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Last post Author Topic: MS Office 2013 US$9.95 Corporate/Enterprise Home Use Program - Mini-Review  (Read 61120 times)

IainB

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My setup:
  • Laptop: HP ENVY 14
  • CPU: with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz
  • GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
  • OS: Win7-64 Home Premium

In attempting to overcome the glary nature of the high-res display on my laptop, I have:
  • Experimented with and set and reset ClearType several times to check it is right for me.
  • Experimented with setting all graphics and animations ON and OFF. Left them all ON.
  • Experimented with setting the GPU ON and OFF for display assistance. Left it ON.

MS Office 32-bit versions 2007 and 2013 are installed and they have both worked and displayed just fine throughout these changes.
So far, I have been unable to reproduce the problem(s) as described by yourself and others with v2013.
The question I have is thus "How come?"

dr_andus

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So far, I have been unable to reproduce the problem(s) as described by yourself and others with v2013.
The question I have is thus "How come?"

My system looks very similar to yours (MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1, Intel Core i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz, 8.0GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series, Adapter RAM 1.00 GB, Acer PC), so I'm also wondering why this is occurring on some systems and not others. I presume that if this had been affecting the majority, then MS would have done something about it by now.

The only thing I can think of is that I have Aero and all other fancy enhancements switched off. I'm just using a plain vanilla Windows Classic theme. I guess I could poke around in those settings, but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.

IainB

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...but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.
_____________________

Why?    :tellme:

40hz

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This is interesting. I once worked for one of the Fortune 10 behemoths in the 80s. I was directly involved with software licensing. We had what was then called a "corporate sitewide license" for Windows, Office, and Visio.

As part of the deal, all the employees of the company were free to install MS Office on their home machines free of charge and legally use it for as long as they remained employees...

We used to refer to it as making the company "pirate proof."

Now, for those companies that have a home use plan as part of their license, employees get to pay $10 out of their own pocket for the same privilege.

I guess Microsoft realized they were leaving money on the table since people today seem to think it's a good deal. ;D
« Last Edit: March 15, 2014, 08:01 AM by 40hz »

tomos

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Thanks, I did try that. Elsewhere it's been suggested that there is no solution to this yet.
[...]

RolandOH replied on

The cause for Office, Modern UI and IE10 to look so bad is that they use a new graphics rendering API offered in Windows 8 (and with updates on Windows 7, too).
The new font rendering engine offered by this new API simply doesn't have Clear Type implemented. So unless Microsoft patches this new API to support Clear Type, no program using this API will ever be able to do so.
[...]
The bad thing is: no one can help you with the font rendering problem. You're on your own, as a consumer. For me that meant to downgrade back to Office 2010, ignoring Modern UI and all apps completely and ditching IE 10 (but hey, that's a no-brainer, isn't it?).

So it sounds like one should be wary of updating to IE10/11 as well...
Tom

dr_andus

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...but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.
_____________________

Why?    :tellme:

Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.

dr_andus

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So it sounds like one should be wary of updating to IE10/11 as well...

Actually I'm not having the same problem with IE11 in terms of font blurriness, though at times some fonts do get rendered in more ugly form than on FF, but it's just an aesthetic problem. My biggest gripe about IE10/11 vs. IE9 was that the Outlook web interface got deprecated, e.g. it's no longer possible to sort emails by the name of a particular sender, it just sorts all senders in A-Z and then you need to navigate through pages to get to the right letter (unless I'm missing something).

Vurbal

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...but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.
_____________________

Why?    :tellme:

Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.

That was the biggest eye opener for me when I tried out Windows 8. I already didn't use Aero but in Win8 it's not optional any more. Having a 4 year old computer with onboard ATI graphics pretty much guarantees my video driver is going to suck which, not surprisingly, it does. I didn't realize how catastrophic that could be until I tried out Win8 which forces you to use Aero's window manager.

