Is WP7 & WP7.5 got anything for Business

[dlcpa]

<Excuse typo in title-remove "got">

I don't know where to put this because there is no "PATHETIC" category. I am trying to figure out why I should get a WP phone instead of an IPhone or an Android and you need to be an explorer to find answers.

Everyone here has been so nice and I really appreciate that help. Maybe Microsoft needs more of a presence on this site to answer some questions.

I want to know about how easy it is to use the WP phones interacting with my desktop and laptop and discovered first it's not very easy and WP took a huge step down from WM5. Maybe the graphics are nicer but what about functionality. I don't care if someone on Twitter is at Dunkin Donuts or if I say "In and Out Burger" the phone will do a Bing search for where these burger places are. And we all know how awful Bing is compared to Google so maybe it finds "In and Out" but what won't it find.

In my Google searches I found this someplace: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/27/windows-phone-7-5-mango-review/

"Word and Excel together offer nine new document templates to help create your docs faster. Word now supports copy / paste and the ability to add comments to specific words or phrases, while Excel offers quick formulas such as sum, max, min and average. But what about PowerPoint? There's not much in the way of improvements here, aside from smoother transitions between slides and better text rendering."

Cut and paste? Make me vomit! That is what they are reveling about? I couldn't remember all the functions the WM5 Office programs did so I found my Dell Axim X51v and turned on Excel to see what it does, besides being able to use a Bluetooth keyboard. Here it is:

Excel:

View-Full screen, zoom (diff %), Multiple Worksheets, Split, Freeze Panes

Toolbar- Graphs (Column, Bar, Line, Pie, XY Scatter Area
Right, center Left, Sum, $, .00, zoom

Menu-Undo, Redo Cut Copy Paste
Edit- Paste Spec
Fill (direction-Fill Type, Series Type (Date, Number)
Clear
Delete Cells (Shift left, Shift Up, Entire Row, Entire Column
Find/Replace (Match Case, Match Entire Cells) Values, Formulas
Go To
Select All
Format-Cells, Chart, Row, Column Modify Sheets
Insert Cells, Chart, Symbol, Define Name & Functions
Functions

Financial (DDB, FV, IRR, NPER, NPV, PMT, PV) -with function fields

Date & Time (Date, DateVal, Day, Hour, Minute, Month, Now)

Math&Trig (ABS, ACOS, ASIN, ATAN, ATAN2,COS, COUNTIF)

Statistical (AVG, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, MAX, MIN, STDEV,STDEVP, VAR, VARP)

Databese (Sames as Statistical but for DB)

Lookup (CHOOSE, COLUMNS, HLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, ROWS, VLOOKUP)

Text (EXACT, FIND, LEFT, LEN LOWER, MID, PROPER, REPLACE, REPT, RIGHT, SUBSTUTE, T, TRIM, UPPER, VALUE)

Informational (ERRORTYPE, ISBLANK, ISERR, ISERROR, IS LOGICAL, ISNA, ISNONTEXT, ISNUMBER, ISTEXT, NM NA)

There is triple level Sorting and filtering

and more

In Word, there isn't as much as Excel but full formatting, color, font, size, underling bold.

There is a toolbar for bolding Italics, Underline center and left and right justify. Numbers, Bullet Pts, Outline indents.

Spell Checker, Word Count, Insert Date, Find/Replace, all the Paragraph Formatting, hanging indent, centering, etc

If in fact WP7.5 can do all these things or at least some of them, maybe someone from Microsoft should tell us, instead of having people with headset mics dance around a stage talking about Twitter and Facebook. There are many business people who could use the functionality of the Office programs since maybe billion people have it.

DLCPA

 

[selfcreation]

lol,

agree,


i was just thinking about that the other day , how my WM 6.5 had more function then my WP7.5 lol .... sorta sad really.....


I'm a business account manager for Bell Mobility , and i can truely say that i don't have as MUCH selling points with WP as i did with WM.... its hard to push out to business clients


twitter and facebook seem to be the big thing now a dayz ,**** , i don't even have facebook on my phone ( to many useless contacts) lol , and w/e twitter..... lol



hopefully the next updates will add all the work features needed to function properly with out a PC/laptop...

 

[dlcpa]

I read what you wrote in another posting and you didn't mention all that so I figured maybe the Endgadget review was wrong. So, it's is good to hear from you that in fact WP7.5 is not what WM5 and 6 were.

I wrote a tax planning spreadsheet on Multiplan, many years ago and I stretched all my abilities to do that. I'm not looking for all that on my phone but some of it is necessary, especially if you are porting over from a PC that has it.

The beauty of the Bluetooth Keyboard (HID Bluetooth profile) is twofold because not only do you get to type on regular keys when you need to, you don't take up 2/3 of the screen with the virtual keyboard.

