Office 2010 to Make Itself Faster With Your GPU

[Godfail]

[citation][nom]sbnathanson[/nom]Oh great, now all new GPU reviews or announcements are going to have the obligatory comment: "Yeah, but can it accellerate Office 2010?"[/citation]

This is already happening with the desktop Aero functions, which is very similar to the functions in Office 2010. It's not a big deal, nor should you really care what marketing you see on the boxes.

 

[delazaren]

This is good news. In many cases I use vectored graphics in Word that come from CAD packages and if they are very detailed Word is very slow in redrawing (I'm talking hundreds of thousands of lines). Hopefully the use of the GPU will speed things up. Nice one.

 

[wotan31]

Just what we need. Another bloated buggy office version that's overpriced, and introduces new proprietary file formats. Wake me up when Microsoft produces something worth buying.

 

[TunaSoda]

[citation][nom]Bolbi[/nom]Um, why? It's not like you're going to need that GPU for anything that can't spare a little processing power at the the same time that you're putting together a presentation.[/citation]
um, I'm thinking the opposite, just imagine outlook 2010 running in the background as you fire up a game...

 

[MrKKBB]

Can't wait to see this in action on a laptop. A lot of my powerpoint slides contain animated gifs, or movies because it is the only way to explore time-dependent 3-D results. My powerpoint presentations are often at 50 MB or more in size. I use 2007 and my laptop works very hard to handle the graphical presentations.

 

[Godfail]

[citation][nom]TunaSoda[/nom]um, I'm thinking the opposite, just imagine outlook 2010 running in the background as you fire up a game...[/citation]

Why is it that most negative comments always come before someone bothers to think about a solution? The Aero desktop releases its hooks into the GPU when you start a game - take that knowledge, and think for about 2 seconds.

 

[aneasytarget]

If MSFT would use the GPU to help crunch my Excel worksheets, that would rock!

 

[hellwig]

Hey, don't forget Outlook 2010 is using Word to render your emails. That way, if they're anything but plain text or Word docs, they'll look like shit. Check-out http://fixoutlook.org/ to try to get Microsoft to not be so fricking stupid. Seriously, Word to render email?

 

[Godfail]

[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]Hey, don't forget Outlook 2010 is using Word to render your emails. That way, if they're anything but plain text or Word docs, they'll look like shit. Check-out http://fixoutlook.org/ to try to get Microsoft to not be so fricking stupid. Seriously, Word to render email?[/citation]

Word is used to render email created with Word features - there's a tradeoff there with HTML standards, obviously...however, most organizations using Exchange are using Outlook on every client. Using terms like "fricking stupid" will surely get you nowhere.

 

[tommysch]

[citation][nom]Godfail[/nom]This is already happening with the desktop Aero functions, which is very similar to the functions in Office 2010. It's not a big deal, nor should you really care what marketing you see on the boxes.[/citation]

God you just failed. He was referring to the ''Can it run crysis'' meme.

 

[Godfail]

[citation][nom]TommySch[/nom]God you just failed. He was referring to the ''Can it run crysis'' meme.[/citation]

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to switch from "intelligent conversation mode" to "tech blog forum mode".

Wonderful little play on my SN there, where could you have come up with that!?!! You are a creative genius.

 

[igot1forya]

I'm running a small 100 user Citrix environment and we are making the move to Office 2010 in the next 6 months. My guess is that there will be no hardware acceleration as the typical graphics adapter in a server is something like a 8MB RAGE128 or something. I wonder what provisions MS has made for us clustered server guys? Office get more and more taxing/bloated and the only one who would benefit from this hardware assist are local installs of Office. I sure hope this wont be a mistake by making the move to upgrade (from Office 2003).

 

[Godfail]

[citation][nom]Igot1forya[/nom]I'm running a small 100 user Citrix environment and we are making the move to Office 2010 in the next 6 months. My guess is that there will be no hardware acceleration as the typical graphics adapter in a server is something like a 8MB RAGE128 or something. I wonder what provisions MS has made for us clustered server guys? Office get more and more taxing/bloated and the only one who would benefit from this hardware assist are local installs of Office. I sure hope this wont be a mistake by making the move to upgrade (from Office 2003).[/citation]

If you look at the features that are using the GPU, they are nothing like what people are getting out of this article. They relate to content creation with graphics - something that probably shouldn't be done using Citrix.

 

[figgus]

[citation][nom]Godfail[/nom]Actually, you're assuming way too much. The GPU functionality seems to only apply to the document creation aspects - not the readability of the document. It's blazingly stupid to then take those assumptions and start speculating on interoperability without any more knowledge, FYI.[/citation]
Sure looks to me like bullet points 2,3, and 5 will involve some client side rendering. Please explain how you think it doesn't?

It might not be as intensive as the original creation, but there isn't much room for it to lean on most office machine GPUs. It won't take much of a requirement to get that content stuttering and skipping all over the place.

 

[dbrooks08]

Since theres GPU processing, it seems like its pretty different than 2007; in terms of how it was built.

Does anyone know if this will be back-words compatible?

 

[annymmo]

[citation][nom]figgus[/nom]And when you send this new jazzed up document to a client with a traditional business PC they can't open it properly.It might be more efficient from an engineering standpoint, but from an interoperability IT standpoint it is blazingly stupid.[/citation]

If you would know what you would be talking about [nom]figgus[/nom],
you wouldn't say a thing about interoperability IT.
Because IT does NOT AFFECT it! It's not related in any way.

