Making Music with Shaders: Practical Additive GPU Audio Synthesis [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.graffathon.fi/2016/presentations/additive_slides.pdf <comment><USER2> On shadertoy there are many examples of GPU shaded audio synthesis. My favorites are:

[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ts3z2](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ts3z2) which is a perfect example for ambient sound

[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldfSW2](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldfSW2) for an example of acid techno music

[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsSXzD](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsSXzD) a doom "port" rendered in a single shader including music

<comment><USER3> Your links include the closing quotes for those clicking in a browser. Fixed links:

Which is a perfect example for ambient sound [1]

For an example of acid techno music [2]

A doom "port" rendered in a single shader including music [3]

[1] [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ts3z2](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ts3z2)

[2] [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldfSW2](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldfSW2)

[3] [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsSXzD](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsSXzD)

<comment><USER2> Sorry/Thanks... apparently one should not quote URLs on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly unrelated, but I find that slide decks posted only at face value miss a lot of contextual information, discussion and audience interest that comes from watching a presentation on a video or in person with commentary.

What makes a good slide deck for a presentation makes for terrible reading. Likewise, what makes for good reading makes for a terrible PowerPoint presentation.

</comment><comment><USER5> GPUs have single cycle sin/cos LUT implementations, so they should be good for this kind of thing - competitive with an FFT for a relatively small number of overtones.

But there are some technical issues. Older GPUs don't have full IEEE 754 floating point support, and compilers are optimised for graphics, not for audio, so you won't necessarily get the same output as you would from DSP code running on an x86.

If shader compilers included some audio-friendly tweaks and perhaps a standard audio API for co-processing, they could see a lot more use in music editing and synthesis.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's worth pointing out that there is a closed form for the sum of a finite geometric series used for summing harmonic sine waves into bandlimited impulse trains (BLIT) which are filtered to create alias-free classic analog oscillators:

[https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~stilti/papers/blit.pdf](https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~stilti/papers/blit.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> It may just be a limitation of the slides rather than the full presentation, but this is almost entirely about the audio synthesis side. There is nearly nothing specific to GPUs or shaders that I can see.

So fair warning: if, like me, you already know the fundamentals of audio and synthesis (and it starts with "what's a sine" and "how does 440Hz map to a piano), but were interested in the shader part, there's not much here for you.

<comment><USER8> The reason is there isn't much special about his use of shaders. The first two slides cover shader specific details (write to a 1D render target where each pixel is a 44khz sample). The audience is people who are familiar with fragment shaders, and specifically familiar with shadertoy, but with limited exposure to additive synthesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very nice work. This could be used to efficiently re-implement 8-bit- and 16-bit-era sound systems, which are mostly emulated on the CPU at present. I wonder if the same techniques can also be used to enable DSP-like workloads of a more general sort on GPU compute.

<comment><USER10> Most of those are either very straightforward subtractive synthesizers, or use digital FM synthesis. It's much more efficient (and accurate) to start from sampled basic waveforms or reverse-engineered data from the actual systems, rather than building them using additive synthesis techniques.</comment></comment>


Office 2013: Just what on earth has the Office team been doing? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/office-2013-just-what-on-earth-has-the-office-team-been-doing/ <comment><USER3> Surprised Ars didn't mention this:

 _"Microsoft switched to Word (from Internet Explorer) as its rendering engine with the introduction of Outlook 2007 and hasn't looked back (errr, forward?) since. Despite the email community's efforts and a well-intentioned response from Microsoft, this means that HTML and CSS support in Outlook has remain virtually unchanged between versions 2007, 2010 and now 2013."_ [1]

Nice.

[1] [http://litmus.com/blog/outlook-2013-still-powered-by-word- no...](http://litmus.com/blog/outlook-2013-still-powered-by-word-now- available-for-email-testing)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is the argument that a touch version of Office is more important than a web- friendly version? Moving to a JavaScript-based add-in model and adding native support for SkyDrive seem like fairly big, worthwhile, and forward-looking additions to me. In contrast, I don't think that touch-friendliness is really very important - it would be nice to have, but I doubt most office workers are going to be doing a lot of editing on tablets.

There are also plenty of nice new features too, like flash-fill in Excel and PDF reading in Word. I really think Office 2013 is a nice, if not critical, update.