I am hoping Ballmer sees this and makes sure it gets into WP8 at least. We have to do what we can to make things better. I would love to see an MS WP phone made in the US. I'd pay $50 or even $100 more for it if it was made here and gave Americans jobs.

I don't understand how these companies can totally ignore their marketing bases. Verizon FIOS ordered new remotes that don't allow you to link all the functions of your TV to the Set Top Box remote (so you have to use both the TV remote and their remote)and then they order new High Capacity DVRs without a socket for the TV power cord so everyone that has the wires buried in back of a huge armoir or dresser has to find a place to plug in the TV power cord. It is idiotic and amazing how some of these "Executive Suite" managers get their jobs.

Thanks again for replying, I needed that one!

dlcpa

 

[rabit1]

Yeah. Microsoft needs to have 2 version of WP. WP and WP PRO

Sent from my HD7 T9292 using Board Express

 

[VernonEL]

I really enjoyed the customability of WM6.1 and 6.5, and the office stuff was pretty good and useful, but I rarely found that it was more convenient than my laptop.

Windows Phone meets (and exceeds) the demands of most of it's users out there. Sadly, there is less market for the office features. No that there are less people using them, it is just that the new smartphone user demographic is growing so rapidly. There are many ways that Windows Phone can improve, but they have their priorities. They can perfect everything at once.

Sent from my LG Quantum using Board Express

 

[dlcpa]

Burn,

There are many incidents where people don't have their laptop with them or if they do, they don't have an air card or Wifi Access. I said above that I wrote a tax planning program for Multiplan but now I'm not looking for that depth on a phone; but why not? Why not have that ability to carry around? I used to have a handheld, it must have been a Texas Instruments, that had two chips that you inserted into a slot the back. One was for Income Tax and the other was for Estate Tax. I even had a little printer that went along with it. I think it was a BNA product.

You could use programs like that for cash and inventory reconciliation in retail situations, for ordering product, to adjust recipes for quantity, to do inventory searches where computers aren't available. Certainly, time and expense accounting is perfect for a phone. You could have an entire report on the phone with Excel schedules that can be tweaked from the phone while you are on a negotiating or settlement conference call. There are lots of things you can do and perhaps with the MS Office foundation, Microsoft should expand on that. Sometimes it's not comfortable to carry around either a laptop or a Pad.

As it is, many people who hear Xbox apps might run from the WP7.5 phones. Right now, nobody is giving business a product tailored for its needs. I'm not sure how leaving all that Office functionality out of WP7 and 7.5 enhances anything else. If it doesn't it's just plain stupid not to have it.

 

[joe-1981]

I was in the same position a few months ago. Within my organisation Blackberry has really fallen out of favour mainly due to the heavy resource drain required to keep a fleet of several hundred devices running. We have numerous BES servers located around the world each of which require support and we were not getting sufficent support from RIM. We decided to look at different platforms to reduce our dependancy on RIM.
I already had a WP7 handset and several colleagues had iPhones and Android devices. We immediately elimated Android its a chaotic and in secure platrom leaving only the iPhone and WP7.
What sold WP7 for us was the office suite and its sharepoint integration. Most mobile users benefit greatly from having a fairly well featured Excel and Word package whilst travelling and the outlook integration is pretty good as well.

Downsides
Requiring a live account to configure the phone - Why MS?
Not being able to backup the device - Come on MS. Seriously?
Facebook and twitter integration - On a corporate Device!! No thanks

Apart from that its gone really well so far. One senior Director had a HTC Trophy for a week trial said going back to his BB was "like going back in time to a point where technology was ****".

WP7 is not perfect by any means but i has its pro's

 

[VernonEL]

dlcpa,

Have you used a Windows Phone running 7.5? I know that the Office functionality has dipped since WM6.5, but it is still pretty good. At least I have not heard of another OS that is better, that's for sure! SkyDrive integration is good, but not perfect. SharePoint and Office 360 is good. I can access and edit all of my OneNote, Word, and Excel files from work easily through SkyDrive, right from my Quantum. I'm satisfied with it.

Sent from my LG Quantum using Board Express

 

[selfcreation]

Smart phones have a * Multy media*(games ,entertainment ,movies ect..) thing going ...... which is kind of the opposite of what business users need.....

i personally dont have a lap top and having all these extra feature added to the office system would GREATLY improve efficiency outside the office.

we can only hope that MS adds them in the next updates... ( considering all updates leading to Apollo are updates to fix the OS or to improve it. im sure will see it get better sooner than later.

 

[VernonEL]

81,

I'm willing to bet that the latest Blackberry "corporate" device has Twitter and Facebook on them.

Also, I'd say that having LinkedIn directly integrated is probably more of a positive than a negative for the business users.