What are you brabling about.
The way how content is rendered has NOTHING to do with compatibility.
This is NOT related in any how in HOW documents ARE SAVED.

For the people who don't know, look for something called "Save as...".
It should be around where you find the "Save" button.

 

[annymmo]

[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]Hey, don't forget Outlook 2010 is using Word to render your emails. That way, if they're anything but plain text or Word docs, they'll look like shit. Check-out http://fixoutlook.org/ to try to get Microsoft to not be so fricking stupid. Seriously, Word to render email?[/citation]

Dude, MS is doing stuff like this for ages.
It is being done to remove interoperability, eliminate competition.
They are just trying to lock things in.

 

[ptroen]

Geez http://fixoutlook.org/. You have 26k user petition. Now if each of you wrote 100 lines of your own code you could make your own free outlook which wouldn't require MS. Think about it.

 

[captainnemojr]

Because my quad-core i7 with hyper-threading wasn't enough to render my clip-art...well at least the ability is there. Probably won't upgrade though. I'm happy with my Office 2007 for the price of free.

 

[annymmo]

[citation][nom]dbrooks08[/nom]Since theres GPU processing, it seems like its pretty different than 2007; in terms of how it was built. Does anyone know if this will be back-words compatible?[/citation]

The way of rendering does not impact compatibility because it's not related.
This has nothing to do with the way it will be painted on screen.

The compatibility depends on the FILE-FORMATS used.
Currently, the most reliable format (without using spreadsheets) is OpenDocument format (ODF). It has the least amount of formatting errors when roundtripping.
(standardization of formulaes in spreadsheets will be part of ODF v1.2, which is in it's latest stages to becomming an international standard.
ODF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument


It surprises me how little Tom's readers know about computers.
With some basic knowledge of how a computer and software generally operates, a lot of questions would be unnecessary.

 

[annymmo]

[citation][nom]Igot1forya[/nom]I'm running a small 100 user Citrix environment and we are making the move to Office 2010 in the next 6 months. My guess is that there will be no hardware acceleration as the typical graphics adapter in a server is something like a 8MB RAGE128 or something. I wonder what provisions MS has made for us clustered server guys? Office get more and more taxing/bloated and the only one who would benefit from this hardware assist are local installs of Office. I sure hope this wont be a mistake by making the move to upgrade (from Office 2003).[/citation]

You are making a mistake.
And by the way, to prevent a lot of headaches for you.
Set the default formats to the old 2003/XP ones.
You know, the formats which produces files without x's as last letter of the file extension.
Or else you will be constantly buzzy with solving the question: "why won't it open it?

You might want to consider OpenOffice.org
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org )
It is less bloated and supports more file formats.
Now you set the default format to the old MS Office formats until ODF covers everything and you're safe.

 

[annymmo]

[citation][nom]aneasytarget[/nom]If MSFT would use the GPU to help crunch my Excel worksheets, that would rock![/citation]

With DirectCompute/OpenCL this is technical possible .
They might do this in a next version of MS Office I think.
There is probably enough GPU related material to make improvements for another 10-20 years.

 

[epkfaile]

[citation][nom]MrKKBB[/nom]Can't wait to see this in action on a laptop. A lot of my powerpoint slides contain animated gifs, or movies because it is the only way to explore time-dependent 3-D results. My powerpoint presentations are often at 50 MB or more in size. I use 2007 and my laptop works very hard to handle the graphical presentations.[/citation]
yes, a intel gma helping the video card. itll do so much right? 😀

 

[annymmo]

[citation][nom]figgus[/nom]And when you send this new jazzed up document to a client with a traditional business PC they can't open it properly.It might be more efficient from an engineering standpoint, but from an interoperability IT standpoint it is blazingly stupid.[/citation]

Maybe you should learn people to not do such stuff. Don't you think?
Teach them some basics between the content they add in a presentation and the amount of work they add for the computer.

 

[hellwig]

[citation][nom]Godfail[/nom]Word is used to render email created with Word features - there's a tradeoff there with HTML standards, obviously...however, most organizations using Exchange are using Outlook on every client. Using terms like "fricking stupid" will surely get you nowhere.[/citation]
Sorry if describing Microsoft's asinine decisions as "fricking stupid" was too subtle. That was my own comment, but I would think many people agree with me that some of the decisions Microsoft makes are pretty f*cking stupid.

And back to my original point, writing an email with Word features in it and then sending it to someone is a dangerous prospect. That method MUST assume that the receiver is also using Outlook. That's fine when you're sending an email in-house, where everyone is on the same exchange server and everyone is using Outlook. That DOES NOT work when you send that email to someone outside the company that might be using Lotus Notes, Pine, Squirrel Mail, Yahoo, etc. (not that Pine or Squirrel understand HTML either).

Besides, Word isn't being used to only create and render Word emails, it's being used render other emails too. If anything, Outlook should use IE, not Word to render HTML emails. Anyone who uses Word for HTML editing/rendering simply doesn't know what they are doing.

I've run into many problems where word-based emails don't display properly in Outlook running Word (where else they could possibly display correctly I do not know). I've also had problems where I had to restart my computer because Outlook and Word are tied together, and an error in either one causes the other to crash (great when the Exchange server crashes and Outlook dies along with it, crashing that Word document I'd been working on for a while).

As others have said, this is just Microsoft trying to tie their products together and force the world to live with the mediocrity above all else. I call it stupid. Like Microsoft Word is the world's premiere choice for email editing or something?