I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.
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IainB

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RolandOH replied on

The cause for Office, Modern UI and IE10 to look so bad is that they use a new graphics rendering API offered in Windows 8 (and with updates on Windows 7, too).
The new font rendering engine offered by this new API simply doesn't have Clear Type implemented. So unless Microsoft patches this new API to support Clear Type, no program using this API will ever be able to do so.
[...]
The bad thing is: no one can help you with the font rendering problem. You're on your own, as a consumer. For me that meant to downgrade back to Office 2010, ignoring Modern UI and all apps completely and ditching IE 10 (but hey, that's a no-brainer, isn't it?).
So it sounds like one should be wary of updating to IE10/11 as well...

This seems to be hearsay - or at least a speculative FUD theory. Repeated searches on this seem unable to throw up any actual evidence to suggest definite proof that it defines the causal problem. For example - as mentioned above - how come I can't replicate the problem on my laptop, yet the problem exists on @dr_andus' i7 laptop/PC with a similar (but newer) configuration to mine?
_________________________________

...Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.

I'm not sure that's a valid point. Your 3-year old PC presumably doesn't have the i7 CPU and GPU configuration of your new laptop/PC either, so the comparison would seem to be chalk and cheese on the technology. Your current setup is a grunt machine and has surplus CPU and GPU cycles coming out of its ears by comparison - never mind the R/W disk throughput performance if you have a 7200rpm hard drive or an SSD. No real bottlenecks. It took me a while and quite a bit of suck-it-and-see empiric method and experimentation to get my head around the implications of this capacity surplus. (Freedom!)
If you switched ON all the animation and Aero - as I eventually did on my laptop, after stupidly trying to conserve everything in sight - and started up IE and the MS Office packages and had them running most of the time, you'd find (like I do) that the CPU utilisation would typically rarely be more than an aggregate of around 12% from all processes - and even that would probably only be an intermittent blip/peak because of some intensive number-crunching or large database-searching, or something has gone wrong - e.g., occasionally, IE starts to do something wrong internally and will knock up 13% when idle, all by itself and for no good reason, so the CPU heats up a bit and the fan speeds up. Restarting IE is the workaround for that.

This is really nothing new. For example, coincidentally, the same point about surplus capacity on modern PCs changing the paradigm was made elsewhere in DCF recently by @Mouser. I guess one is unlikely to need to hoard water if one lives underneath a waterfall.
_________________________________

...I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.

I'm unsure whether it was the same issue, but I recall reading recently something to the effect that the root cause of a particular crash/hang/restart problem was an inadequate WAIT time interval being set for a service to respond via an I/O bus somewhere. Once you set the WAIT to a longer time interval, the problem went away. The WAIT was specified in the Registry somewhere. Sorry I can't be more specific. I would have made a note of it if it had been relevant to my setup. I shall try and find it and will post it up here if I do.
_________________________________

There's a lot more to go wrong and to get right with the newer technology. For example, I was trying to connect an HDMI cable from my laptop to my digital TV the other day and output audio-video from the laptop to the TV screen. The TV has 3 x HDMI input sockets, all apparently with the same specifications. But it wouldn't work. I read the laptop manual and the TV manual to get it working, and neither was much help. However, once I figured out that the laptop display needed to be set to laptop + screen projector, I got a very blinky video and spasmodic sound out of the TV. It was like the video and audio sync/timing was way off. That was on HDMI 1.

HDMI 2 didn't seem to work at all ("No signal), and HDMI 3 (this was the last one I tried in sequence) worked fine, though the colour didn't seem as nice as the laptop's display.

dr_andus

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This seems to be hearsay - or at least a speculative FUD theory. Repeated searches on this seem unable to throw up any actual evidence to suggest definite proof that it defines the causal problem. For example - as mentioned above - how come I can't replicate the problem on my laptop, yet the problem exists on @dr_andus' i7 laptop/PC with a similar (but newer) configuration to mine?