Sent from my LG Quantum using Board Express

 

[Umm Yeah]

I tend to agree that that the way the sell WP7 as having "Microsoft Office right on your phone" is very deceptive. My Docs to Go on BlackBerry has as much functionality as does the Office software on WP7. That said, in my line of work, I seldom, if ever do any editing of spreadsheets on my phone. I just tend to view attachments and in that way, it works fine for me.

Obviously, I'm just one case and I have no doubt that there are those who use the WP7 Office suite often and find it lacking.

 

[jfa1]

You can always get a free trial of Office 360 and check it out if that's to your liking its as low as 6.00 a month. You can even sync through the built in EAS just like WM days direct with outlook!

 

[dlcpa]

The fact is the market is theirs to own and one need and desire feeds the other. I don't know what it would take to put a much more complete version of Office on the phone or what that will do to memory, and quite frankly, I don't know what is in WP7.5 and that too is frustrating. MS needs to look at this discussion because it has merit.

 

[jfa1]

You can go to the wishlist/voting site and see if there is some input similar to what you are voicing that can put your votes behind. Thats a start or further step down the path.

 

[dlcpa]

I don't know what/where that is, the wish list/voting site. Further, I don't know what functions WP7.5 has for Excel and Word. Where can I find that? Still, at the moment there are no WP7.5 phones on Verizon and w/ the unlimited data package, I'm not switching.

So, at some point, Microsoft has to come to me and others with information, a Verizon 4G LTE phone and some of the functions that Windows Mobile had...oh yeah and the HID Bluetooth connectivity profile. I cannot understand why they'd leave these things out.

 

[psychotron]

I don't know what/where that is, the wish list/voting site.

http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-suggestions

I think the real problem here is that when they started designing WP7 they were reaching more for consumers than they had in the past, obviously to the detriment of enterprise users. That being said I can't see MS ignoring business users for long. They can't, since it has always been their bread and butter. Windows Phone, for what it is, is still a relatively young OS and has a ways to go yet. I'm fairly certain that WM didn't spring from the womb fully fleshed out either and WP7 will eventually get to where it was, it's just a matter of time.


Sent from my Samsung Focus using Board Express

 

[J4rrod]

<Excuse typo in title-remove "got">

I don't know where to put this because there is no "PATHETIC" category. I am trying to figure out why I should get a WP phone instead of an IPhone or an Android and you need to be an explorer to find answers.

Everyone here has been so nice and I really appreciate that help. Maybe Microsoft needs more of a presence on this site to answer some questions.

I want to know about how easy it is to use the WP phones interacting with my desktop and laptop and discovered first it's not very easy and WP took a huge step down from WM5. Maybe the graphics are nicer but what about functionality. I don't care if someone on Twitter is at Dunkin Donuts or if I say "In and Out Burger" the phone will do a Bing search for where these burger places are. And we all know how awful Bing is compared to Google so maybe it finds "In and Out" but what won't it find.

In my Google searches I found this someplace: Windows Phone 7.5 Mango review -- Engadget

"Word and Excel together offer nine new document templates to help create your docs faster. Word now supports copy / paste and the ability to add comments to specific words or phrases, while Excel offers quick formulas such as sum, max, min and average. But what about PowerPoint? There's not much in the way of improvements here, aside from smoother transitions between slides and better text rendering."

Cut and paste? Make me vomit! That is what they are reveling about? I couldn't remember all the functions the WM5 Office programs did so I found my Dell Axim X51v and turned on Excel to see what it does, besides being able to use a Bluetooth keyboard. Here it is:

Excel:

View-Full screen, zoom (diff %), Multiple Worksheets, Split, Freeze Panes

Toolbar- Graphs (Column, Bar, Line, Pie, XY Scatter Area
Right, center Left, Sum, $, .00, zoom

Menu-Undo, Redo Cut Copy Paste
Edit- Paste Spec
Fill (direction-Fill Type, Series Type (Date, Number)
Clear
Delete Cells (Shift left, Shift Up, Entire Row, Entire Column
Find/Replace (Match Case, Match Entire Cells) Values, Formulas
Go To
Select All
Format-Cells, Chart, Row, Column Modify Sheets
Insert Cells, Chart, Symbol, Define Name & Functions
Functions

Financial (DDB, FV, IRR, NPER, NPV, PMT, PV) -with function fields

Date & Time (Date, DateVal, Day, Hour, Minute, Month, Now)

Math&Trig (ABS, ACOS, ASIN, ATAN, ATAN2,COS, COUNTIF)

Statistical (AVG, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, MAX, MIN, STDEV,STDEVP, VAR, VARP)

Databese (Sames as Statistical but for DB)

Lookup (CHOOSE, COLUMNS, HLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, ROWS, VLOOKUP)

Text (EXACT, FIND, LEFT, LEN LOWER, MID, PROPER, REPLACE, REPT, RIGHT, SUBSTUTE, T, TRIM, UPPER, VALUE)

Informational (ERRORTYPE, ISBLANK, ISERR, ISERROR, IS LOGICAL, ISNA, ISNONTEXT, ISNUMBER, ISTEXT, NM NA)

There is triple level Sorting and filtering

and more

In Word, there isn't as much as Excel but full formatting, color, font, size, underling bold.

