[cowabunga]

The majority of the power of Office is only available on the desktop: COM, automation and integration.

This isn't a total give away, this is a loss leader which is just selling an editing front end for the files, not anything like the power of the full product.

However, I really think that Office on the desktop is a turd but it does make automation pretty easy but slightly awkward and painful. Perhaps this is bitterness from converting VSTO and Word interop to late binding all morning but I'm not a fan.

This is "meh" even to someone as embedded into the ecosystem like myself.

[ctdonath]

It's a loss leader intended to retain users. Most of us have used Office regularly at some point, but many of us have drifted away as other non-Windows platforms became viable (Linux, OS X, iOS, Android) and adherence to the new ecosystem overcame adherence to the Office platform. We'd like to have Office available, if only for basic compatibility re: viewing & simple editing, but at $10/mo or $X00/flat we're satisfied with hacked-up translation to other ecosystem-standard suites (OpenOffice, Pages/Numbers/etc). Microsoft starts seeing the departure numbers growing rather high, and if they're smart (!) they will - and are - release[ing] something which persuades users to maintain a stake in the Office suite: free (albeit stunted) apps costing users nothing more than a shrug & download.

I'd rather give up on Office entirely, but its relative ubiquity plus free apps mean I'll let the camel stick its nose back under my tent.

[bachmeier]

These days, in many contexts, it's perfectly fine to ask someone to resend a file in a different format so it works with all devices. You can't always do that with business-related documents, but you're most likely using a laptop or desktop for that work anyway.

[zacharycohn]

I wouldn't exactly call Office a "loss leader" when it's MS's highest revenue division (circa 2012: http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money-updated-20...).

[ctdonath]

The thread is about the _free_ MS Office apps being released today. I'm not paying for the $10/mo versions, but heck yeah I'll download the "loss leader" free versions, however crippled they may be.

[gabriel34]

I believe most of Office's userbase doesn't use anything more complicated than excel's formulas and word's styles (perhaps some academyc writers use latex or fields)

[cowabunga]

In my sector (finance), literally everyone has some automation junk set up somewhere. They're usually written by one person and mailed around or stuck on fileservers somewhere or copied off a website somewhere badly.

It's surprisingly common. Even my wife who is a complete luddite has a couple of scripts for excel she copied off a web site to do a tax calculation.

[nnnnni]

I "love" when those things break and the original author left the company a decade ago... ugh.

[Ntrails]

...and then you get handed it to fix and find zero comments, undeclared variables (often single letters), and then 70 lines of "sheet scrolling" followed by the same loop 3 times in some internal function evidencing that half of it was done by macro record.

Not bitter at all. Nope.

[cowabunga]

That was my day today I.e. untangling one of those bags of shit that someone had tangled even more by converting it to a VSTO add in.

It's now a nice clean late-bound C# command line tool and powershell cmdlet.

[narrator]

The scripting in Google drive is pretty awesome. I saw some pretty impressive automation recently that a business analyst did where he'd grab spreadsheet attachments to emails in Gmail and analyze them in sheets.

[cowabunga]

Well it's awesome until you want to leave or want support or thought wave was good or one of your users violates their ToS and they take your entire account out before you are even notified or its down for a few hours when you're about to drop a big presentation to that client or you find out that local legislation changes make it illegal to export data out of the EU or you're somewhere with a basic GPRS connection or none whatsoever.

These are all real problems I've had to work around.

[TorKlingberg]

I think Apple will not allow an embedded scripting language like VBA. On Android and Windows it should be possible.

[xxs]

Apple will allow as long as it doesn't involve JIT - i.e. awfully slow.

[unsigner]

Interpreted languages are fast enough for what VBA has been traditionally used. You just need to steer away from the travesty of Atwood's Law.

[rwc]

Understand your "meh" reaction, but I think this is an exciting announcement for people outside the ecosystem. Office has been unattainable for a huge set of PC users for a very long time... it was rare to find affordable PCs with Office pre-installed. Anyone remember Microsoft Works?

Now, it's post-PC. This is opening up Office to a whole new generation of users who have found their home in tablets.

[sheetjs]

The problem is that for the subset of features supported on mobile, other tools like Numbers are comparable and have been available for free for a long time. The features that make Excel and other office products shine, including automation and macros, are not supported.

While it is a solid move for Microsoft, that whole generation of new users wont see much of a difference between 2014 office for ipad and numbers.

[chez17]

LibreOffice has been available and does 99% of what 99% of users need.

[jonathansizz]

You don't even need to go that far. Google Drive does 99% of what 99% of users need, and has second-to-none collaboration features to boot.

I bought my wife a Chromebook as a stopgap when her last Windows laptop died, and although she still has to use Windows for work, she now swears by Drive for working on shared documents.