But that's exactly the point. The problem occurs on some people's systems and not on others. And as for why people speculate about the causes... what other choice do they have if MS, the creator of the software and an organisation with huge resources, is unable to or unwilling to offer an explanation and a solution?

And it looks like people are having this problem not only with MS Word 2013 on Win7 but also with Win8 in general: Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

Tzon asked on  February 24, 2013

Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

Apparently there is a huge problem with font rendering in Windows 8. Text appears very blurry. Programs affected by the new rendering are: Internet Explorer 10, the modern interface (start screen), Office 2013 and other 3rd party applications that rely on this rendering technology. There is no way to fix this problem, unless Microsoft recognizes it.
« Last Edit: March 16, 2014, 07:45 AM by dr_andus »

Shades

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As Windows uses internet explorer functionality for rendering of text and graphics in any of their own applications, I assume this problem might be more related than it appears on first glance with another issue I more regularly encounter.

Whenever an image is surrounded by white lines it is shown blurry. If I view the image in IrfanView it looks fine, it shows up fine in the portable version of the Gimp on my computer as well.
This image is used in an web page, and it shows up fine in Firefox, Opera and Iron (chrome based) browsers. Just not in IE. It is all a blurry mess.

The only thing what helps in my case is adding a 1 pixel-wide border with a color that is close to, but not exactly white. After that, the image shows up as expected, even in IE. This already occurs in IE10 and up (to me).

You should take a good look if the blurry representation of fonts are also not "encased" in a border of white. With Windows 8 close relative, Windows Server 2012 I haven't seen blurry fonts yet
(NVidea's 210 series video card is used on that server and the default MS driver software on a monitor with 1920x1080 resolution). 

If possible, you could try a different colored theme for the application with the blurry fonts and see if the blurry problem disappears. Then a) you have a solution and b) you have also a direction in where to point the MS dev's to reproduce and/or fix this problem (rendering issues with IE).

Vurbal

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...I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.

I'm unsure whether it was the same issue, but I recall reading recently something to the effect that the root cause of a particular crash/hang/restart problem was an inadequate WAIT time interval being set for a service to respond via an I/O bus somewhere. Once you set the WAIT to a longer time interval, the problem went away. The WAIT was specified in the Registry somewhere. Sorry I can't be more specific. I would have made a note of it if it had been relevant to my setup. I shall try and find it and will post it up here if I do.

I suspect it's not the same problem but that's mostly just because of the fairly unique circumstances (coincidences you might say) which led me to my conclusion. Arguably the most significant component of that is my computer's integrated Radeon HD 4250 graphics. If there's one thing ATI knows how to do it's making a broken driver, especially for legacy hardware.

To make a long story longer (more vurbose you might say), here is what led me to my conclusions. First and foremost you have to keep in mind certain fundamental changes to the Windows GUI. I already mentioned the fact that the compositing window manager (DWM) became mandatory. Just as important, though, are the changes to explorer.exe which made that necessary. Rather than making the Start Screen a separate thing all its own, MS incorporated it into explorer. It's an old trick of theirs going back to the days of the big antitrust case in the 90s but their motivations aren't really relevant here. The point is explorer has to provide both the Desktop and Start Screen UIs, as well as the file manager/COM client UI for Windows Explorer.

Initially, after I first installed Windows 8 and just a few basic programs (Firefox, OpenOffice, Foxit PDF Reader among others), I noticed every explorer instance seemed to hang and then crash intermittently but only when I had Windows Explorer open. Sometimes it would happen with just one instance of Windows Explorer open and nothing else and other times it was after I opened several other (non-explorer) windows or a single program with a big memory or CPU footprint. All my Windows Explorer instances would disappear, the desktop would disappear and then reload, and then everything would seem fine for anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours before it happened again.

I was also focusing on a thorough evaluation of the new Task Manager interface or else I might have gotten a lot more useful information at that point. Primarily what I did get was this. If I checked Task Manager before the crash there was always a Windows Explorer instance (ie never the desktop) "Not Responding" eventually and then the crash I described occurred. I don't recall that Windows Explorer ever just recovered and went back to normal operation but it's been quite a while so I might be remembering wrong.

