Thinking of getting the MS Office demo?
This is something I read on the Planet KDE blog I use to gather news for my other blog: an account of what the author found when she downloaded the recent Microsoft Office demo. Quite simply, all worthwhile functionality has been disabled. The "new" and "save" functions have been greyed out, with a message attached saying "to enable it purchase a licensed copy of Microsoft Office", and you can't even edit documents!
It took 50 minutes to download and install it, and 20 minutes to remove after an attempt at use that lasted two minutes. They call this a "fully functional demo". Like, what's the point?
Comments
Perhaps Microsoft actually want people to switch to Open Office?
Posted by: Philip Hunt | April 29, 2007 8:50 PM
Salam alaikum,
That's not my experience. My MS Office trial was fully functional - although it did not include Outlook - allowing me to trial it for 2 months. It runs out in two days' time. I found the new interface irritating at first as I could not find well-used commands very easily (the menus have stayed pretty much the same for the past 10+ years, so it's quite a change) - but I do think MS Office 2007 is very good.
I now have a full copy on my home PC thanks to the NHS Home User agreement, which allows NHS employees to get a copy totally free (apart from postage). I really enjoy using it I'm sorry to say - OpenOffice on my Ubuntu laptop doesn't quite compare somehow.
Anyway, on Microsoft's trial download site (http://us20.trymicrosoftoffice.com/) it states:
"To use the Trial version, you must activate the software the first time you run it. Otherwise, the Trial version runs in Reduced Functionality mode."
Maybe that's the problem. Allah knows best.
Wasalam.
Posted by: Tim Bowes | April 29, 2007 10:03 PM