<comment><USER5> They've certainly used Office as a _major_ selling point of Surface RT. So there's at least some conflict in the message they are sending there. Is Office meant for tables or not? If yes, then why haven't they made it more touch optimized? If not, then why are they making such a big deal out of it with Surface promotion?

And don't think you're getting Office for "free" in there anyway. The hardware specs are almost identical to a $200 Nexus 7. There's little in there, hardware wise, that could justify a $300 increase. So obviously most of the difference is to pay up for the Windows and Office licenses. They are included in the price. they are not "free".

<comment><USER6> The answer is pretty plain: The Office division cut the team that was supposed to ship the Metro-styled Office apps for 2013 despite the Windows division objection. Windows then relented and added 'desktop mode' for ARM just to keep Office in the release. Office tweaked the existing UI to make buttons 'bigger.' The original plan called for the Metro UI to be available whenever a user interacted with his hands -- Surface was the primary objective, but Office 2013 should work great on the Toshiba tablet as well.

The decision to cut Metro support was made in Q1 2011 and distributed to all Office managers by Kurt himself. The team that was working on Metro (called Modern Office eXperience, MOX) shrunk and merged with OneNote. Hence, why we see OneNote has Metro and no other app does. The reasoning was "the Win8 APIs are not stable enough for us to finish on schedule with the team we have. We either ship 10/11/12 or slip by a year to support Windows 8." They decided to ship (RTM) on 10/11/12. We should see a 'surprise' SP1 that supports Metro and iOS by the end of this year (this is pure speculation from me -- I have no NDA knowledge about plans past 10/11/12).

You are seeing a classical "ship the orgchart" dilema from Microsoft with Office and Windows this season. It's sad, really, but these tensions are why I don't work there.

<comment><USER7> Shipping WinRT support for all of Office within a year sounds aggressive if it was only OneNote at the end of Office 2013!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't tell you what the major "advancements" in Wordprocessing have been in 20 years. I haven't had Office installed on my personal computer in about 10 years, but when I use Word or Excel they just feel like... well, spreadsheet and wordprocessing tools. Excel still feels really inadequate and slow compared for processing complex and large datasets. Word feels like a slightly different UI of wordprocessing software I had on Windows 95.

The changes for so long have felt like they haven't done anything really positive. If i need to write a letter, I just use Google Docs. If I need to tabulate some simple data, I just use Google Docs. I just don't get it.

Powerpoint still feels smooth to me than Keynote, but Keynote looks better in output generally. Pages almost always produces better looking output than Word for me for some reason (although I'd rather just use LaTeX for real document layout). Numbers by Apple is a mess compared to excel and not worth using.

<comment><USER9> I'm using Google Docs for mostly everything. I've typeset one book using LaTeX and several using QuarkXPress on Mac computers.

We're simply not the target for Microsoft Word.

But with less and less need to write letters (we've got emails now) and more and more totally free and convenient solutions like Google Docs, the "target" keeps shrinking for Microsoft Word.

The corporate world won't change anytime soon: MS Office is their way of doing business.

But SMEs are fleeing fast: I'm seeing more and more shared Google Docs (both text and spreadsheets) used inside SMEs and even to exchange doc with the outside.

Want an invoice and you're on GMail? OK, I'm sharing the invoice with you so you can print it. Why bother printing it and sending a letter? Why even bother exporting it as a PDF and sending it as an attachment? Shared invoice (read- only) just so that the recipient can print it.

I'm not saying it's "great" from a security point of view to share a Google Doc with a customer / contractor but that's where we're at now: lots of SMEs aren't even bothering with Word and its incompabilities (whether they still exist or not not being the point: they do exist in the users' mind).

MS did a 180 degree with Office 365 because they know it's very real.

<comment><USER10> I realize that, 15 years ago, I used Word for things like writing manuals, printing cover sheets, formatting resumes, writing newsletters -- everything that was designed to be _printed_.

I haven't used Word in years. Every workplace of mine has used Google Docs instead. And for the first time, I realize it isn't just because of Google Docs collaboration and use-anywhere -- it's the fact that all the "power" features of Word, particularly formatting and layout, are all geared towards the printed page.

But I literally produce _nothing_ designed to be printed anymore. Everything that used to be printed, is now thrown up the web. Fancy formatting is _useless_ now if it can't be translated into HTML.

