Office 2013 Review

Released to the public yesterday, Microsoft Office 2013 is finally here. Building on the tradition of the past, but not holding on to aged technologies, the Redmond-based company has completely re-designed their suite of office productivity applications. The installation is fairly straight-forward and easy. The software can be purchased in a store (included on 487 high density 3-1/2″  floppy diskettes), streamed wirelessly via FM radio (accessible through any Zune device or USB radio), or downloaded directly through The Pirate Bay.

Aiming to impress without leaving the painful impression left by the most severe of impressions, Microsoft Office 2013 is here. We feel you’ll love the simplicity, challenge and nostalgia afford by the 5-hour install time and bold orange color theme. Free subscription to Redmond Magazine in every box! ~ Office 2013 press release

Microsoft has taken a bold stance on UI with its newest version of Office. The entire experience is optimized for touchscreens, and the controversial “ribbon” menu interface has been replaced by the “bow tie” experience (instead of being hidden under tabs, options are now selected by tracing your finger or mouse in certain knot patterns, for example, the half-Windsor selects the printing options). Word has undergone perhaps the most drastic change, in appearances at least. The program now resembles a traditional pen-and-paper notepad, and all of the menu options are built into the spiral binding cascading down the left side of the screen. Options to change to college-ruled are available for more advanced users.

Microsoft Power Point has been completely revamped to minimize user input. Designs are now chosen via the theme options in Control Panel, and picture customizations can be applied from Instagram. The presentation mode of Power Point is now controlled exclusively through Kinect for Windows. Transitions are chosen randomly, and font selection is limited to Comic Sans, Arial, and Wingdings.

Microsoft Excel has been made more user-friendly, and “all that complicated math stuff” has been removed to make the user experience more smooth. Graphs are now limited to pie charts and bar graphs, and the color scheme changes according to the Bing Weather forecast.

Outlook has been changed to look like a cell phone texting screen, and Access and Publisher have been nixed entirely, because “nobody uses those programs anyway.” Onenote is still included, but nobody really knows how to use it.

And that’s how not to write a review,
~XK

The Man Who Could Not Win

This is a demotivational story, designed for people who really don’t need encouraging. If you want to be encouraged, go look at kittens or something. If you want to be amused, keep reading. If you’re hungry, eat some popcorn while reading this. If you’re lost or you mistakenly clicked on this link, read this anyway. 

Marvin walked out of his door and into the weather–more specifically, the bad weather. It was raining buckets, and he had left his umbrella at home.

“Luckily,” he thought to himself, “I have this spare umbrella.”

Marvin never had any luck. Not the good kind of luck anyway. He opened his spare umbrella. Out fell a dead mouse. If you’ve never had the experience of opening an umbrella and receiving a mouse, I can assure you it is not pleasant. After brushing the rodent off of his shoulders, he looked up at the sky–through the shredded umbrella. Unfortunately for the umbrella, it was allergic to mice. Unfortunately for Marvin, so was he.

Marvin shrugged. He didn’t really need to stay dry, anyway. He walked out into the pouring rain. That’s when he realized that his laptop case was unzipped. He reached down to zip it up, but he was in such a hurry that he ran crookedly into a telephone pole. (Most people run straight into things, but that’s far too easy. Marvin never did anything easily.)

When his brain received the message that his head had attempted to knock down a telephone pole, it decided to shut down all systems and make sure everything was ok. In an effort to resolve the situation quickly, his body decided to test the functionality of gravity. In short, Marvin blacked out.

When the systems were all deemed operational, the lights were switched back on, and Marvin found himself lying in the middle of the sidewalk with a strange ringing in his ears and an invisible vice on his brain.

He looked up and found that the sun was shining, and the ground all around him was steaming from the rain. He looked down and saw that he was laying in the middle of an ant hill. He tried to jump up, but in the process he dropped his laptop case, out of which spilled a fizzled laptop, a tangle of cords, and a soggy dead mouse. He bent down to collect his belongings and muttered to himself something about misguided anchovies (he still wasn’t thinking quite clearly).

Once he finally repacked his laptop case and chased most of the ants from his clothing, he started down the sidewalk again. He walked three blocks before he realized that he was heading in the wrong direction. He turned around to head towards his home and was hit in the chest by flying ball of donut dough.

In Marvin’s town, the people have a peculiar habit of throwing uncooked donuts at passersby. The reasoning has still not been worked out, but local superstitions take most of the blame. Most people wouldn’t have been too upset at being smacked in the chest with a donut, but along with being allergic to mice, Marvin also broke out with a rash every time he touched chocolate. Strangely enough, this was a strawberry donut, and it seemed his luck had actually come through. The original donut throwing culprit seemed to be having a slow day, though, so he threw another donut just for good measure–a chocolate one.

Marvin finally arrived at his house. He panicked momentarily, for he realized that he had locked his keys inside, but he remembered that he had left his windows open. His landlord had noticed, though, and closed them, but not before the rain had drenched everything inside.

Marvin was much too tired to remember his spare key, so he broke one of the window panes, cutting his hand in the process. He opened the door just as his roommate showed up with the second key.

Marvin walked in, noticed that the water was still running in the sink, and found out the hard way that the stove burner on which he had placed his jacket was still on high.

“You know what?” He said rhetorically to his roommate, “I just can’t win. I’m going to try to lose. Maybe I’ll fail at that, too.”

So he played chess with himself. He tied.

The Incomplete Plenary of Obfuscation

The atmosphere was one of light-hardheartedness and general mirth. Small talk and generic persiflage tickled the ears of passersby; the ubiquitous red shirts and old-style, ripped blue jeans that comprised the uniform of the shopkeepers might have been distracting, had the scene itself not provided a multiplicity of foreign and wild distractions. The floors were scattered haphazardly with tiles of multifarious shape and style. The mad colors blended with the dull grout and otherwise quotidian construction of the old building. Indeed, had those employed been dressed in naught but their essentials, the newcomer to this exhibit would have thought it none the stranger nor less fantastic. The walls held hand-painted murals and glass mosaics of nefarious looking poultry and graphic demembrations of various fowl. Many have pondered the state of consciousness of the artist from whose mind these images came: demented, insane, inebriated?

The establishment manages, somehow, to escape giving the impressions of a spurious or dubious nature. The real danger lies in the posterior of the curious shop. The clandestine–nay, even surreptitious–operations of those who work behind the visible operation. Indubitably, the operations were properly sanctioned through the various and customary routes of authoritarian government obtainment of permissions, yet when one was allowed into the cookery, the crushing reality of the atrocities committed therein were brought to light. Composed of the organization was this verse of undoubted truth and verisimilitude:

‘Twas a scene so foul, In the indeterminable bowel,
Of that terrible, queer, and violent store.
The place did give, of its own derive,
A feeling and aura, reminisce of Pandora,
Hidden behind that deathly door. 

For whom did it open? For what was within?
What could in the dreadful unknown be?
There behind that door of metal,
Wrought from pan, pot, and kettle,
There work the ones who peddle,
The lovely fried goodness, we call, KFC.

Salutations distinguées,
XanthusKidd