View Single Post
  #1  
Old May 14th, 2010, 03:35 PM posted to microsoft.public.office.misc
Celcius
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1
Default merge the office suite into one single componentised application

How many people get fed up with switching between outlook, excel, word,
visio, one note, project and a many other MS applications to get your
desired result?

Office is in desperate need (IMHO) of a rewrite in a more .net friendly
manner anyway so ditch the product ande write one single product (Office)
which is complete package which calls all the features of the other
applications to do whatever you need.
An interface somewhere between outlook and one note allowing the user to
create projects and sub projects that have numerous pages. Your home section
would effectively be an outlook style area which managed not only your
emails, appointments and tasks but also your documents and projects.

Documents (or perhaps pages would be a better term) would be managed in a
onenote style with workbooks, section headers and tabs, these would just hold
containers which can be nested in any way. Similar to the visual studio ide
you would have a toolbox of components which you could drag and drop on your
page.

You could enter, manipulate and format text and images using a word object
and / or drop a spreadsheet onto the page to use either just as an easily
formattable table (does anyone else hate MS Words tables) or to use as a
spreadsheet, eitherway Excels functions would be available to add
calculations to your table with ease. You could drop a visio control on and
off you go creating flow charts etc or drop a project tracker control on and
start using MS Project style gannt charts to track progress. Add a task,
appointment or email to a page and have it entered into your outlook section
automatically.
Options to have your pages formatted to print page sizes (Letter / A4 etc)
or just be controlled by the content on them like onenote pages.
Options to host pages or projects in sharepoint and exchange shared folders
as well as office live workplaces and Live spaces.

WPF is the perfect tool to write this in and it would enable third party
plugins to be written easily.

I know much of this is possible in several MS Apps but why not stop making
us fight with ourselves over which tool is best for the given project at hand
and let us use them all in one place seamlessly.

MS still get to sell all the different flavours of office but intead of more
or less applications ist more or less plugins which would potentially be a
better way of selling the other more obscure MS applications.

Im a project manager for an ERP comapny and I do a lot of R&D on how we can
leverage new MS technologies to our advantage, I spend my life torn between
MS Project, Onenote and Outlook and get frustrated that I can't settle in one
of them and that the integration between them is poor in most cases to say
the least.

As an example in MS Project my items should be automatically added to my
outlook calendar and task list (outlook task deadlines should also be in my
outlook calendar too) and changing them in either app should change them in
both. Onenote lets you pull in appointments but if you edit them it doesn't
reflect in outlook. Formatting tools in excel should be as good as the ones
in word and tables in word should be as easy to use as a spreadsheet. Visio
flow charts almost always accompany other documents rather than stand alone
so they should be embedded in my documents not managed seperately. Oh and
just as an aside how about allowing linked tasks in outlook!

Anyone still awake thanks for listening!

p.s MS I'm available to manage the project if you want

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...ic.office.misc