(For spreadsheets, there are still big reasons for power usage of those, so I don't see Excel going away anytime soon. But except for producing PDF versions of nicely formatted resumes, it's getting harder and harder to see why Word should even exist. And of course graphic designers need to produce typeset pages, but that's what page layout programs are for.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly the change from 2010 to 2013 is bigger than the change from 2007 to 2010 - particularly all of the cloud stuff. (It's actually quite cool to have the same most recently used documents when you open up an Office app, regardless of which computer you're on).

In any case - overall I somewhat agree with the article, though I'd be surprised if Microsoft isn't aware of this themselves. I think Office 2013 is a solid upgrade for the desktop - though a solid touch version is indeed lacking. Here's to hoping they have one on the way, hopefully sooner than 3 years from now...

<comment><USER12> Agree the cloud integration looks quite useful. I'd love to just open and save files directly to SkyDrive and have that list of recent files available to me in any office client I use. This is an awesome functionality. Worth 2.5 years or not... don't know but I'm sure there is more cool stuff to office 2013 than just that. Love the OneNote app on metro.

<comment><USER13> Why is opening and saving files to SkyDrive superior to opening and saving files to DropBox or Google Drive? Is the big benefit that the recently opened files list moves with you from machine to machine? I feel like I am missing something.

<comment><USER14> It is because you can access your "Office" from any copy of Office 2013. As long as a computer has 2013 installed, you can access your files. No downloading and setting up the dropbox app, or logging into dropbox.com and grabbing the files from there.

Just log in, edit, save, log out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Office 2013 is a visual nightmare. The lack of any dividing lines gives me a headache; it feels like a snowstorm.

And just to be more insulting, the UI has random caps. There's no design or reasoning for the caps. They don't indicate clickable things, they don't seem to indicate anything. I spend a fair amount of time in Outlook and Lync - <USER2> would I want to subject my eyes to this?

<comment><USER16> There are plenty of dividing lines

<http://i.minus.com/ibm6UEFR5wXRGJ.png>

I personally like the new UI, I find it refreshing.

<comment><USER17> I agree, but only because the office installation in this screenshot is set to use the darkest theme -- by default all that gray is just more white.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07.

Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an engineering user of these tools than a typical office worker. And, although I have used it extensively for such things as invoices, purchase orders, financial calculation, presentations and business documents I still think of these tools as part of my engineering tool set.

Examples:

I devoted about three months to write an Excel VBA tool to help automate the creation of components for the EDA package we were using at the time. Creating a component such as a 1000+ pin FPGA went from almost literally days to an hour or two after this tool was in place.

Use Excel and the built-in Solver tool to find solutions for programming a clock synthesizer to output a given set of frequencies.

Use Excel + external voltage, current and temperature sensors to log and analyze test data.

Use Excel to easily produce and maintain lookup-table-driven state machine code in C, including all the callbacks for each state.

Use Excel to produce CNC G-code to run a Haas VF3-SS milling machine to produce patterned holes and threads.

Automate Powerpoint with VBA to simulate the control panel of a piece of equipment, complete with a small dot-matrix LCD display and functioning menu buttons. This was used to for training purposes when the actual piece of equipment was not available.

Use Word and VBA to automate parsing of documents and extraction of data.

Anyhow, just some examples that come to mind.

I had to install '07 when we switched to a Vista 64 to be able to run FEA and other tools that would benefit from that platform. I remember going from being a "power user" to feeling like an utter idiot. The UI change was brutal and I am still not sure that it was an improvement. They also modified automation and put in all of the roadblocks that just made it painful to use.

Office 2013? Nope. Thanks.

<comment><USER19> A bit off topic, but are you sure Excel was the right tool for communicating with instruments, power point for simulating instrument front panel etc? I think LabVIEW or any other appropriate tool with Excel used for data presentation would have been better.

<comment><USER18> Not sure it was the best, but they worked very well. Powerpoint with some automation code under the hood can be absolutely brilliant in a presentation. All of a sudden your presentation isn't just a bunch of slides but you have a real instrument's control panel come to life and be usable on slide 59 (or whatever).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sold on the argument that customers even desire the ability to produce long-form text content on a touch-based device, or that it's ergonomic to do so. Touch-screens are great for reading and basic editing, but beyond that I'm skeptical; the line-of-thought that leads to "word processing... on a tablet!" seems haphazard and reactionary.

Additionally, I'm reminded of the old Dvorak-vs-Qwerty keyboard layout wars that would occasionally flare up on Slashdot. Eventually, most people realized that it was a neat idea that wasn't practical and moved on. I think that's where this is going.

