Office 15 Revealed

Personally, I love using Publisher. We use it to create all our in-house marketing materials. I could understand if the functionality of Publisher merged with Word though, since there is a lot of overlap. With Word, you can effectively place text anywhere on the page using floating textboxes, and Word has more options for editing or enhancing images. Sometimes we use Word for quick single-sheet handouts, but Publisher has more advanced options for page layout, and it also supports CMYK colour space for professional print options. Those kind of features could be worked into Word. What I'd like to see is Access, Excel, and Infopath merge some day into a single product. Too much of the functionality of those programs is related for it to be in separate applications. Infopath is just a form and report filer for data in a database. Access has that functionality, but it's not as easy to use. Access stores the data in tables. So can Excel (someone please tell me the difference between a "table" and a standard spreadsheet in Excel other than filtering and formatting....). Excel doesn't have a half-decent form entry component that's as elegant as Infopath though, but formula calculations are easier to input than in Access, which requires knowledge of SQL-style database commands. Infopath requires knowledge of database commands to set up a form too. Here's a few suggestions: a) Form data setup and entry has to be easier - MUCH easier b) There's no reason why all three of these programs can't become one single program They should look at the most basic of tasks for these programs to simplify the product lineup. Here's my take on what they need: 1) A program to create documents 2) A program to keep records of data 3) A program to allow users to communicate and collaborate Notice how I didn't mention PowerPoint, or OneNote for that matter? Ok, creating animations for a slideshow might be the only option outside of page layout/word processor software, but it's like if you took a standard document and flipped through the pages of it, that's PowerPoint in a nutshell. Why can't you just do that from your document creation program? Ditto for Visio. Visio is just like a page layout program with lots of different vector clipart and 2D shapes. How is that so different from Word? There's a lot of functionality in each program. Some of it is specialized, but a lot of it is just overlap. I would relish the day when we have just a few programs in Office: 1) Word+Publisher+OneNote+PowerPoint+Visio 2) Excel+Access+Infopath 3) Outlook On the server end, you'd still have SQL and Sharepoint. I'd like to see more abstraction of technical features in the spreadsheet/database program so that users can build impressive databases without requiring advanced training or knowledge of some computer language.