Office 12 Story and Pictures

CNET has this story on the upcoming Office 12.

 

I have to admit I’ve never been a big Office user, but I had the chance to see Microsoft’s preview of Office 12 at the PDC conference last week, and I was impressed.

 

* Updated user interface – Office is getting a very overdue update to its UI, and it makes a lot of sense. It seems to follow the pattern of "what you need is what you see".

* Integration with the .Net framework – this will allow us developers to better integrate our applications with Office, and make it easier to take advantage of the power it provides.

* New technology which allow using Office features in web sites – at the conference we saw demonstrations on how Exel spreadsheets can be places in web-parts in the upcoming SharePoint v3 portal. We also saw how you could save and load Office documents directly to a Sharepoint web server for sharing with other users.

* There’s a successor to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), using .Net programming languages. I don’t have the name of this technology in front of me at the moment, but this will allow advanced users and integrators to write more powerful and robust scrips, macros, and applets in Office.

Web site just created…

In the process of researching web technologies, design, architecture, etc. I decided to give MSN Spaces a try.

 

So, here I am!

 

There will be no promises as to what appears on my site or how often I’ll be updating it. This is a test run only, and if everything works out, maybe this will become a permanent site.