<comment><USER21> > I'm not sold on the argument that customers even desire the ability to > produce long-form text content on a touch-based device, or that it's > ergonomic to do so.

Not with a tablet, but when you've got a touchscreen laptop it feels pretty natural to go between touching controls with your fingers and entering text with the keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't speak for the entire Office suite but the things happening in Excel are impressive. First, Excel 2013 has the PowerPivot engine built in. If you don't know about PowerPivot, it allows data analysis over very large data sets (think millions of rows). It has other features like pulling data from multiple sources, tabular data modeling, and others. Power View is another option that is now built into Excel 2013. And there are a bunch of plugins available like the Data Mining. They are throwing all of this into Excel for no additional cost.

You have Office 365 now, is that not something? You can get a hosted version of SharePoint now with it. Again, is this nothing?

Windows 8 has a new OneNote app available that has a very innovative interface. Again, no recognition on this?

Like I said, I don't know what's going on with the rest of the suite but I do not think this article is warranted.

<comment><USER4> Yep, and flash fill, too, which if it were introduced by Google instead would probably be hailed as evidence that the strong culture of AI at Google gives them an innovation advantage in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In my humble opinion, Touch devices are "computers for people who don't need computers" and their needs are much simpler and more generalised.

Building a full featured Office for touch is a waste of time and a waste of opportunity for Microsoft. They could have breathed new life into Office if they built a simpler touch based experience and kept the existing experience for desktops.

Eventually you would probably want those advanced features as touch devices go mainstream and replace desktops, but by designing for everybody (touch and desktop) they've ended up with a shitty experience for both.

<comment><USER24> The exact same thing could be said for Windows 8 on tablets.

<comment><USER23> Completely agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good article and agree that Microsoft has been awfully lazy about upgrading their bread and butter but i don't think Microsoft cares to appeal to the hacker / bleeding or even cutting edge community with Office. Office is meant for productivity; and despite the tablet sales figures, when you need to bang out 1000 word essay or make a pivot table you're doing it with a keyboard (maybe even a keyboard attached to a touch device)--anything else would be silly. Input by touch is not productive yet; once so, this is a valid discussion.

</comment><comment><USER26> The problem is that word is a flawed product from the outset. It is like a very poor quality version of InDesign with a writing tool clamped on. Its bad for writing and bad for design. Instead they should have users do writing in OneNote and have a separate tool for turning the documents into print versions. This would be much more natural in touch and be much easier to use.

<comment><USER16> >The problem is that word is a flawed product from the outset.

That must be why Word is the most widely used word processing a program in the world.

<comment><USER26> And its a very good word processor. But word processing isn;t really a thing. You can write, design, take notes, draw, calculate, and assemble print documents. Those are real things. What ties the functions of a word processor together are the fact that they are things traditionally done on paper. That is a legacy issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> At this point Office would be hard pressed to change anything without annoying a lot of people. We see this all the time, people complaining about lack of new features in mature products.

There are so many functions that need to be exposed via the UI that it is always going to be hard to make something that works for everyone.

Making something like word touch friendly while maintaining the right level of functionality is going to be very hard. Pages for iOS has been annoying to use due to the amount of features it lacks.

</comment><comment><USER28> There was no new functionality in 2013 useful to me so I ended up going back to an old version just because of the new UI. The layout is fine. I've always liked the ribbon UI. The problem is the entire UI is this block of whiteness dotted with icons. I had a very difficult time finding items that hadn't even moved much or at all. I never realized before this just how important the 3D-ish look of buttons/toolbars/etc was to me. The whole flat UI look isn't working well for me at all.

</comment><comment><USER29> It is possible we've reached the stage, with office productivity software, that there isn't really anything you can _do_ to one except put better cup holders on it.

<comment><USER30> As far as features are concerned, yes. But as far as usability is concerned, not by a long shot.

<comment><USER29> I am not so sure.

For me, word processors have gotten progressively stupider and harder to use since WordPerfect, circa 1996.

Excel is pretty good.

I may be biased - I've been using emacs for the last two years and keep finding more ways to use it, and far less for Office or NeoOffice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> They most likely spent 2 years porting the code to ARM. Can you imagine the decade of legacy code they had to wade through to get that done?