I was already evaluating free third party file managers for a project I was working on and ended up going with Explorer++. Also as part of that project - which I never finished due to my stability problems in Win8 - I installed System Explorer as an alternate task manager. It ended up providing a lot more clues about what was going on. Explorer++ worked great most of the time but just like Windows Explorer it would suddenly hang for no obvious reason and with no discernable pattern. It didn't crash though. It just hung until I killed it in System Explorer.

It also didn't necessarily work when I started it again afterwards. Sometimes it did, but more often than not the process would start but no window would appear. Even stranger was the fact that it always loaded properly if I started in Windows Explorer and launched Explorer++ from a folder's context menu. Eventually I noticed a significant difference between what Windows' Task Manager and System Explorer showed on the basic programs tab. Any time a program was hung for more than a few seconds, suddenly it would switch to adding DWM to the program list with the Not Responding label.

After a lot more testing in both Win8 and Win7 I finally identified some distinct patterns. I haven't examined what's going on in great detail - like using Process Explorer - so my conclusions should be taken for what they are, basically a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess)w. Also keep in mind that I'm not intimately familiar with how much DWM was changed for Win8 which adds another degree of uncertainty.

I'll start with Windows 7 since I think it's useful as something of a baseline for DWM behavior. Although DWM technically originated in Vista, I don't have a Vista machine and generally consider it more like as an intermediate development version on the way to Win7. If I turn compositing on I get similar problems with DWM hanging. It doesn't happen as often and given enough time it almost always recovers. Explorer crashes are extremely rare as long as each instance runs in a separate process. The best program I've found for replicating the issue is OpenOffice Calc. It's not immediate but all I have to do is start entering data into cells and it usually occurs within 5-10 minutes.

The other thing I discovered was just because you aren't using compositing, it doesn't necessarily mean DWM isn't your window manager. Initially that threw me because even after I turned off all the compositing features in Windows I continued to have programs intermittently hanging. Windows didn't switch to the legacy window manager until I disabled the DWM Session Manager service. When DWM is being used and System Explorer indicates it's hung, restarting it always resolves the issue.

That also works in Windows 8. In fact sometimes I was unable to restart or even kill a program when System Explorer said DWM was hung and the problem never seemed to resolve itself in any amount of time. I actually went so far as to leave it overnight and DWM was still hung when I came back 6 or 8 hours later. Some programs are like Explorer++ and don't work even after you restart them but most do.

More interestingly, whenever the Windows Explorer hang/crash scenario occurs, DWM was restarted automatically. It never happened when I manually killed or restarted any or all explorer processes but always happened when they spontaneously crashed. My working hypothesis is that MS developers already knew about the issue and included a workaround in their major changes to explorer.exe. It appears to me that explorer is triggering the DWM restart.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised to find out the desktop/start screen process wasn't actually crashing, but actually restarting itself as part of the same process. That would seem like the smart and safe way to go because it would also cover situations where explorer might actually be the problem. When in doubt, restart everything - sort of a big red switchw for the Windows GUI.

On one hand it's entirely reasonable to look at this and say AMD (ATI) deserves the lion's share of the blame for these stability problems. In fact that happens to be my position. However that doesn't excuse Microsoft's poor design decision. If my analysis of what's going on in Win8 is anywhere near accurate I can only conclude Microsoft recognized relying on DWM as the exclusive window manager would cause problems for some unknown, but certainly not insignificant, number of systems. That's not necessarily a mortal sin but not being up front about it is just plain irresponsible. I suspect it won't be an issue if your hardware is relatively new, at least relative to Win8's development, but given the fact most computers (at least home computers) are in use for 5+ years today it's still inexcusable.

