wrote: post #91
greggman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to admit up front I'm probably hopelessly out of touch. I used to buy office from like Word 2.0 up through Office 2007 or so but for the life of me I can't figure out why most people would need Office today. Like I said I'm out of touch but... If I write docs for publication it's HTML. If I write for correspondence it's email If I write for product design it's probably a wiki. Something the entire team can…

I use (Mac) Excel for a niche but handy purpose: as an editor tool for the game I'm building. Tabular data files for my game are stored in the (easily parsed) Excel 2004 XML format. There aren't really any similar, generalizable tools that are more modder-friendly and I'm not going to sit there writing YAML/JSON/XML to fill in stuff like "this wooden sword costs 10 coins" because there are vastly better things to be…

I posted something below but, I've used Excel for that purpose too but with Google docs multiple people can edit at the same time. I've used that feature quite a bit. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one.

If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#112

Post by fennecfoxen »

anigbrowl wrote: post #57
fennecfoxen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an efficient market, in the long run, the price of a unit of software would approach the marginal cost of a unit of software. I wonder how long it will be until essentially all software is free, and all the services are run more or less at cost (as the economists would put it, they can earn profits, just not economic profits). But in the long run, as they say, we're all dead ;)

That's only true in cases of perfect competition, which mainly obtains for commodities. Products with different features are examples of monopolistic competition, because different products are not automatic substitutes for each other.

I think you misunderstand a little. That's not the consequence of an efficient market, that's the definition of an efficient market. ANY market where the price of an item is higher than its marginal cost is an inefficient one. (The cost includes opportunity cost, though, so it's not like the widget factory needs to make zero accounting profit on the operation).

It's quite probable, of course, that software in the general case is prone to market inefficiencies, especially in the short run: there are high fixed costs associated with producing software. Yet extant software is so stupidly easy to copy that it's unthinkable that, thousands of years hence, things like WORD PROCESSORS will have a good reason for costing money. So how long will it take to get there?

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#113

Post by eropple »

greggman wrote: post #111
eropple wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use (Mac) Excel for a niche but handy purpose: as an editor tool for the game I'm building. Tabular data files for my game are stored in the (easily parsed) Excel 2004 XML format. There aren't really any similar, generalizable tools that are more modder-friendly and I'm not going to sit there writing YAML/JSON/XML to fill in stuff like "this wooden sword costs 10 coins" because there are vastly better things to be…

I posted something below but, I've used Excel for that purpose too but with Google docs multiple people can edit at the same time. I've used that feature quite a bit. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.

Google Docs requires an export step. This lives in git.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#114

Post by obimod »

fpgeek wrote: post #44

Is this a (belated) reaction to Google Docs being "good enough" for many use cases? We also just heard about Chrome OS pushing Microsoft to cut the price of Windows licenses for low-end laptops. Plus we have Nokia (soon to be Microsoft's smartphone division) releasing low-end handsets based on Android. These may all be reasonable strategic choices (I tend to think they're at least heading in the right direction), but…

I think they're starting to understand the pursuit of singularity and think (for good reason) that they have enough connections/money/data in the bag to reach for it. Google disclosed their pursuit for the first time in my knowledge recently on ACM. It would be an interesting read, their privacy policy, and whether they "collect information to enhance their service". Also the business intelligence is worth it's weight in gold.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#115

Post by transitionality »

crystaln wrote: post #108

Why was this "now free" removed from this subject of this submission??? That was the interesting part of this submission! :-/

It was pointed out that it's been free since 2009, through SkyDrive, now OneDrive. This is just a new cover page/interface to the apps.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#116

Post by ConceptJunkie »

nevi-me wrote: post #100

Will it save my documents in a compatible format to Office 2013? I've had Excel documents go corrupt or unreadable on Excel desktop app. As much as I use Excel at work and home, I'm staying away from their online thing with most of my work. Been burnt enough

You can save an Excel document in Excel and immediately re-open it and have Excel complain the document is corrupted. It's happened to me dozens of times (back when I was required to do Excel development a couple years ago... it was like a flashback to 1990).

Anyhow, every time it happened, there was no apparent damage to the document. I think this stems from Microsoft having to be insanely aggressive in defending against their own bugs.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#117

Post by crystaln »

transitionality wrote: post #115
crystaln wrote: post #108

Why was this "now free" removed from this subject of this submission??? That was the interesting part of this submission! :-/

It was pointed out that it's been free since 2009, through SkyDrive, now OneDrive. This is just a new cover page/interface to the apps.

Ok.. thanks.

Perhaps changing it to "Microsoft Office Online free no longer hidden" would have been more appropriate.

Linking to just "Microsoft Office Online" gives no sense of the purpose of the post.

Not that it matters at this point. Just seems rather pedantic to change the title in such a way.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#118

Post by pacaro »

greggman wrote: post #110
pacaro wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a great tool for a developer.

For what purpose? I've used Excel in the past for developer things but with Google Docs everyone can edit at the same time. I've used that feature as well which AFAIK I don't get with Excel or Open Office. The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. Just a thought.

Some of the Microsoft Office suite have collaboration features (OneNote is good for this in my experience) I'm not sure about Excel

As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad

Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty good twitter client[1], and it's still quite effective at web scraping

the list goes on...

[1] http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/02/05/twitter-from-excel/

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#119

Post by greggman »

pacaro wrote: post #118
greggman wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what purpose? I've used Excel in the past for developer things but with Google Docs everyone can edit at the same time. I've used that feature as well which AFAIK I don't get with Excel or Open Office. The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. Just a thought.

Some of the Microsoft Office suite have collaboration features (OneNote is good for this in my experience) I'm not sure about Excel As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty…

Those features are all available on spreadsheets in google docs. I use google docs as a mathematical scratch pad all the time. It also does graphs and it can be scripted in JavaScript. One of my friends wrote a script that downloads all the latest stock data every few minutes and does a bunch of analysis on it.

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets

I'm not suggesting you should give up Excel. Just pointing out the features you listed are available should you decide to take a look.

Re: Microsoft Office Online

#120

Post by greggman »

eropple wrote: post #113
greggman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted something below but, I've used Excel for that purpose too but with Google docs multiple people can edit at the same time. I've used that feature quite a bit. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.

Google Docs requires an export step. This lives in git.

And Excel requires a save step. It also requires manually making sure 2 people don't edit the excel file because git won't be able to merge that changes. Google spreadsheets won't have that problem.
Post reply on HN