freney

Great video!

 

I was wondering out of curiosity if there will be an easy way to add and remove drivers from the driver store to make, for example, a custom installation CD with all the drivers already installed or to manage the existing store.

Excellent, I like the new UI and I think it can be very helpful to the user. Other than the UI, I think there are three main topics that I would like to see improve in Office 12

 

1) Word Styles: most people don't know they exist or what they are useful for. Every time my thesis text went for a review, my advisor would create titles using the Normal style and then making it Bold, changing Font Size… I hope it will be very intuitive for the user how to make formatting choices and how to structure a well formatted document. How about including a few tutorials?

2) MathML (and PlotML, ChemML, etc.): more and more people are moving away from LaTeX for scientific publications (although I worked for my thesis project on a Unix machine, I was required to write the thesis in Word because this way it is easier to review the paper without moving from the PDF output to the source code…). However, the Insert Equation command and even the full Equation Editor are not the best choice: it is virtually impossible to search equations and these are treated like images, making it very hard to do a good formatting job. If including all these extensions is not possible, it should be very easy to implement them with plug-ins.

3) More easily customizable cross-references: it took me a long time to find out how to format multiple cross-references (for example "Figure 1 and Figure 2" to show as "Figure 1 and 2") and it took me even longer to actually do it. This should be much more intuitive and easy to do…

4) Better support for inserting figures in vector form. The EPS filter is far from perfect (try making an EPS figure with Illustrator CS and importing it into Word 2003, it will not show up no matter what you do, unless you save the file as an EPS for Illustrator 3). It would be great if one could include native formats from popular graphic applications (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc.).

4) More statistical functions in Excel and a way to save diagrams as figures to be edited in a graphic application, please!

 

This is simply a list I made from my personal experience and I hope it will be helpful to someone. Thank you for reading it.

I just hope that Word will natively support MathML. There will still be room for applications like MathType (for better editing, etc.) but there are many problems with equations nowadays with both Equation Editor and MathType (mainly problems of spacing for inline equations and aligning of multiple equations).

 

There are more and more people in the scientific and academic fields who are writing thesis in Word because they are easier to edit and share on screen than a tex documents (both me and my roommates were required by our advisors to write the document in Word even though the main platform we worked on was UNIX).

 

There is still some times before Office 12 is released, so I hope this will make it into it.

Excellent, I lke XML. But does this mean that MathML will/could be natively supported in Word or other apps?