But the cherry on top of this turd pie is the reason Microsoft made the change in the first place. It wasn't to serve some market need or customer demand. Like pretty much everything related to the Start Screen, their motivation was purely to funnel users into their online store. And that criticism is coming from somebody who is in the target market Microsoft should be focusing on. I don't want a Windows tablet. I want a reasonably full featured laptop which can occasionally be used as a decent tablet for short periods.

It's not just a good idea, it's an unserved market. Microsoft could have hit a homerun with Windows 8 and set the standard. Instead they focused on their competitors, rather than customers, and created something that doesn't really suit anybody's needs particularly well while also making it more difficult for users (or even OEMs) to improve upon.

The lesson most successful executives never learn, the one Steve Jobs didn't learn until he was run out of Apple and failed on his own, is this. You can lead an industry but you can only follow a market. The good news for Microsoft is Google has the same problem and post Steve Jobs Apple seems to be headed that way as well. The bad new is that means somebody else will probably come out of the blue and blindside all of them. Here's to hoping that happens sooner rather than later.

Maybe by then I'll have written enough on DC to compile my own encyclopedia of long winded diatribes.  :'(
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- Thomas J. Watson, Sr

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- Me


I recommend reading through my Bio before responding to any of my posts. It could save both of us a lot of time and frustration.

IainB

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...I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.

I'm unsure whether it was the same issue, but I recall reading recently something to the effect that the root cause of a particular crash/hang/restart problem was an inadequate WAIT time interval being set for a service to respond via an I/O bus somewhere. Once you set the WAIT to a longer time interval, the problem went away. The WAIT was specified in the Registry somewhere. Sorry I can't be more specific. I would have made a note of it if it had been relevant to my setup. I shall try and find it and will post it up here if I do. ...
_________________________________

I have tracked this down. I had been trying to fix a problem where the laptop display would hang and then Firefox would crash.
Searches showed 2 relevant hits:

That's where I read that by altering certain Registry keys you can effect a change to the Timeout Detection and Recovery of GPUs.

IainB

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2015-02-17 1852hrs: EDIT to opening post:
Added row "Relevant links" to bottom of the table in the opening post, with the link: Useful OneNote links

dr_andus

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I have just installed MS Office 365 on my PC (offered for free by my workplace, for up to 5 machines/devices), and I was pleasantly surprised that they offered the option of installing MS Office 2010 Pro instead of 2013 (so I don't have to endure the aforementioned font rendering problem).

I presume there must be a reason why workplaces now opt for the 365 subscription instead of the above Corporate Program. It's worth checking with your employer (or university, if you're a student). The pros are that it's free and there is the 2010 option (and the 5 installations instead of the usual 2); the cons are that it's more integrated into the cloud (if that's not your cup of tea).
« Last Edit: September 20, 2015, 07:53 AM by dr_andus »

Shades

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For consumers the cloud could be seen as an option. For companies I fear there are legal issues...depending on the nature of work the company does, of course.

If you work for a company that delivers services for other companies which require you to sign contracts allowing you to open their files containing their trade secrets...storing those in the cloud consciously or unconsciously isn't smart. When (not if) things go wrong, the company you work for will get into legal disputes over which party in the whole cloud endeavor is to blame. Costly disputes...easily nullifying whatever financial gains you think you are making by going cloud, instead of doing things properly yourself.

The extra dependency on a decently functioning internet connection for the business hours your company keeps is also quickly forgotten (and the extra costs that business ISP accounts entail). You aren't considering this, but having such connections is not a given in large parts of this planet either.

In my book there are a lot of hidden costs behind a workflow that isn't nearly as beneficial as cloud companies present them to be. And legal issues make things more "cloudy".

Then again, if it works for you...it works for you.

dr_andus

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Just to be clear, MS Office 365 is installed and runs locally on your PC, and you don't need to save anything in the cloud.

I'm not sure if it's restricted to the Office 2010 version that I have (using it in Win7), but it offers the local save as default (in fact I can't even find OneDrive there as an option).