<comment><USER32> See, I just don't get that. We aren't talking about an OS kernel here, we're talking about a graphics toolkit. What is it about their libraries that weren't capable of running on different versions of Windows capable of running on different architecture?

Unless, of course, the issue is in porting the toolkit...

<comment><USER33> Remember the Excel calculation bug introduced in 2007? That was because of assembly code that only then got updated to 32 bit. You can be fairly sure that Office is a lot more than just a graphics toolkit.

<comment><USER32> Surely the amount of assembly code in an application like Word would be at a bare minimum? Seriously question, please don't take this for credulity...

<comment><USER33> Even then I'm not sure Office is as portable as Windows is. As far as I know it never moved outside x86.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I work at a big company. This is hell. Really. People never understanded why office upgraded it's interface since 1997.

</comment><comment><USER35> This flat design madness has to stop.

</comment><comment><USER36> Id bet that the office team have been crazy busy overhauling the product suite to deeply integrate touch. 2.5 years was not long enough, so this is a Metro skinned release of office 2010 so that the gap is less (visually) noticeable and keeps up with the change in branding.

Looks like a service pack release, 'cause it is one.

<comment><USER5> How do you "deeply integrate touch" if the UI still doesn't look touch-ready? Seems like they skimped on a pretty important.

<comment><USER37> Re-read the comment you replied to. It said that this UI doesn't look touch- ready because it's just a reskin of 2010 while they make that touch-ready version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've got Office 2010 on a machine, I use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Something I don't like is the impact this has on a 2G laptop. (I know they are all 4G now, get with the program) Office 2013 continues the grand engagement that Microsoft started on but didn't get a chance to fully consummate (in my opinion of course) with a fully integrated Enterprise. They left people like me, who want to do documents, spreadsheets, and presentations some what out in the cold.

I wonder if the Libre Office stuff can take advantage of that. I wonder if a group targeting the most resource efficient word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation builder could find success in the burnt out landscape behind the Office juggernaut. Something not 'cloud' based but simple. I'm probably just suffering from nostalgia but sometimes ...

<comment><USER14> You don't have to save things to SkyDrive though. How can you be "left out in the cold" if that functionality is unaltered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am a heavy office 2003 user. I tried Office 2007 and Office 2010. Neither lasted more than a week. The non-standard, non-intuitive and inflexible ribbon ruined Office. It has no redeeming value.

The only reason I can see for the change was marketing.

<comment><USER4> If you're not trolling, you may be interested in Jensen Harris's fairly detailed blogs posts on the rationale for the new UI [1], which I found informative.

[1] [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/default.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Excel has very useful increased functionality

(I know, I know... use R or something but shh)

<comment><USER13> Can you give some examples? I looked into upgrading from Office 2007, but it didn't seem like it was worth the hassle. Better data analysis functions in Excel would probably tip the balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am holding out for Office on iOS, which current rumors point to March 2013.

The current Office on OSX is quite nice, Excel performs really well and in Powerpoint there is this nice 3d layer editor.

Office on Tablets needs to be re-thought. What do you really do on a tablet? Looking at the use cases in the corporate world, it is not about creating complex spreadsheets from scratch. It is about viewing, filtering and data entry.

Hey, please enter your forecast numbers and send back. Hey, these are our numbers, columns B, N and Z are super important, etc.

Excel and Powerpoint are key in corporate. Word is dying, killed by Outlook.

Tablet users need to be able to open an email attachment, browse through it efficiently, maybe correct a bit and then send back.

This points to a separate Office for Tablets. MS had special Office viewer apps in the past. Apple has Keynote, etc on iOS. If it is a separate team at MS working on this, they just might have enough freedom to pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER42> The ability to collaboratively edit Word documents in realtime a la Etherpad would be huge. Our organization uses Google Docs and Workflowy because they're real-time-collaboratively-editable.

Though I use Scrivener for most things these days because it has much better modularity and change control.

</comment><comment><USER43> What are they doing? Justifying Software Assurance?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm so tired of watching Microsoft flounder. I just can't stop feeling that if they start at the top firing people and work their way down that they will be much better off.

<comment><USER32> Aside from the reduced wages bill, a round of retrenchment will probably not do wonders for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> We just "upgraded" to office 2010 at work, and....it still stinks. I admit that many Windows applications are very well designed, but the Office suite suffers from the worst of the worst -- whether it's the horrid options menus, where the menu layering goes 4-5 levels deep at times, or the complete trainwreck that is the "ribbon" and everything associated with it.