There is a toolbar for bolding Italics, Underline center and left and right justify. Numbers, Bullet Pts, Outline indents.

Spell Checker, Word Count, Insert Date, Find/Replace, all the Paragraph Formatting, hanging indent, centering, etc

If in fact WP7.5 can do all these things or at least some of them, maybe someone from Microsoft should tell us, instead of having people with headset mics dance around a stage talking about Twitter and Facebook. There are many business people who could use the functionality of the Office programs since maybe billion people have it.

DLCPA

First of all, Bing is not worse than Google, at all. That's why it's grew over 50% since its launch. You think Google is better for the same reason the general public does - because Google is a habit and you won't openly give Bing a try. I've not did a Google search in months, and I'm a senior in college; Bing gets things done, and it's much more organized. Not to mention it's video and image search destroys Google's, and it has Wolfram Alpha integration, bam! And guess what? All the time I'm searching I earn Bing Rewards Points, which I recently used to "purchase" MS Points.

Want to see for yourself that Bing is just as good/better at results? Go here, and tell us your results after 5-10 searches: Blind Search

 

[selfcreation]

First of all, Bing is not worse than Google, at all. That's why it's grew over 50% since its launch. You think Google is better for the same reason the general public does - because Google is a habit and you won't openly give Bing a try. I've not did a Google search in months, and I'm a senior in college; Bing gets things done, and it's much more organized. Not to mention it's video and image search destroys Google's, and it has Wolfram Alpha integration, bam! And guess what? All the time I'm searching I earn Bing Rewards Points, which I recently used to "purchase" MS Points.

Want to see for yourself that Bing is just as good/better at results? Go here, and tell us your results after 5-10 searches: Blind Search

Bing is worst then google.... the google Search engine is more refined then BING ..... I always start with bing and always end up going to google... and 95% of the time i get better resaults with google.

Video search on bing kills google? lol thats not even possible . considering 99% of vids on the web are on youtube witch is a part of google. lol... sorry but thats what it is.


and BTW i tried your Bing VS google VS yahoo

Google won every time LOL.. specially for videos....

I ran a search for a live music video of * infected mushroom*

- google gave me over 30 Youtube links

- bing gave me the official page for the band and random sites .. ( 6th link had a video )

bing = is still not up to google in terms of efficiency , not saying it won’t ever be ,,, but for the time being google is still better...

and im a UGE MS fan boy... dont get me wrong ... but im just pointing out true facts..

as much as I love and want BING to be better.. its not!

 

[dlcpa]

Bing comes with the BlackBerry and two years ago if was so absolutely awful I took it out, or bypassed it. It found more nuissance sites than relevant sites. I checked out the searches in the Blind Search and I picked Google but there was not a lot of difference between Google and Bing finds. However I wonder if that would change over 15 pages of search results.

One search I did was "Excel and WP7.5" and came up with no list of functions and as a matter of fact, someone asked that question of Microsoft and there was no answer. One grab said that in WP7 Cut and Paste was not available in Excel and now the WP7.5 has the SUM function. Pathetic!!!!!

I think we need someone from Microsoft here to talk to us and tell us why was Office cut back on WP7 and WP7.5, from the more complete versions on WM5 and WM6, or was it, and when can we expect it back. If not, what are the programming memory and space problems for eliminating it and can we trade it for Xbox apps. What do you think?

I saw the new Nokia phones and I am not impressed. I want bigger and more powerful with a better screen.

 

[dlcpa]

I am going to send a request to Matt Bencke of Microsoft, he is the GM for Windows Phone Apps, to send someone here, or join us himself, to clear up BIG questions about Office and WP7.5. I am still not even sure how you sync the damn thing and honestly, without a desktop sync I may just give up on the WP phones. I don't want to put all my information in the clouds or on Hotmail because that is no different that Google...although there is an Adndroid desktop app "Compulink" for syncing Office data to your computer to keep your improtant info off Google.

Am I missing something very obvious here? I am no big fan of Excel and the fact that it hasn't evolved in 10 years but it's the spreadsheet we all have and if there is no connection between Desktop/Laptop and Phone, there is no way I would consider an Windows Phone. I may get touchy about other features but what's the point here.

The more I look into this Office/WP problem the more confused I get