I vaguely recall that maybe it's Office 2013 that tries to force you to save on OneDrive first? (I don't have 2013 installed any more, so can't check). But even there you can just ignore and save locally.

wraith808

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Just to be clear, MS Office 365 is installed and runs locally on your PC, and you don't need to save anything in the cloud.

This is correct. I have it, and use it, and I always have the choice of where to save.  And it keeps my last locations handy, and if I open something and do a save as, it defaults to that same location. 

This is the save dialog for a new document:

word2013save.png

I don't see how that's any different than the current versions affinity for c:\users\username\documents

IainB

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...so I don't have to endure the aforementioned font rendering problem...
__________________

So now that you have installed (?) MS Office 2010 on your Windows OS, how it it working out? Is it more legible?
What OS are you using?
Are you using the 32 or 64 bit version of MS Office?

I am using 32-bit MS Office 2013, on Win10-64bit Pro.
My eyes really object to the glary display.

IainB

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...and I always have the choice of where to save...
__________________

Good point.
I always want my working stuff on my client PC's hard drive, and in the Cloud (for backup/contingency). So I attempt to get the best of both worlds and usually save to the OneDrive directory on my hard drive, and I have my User documents directory mapped to OneDrive.

With OneNote though - and which is part of MS Office - I got OneNote to move all my primary Notebooks from their former default location on the hard drive to OneDrive. That way, they don't figure as a workload component in my usual backup regime (I TRUST OneDrive) and can be accessed by others (OneNote is a pretty good collaboration tool). The Notebooks are cached to the hard drive and can be accessed when offline.

For example, the other day I was sat down alongside my daughter, and we each had a laptop on our laps, and I introduced her to using OneNote and Excel and SC (Screenshot Captor) to:
  • 1. write up the notes for her latest science assignment (using OneNote), with me working collaboratively online;
  • 2. conduct a statistical analysis and charting of the time series data (observations) involved (using Excel and its graphing capability);
  • 3. save the Excel Workbook as an embedded file in her Notebook.
  • 4. manipulate images captured in OneNote (manipulation done using SC);

Having learned what drudgery it is to try and do that sort of thing by hand, even using a scientific calculator, and never having previously understood what OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) or collaborative online working implied, she was blown away by the experience - very impressed. There'll be no holding her back now!

tomos

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For example, the other day I was sat down alongside my daughter, and we each had a laptop on our laps, and I introduced her to using OneNote and Excel and SC (Screenshot Captor) to:

    1. write up the notes for her latest science assignment (using OneNote), with me working collaboratively online;
    2. conduct a statistical analysis and charting of the time series data (observations) involved (using Excel and its graphing capability);
    3. save the Excel Workbook as an embedded file in her Notebook.
    4. manipulate images captured in OneNote (manipulation done using SC);


Having learned what drudgery it is to try and do that sort of thing by hand, even using a scientific calculator, and never having previously understood what OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) or collaborative online working implied, she was blown away by the experience - very impressed. There'll be no holding her back now!

sounds impressive :up:
Tom

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So now that you have installed (?) MS Office 2010 on your Windows OS, how it it working out? Is it more legible?
What OS are you using?
Are you using the 32 or 64 bit version of MS Office?

I am using 32-bit MS Office 2013, on Win10-64bit Pro.
My eyes really object to the glary display.

I used to have both 2010 and 2013 installed but I never used the latter, not only because of the rendering problem, but also because it was too hard on the eyes (too bright, too much whiteness). This time I'm not even going to bother with installing 2013. 2010 does everything I need and I prefer its styling.

I've installed the 32 bit version of Office on my Win 7 Home Premium, 64-bit PC. Don't ask me why I didn't install 64-bit Office, because I can't remember my reasoning. I might have read something somewhere or mixed it up with some other advice to stick with the 32 bit. But for now it's running really fast, much faster than my previous installation, which might have been 64-bit Office.