They could certainly take some design cues from products like those from Apple and Google.

<comment><USER45> I think the ribbon is great. Prior to the ribbon, Word, for example, had all of these different components, each with its own UI, all fighting among themselves for screen real estate (the UI version of how this article describes MS, I suppose). The ribbon came along with the expressed intent of unifying all of those UIs so that people could actually use all of Word's features without clobbering the space allocated for, you know, editing their documents. I think it's pretty successful at that, but you have to go back to those old versions of Office to remember just how awful it was.

Sure, it's different. It takes getting used to and that's unfortunate (if only they'd gotten it right the first time!). Ultimately, I realize that some people will never like it, and that's reasonable but I hardly think it qualifies as a "train wreck."

<comment><USER46> In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none) people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics, but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked out for me.

<comment><USER47> I think the ribbon is okay. I had just as hard a time finding things in Word/Excel 2003 as I did in Word/Excel 2007 but after a while the design started to make sense. I still had to google things but I also had that problem with the older versions.

Word 2007 worked much better for mathematical documents than 2003 and once you learned the shortcuts (it even allows some tex like functionality) short reports work out much faster than emacs+auctex or lyx while still looking generally good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> biased opinion here, i helped build Excel 2013. We did a lot of investments in making it easier to work with your data. Off the top of my head here are some of the top things we did: Flash fill : Automatically detects what you are trying to fill/parse and does it for you. Suggest Pivottables: Select a range and ask excel to aqutomatically create a Pivot for you. -Suggest charts: Excel suggest what type of charts work best with selected data. Data model - Although you need Pro Plus to use powerpivot and powerview, basic functionality that "converts excel into a database" is built in. You can combine data from multiple sources and create relationships between data. Apps for Office : A new way of programming against the productivity suite in javascript and html5 Chart enhancements: creating beautiful charts is easier and the options are more accesible.

A lot of this information is on our blog: <http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/> Twitter account: @MSEXCEL

and if your particularly inclined to data analysis and business intelligence I blast cool features and how tos on my personal account: @doppenhe

</comment><comment><USER49> "just what on earth has the Office team been doing?"

should read

"just what on earth has Microsoft been doing for the last 5 years?

</comment><comment><USER50> Breaking backwards compatibility may be ok for windows, but it's pretty much a nonstarter for office -- i still run office 97 on an old machine because of some add-ins

</comment><comment><USER51> Doing the standard "guess the conclusion" game with the title, I assumed that it would pick on the devastating changes in Visio (the ERD has gone from the prior weak state to the now disastrous), or the "move stuff around, call it a day" tactic that has been the standard for every Office release. I did not expect it to harp about tablets.

I do not expect Office to work well on tablets, and that isn't a reasonable concern for every application to pander to. A rich mouse and keyboard interface does not carry over to a meat-sausage interface without a profound rethink of every aspect of the interface. We've already seen the worst-of- both-worlds approach with metro, and it simply needs to stop.

I get that people want rich apps on their tablets. But they should be _different_ rich apps that start from the ground up built for this entirely different interface medium. Every desktop app should not be diluted to support tablets, and personally I think that has already been a detour on a backroad that Microsoft has found themselves on.

<comment><USER7> Office is a $20 Billion business with a 60% profit margin ([http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/technology/business- comput...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/technology/business- computing/28soft.html)).

There is no excuse for leaving these vectors uncovered for so long.

Though I'm pretty sure they're caught up in a painful conversion to WinRT right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I have Office 2010, is it worth getting 2013?

<comment><USER37> All that's been seen was a pre-release preview version that came with Windows RT. You can't get Office 2013 yet, it's not out.

<comment><USER53> I've been using it for a while. There was a beta version available for free, and I believe most enterprise customers have had access to the final RTM version for months. I know that some MSDN subscriptions include a production license, and I was able to purchase a consumer copy from Microsoft's Home Use program last week, as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Fantasies vs. Realities of a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://grasshoppergroup.com/fantasies-vs-realities-of-a-startup-comic/

<comment><USER2> I thought it was my eyes for a minute but the text in the black speech-bubbles is just 7 pixels high (for the lower case letters).

Readable, but the letters are blurry enough (especially since they are italics) to be noticeable.

<comment><USER3> Especially since the rest of the site uses large fonts... it's a bit better if you actually click on the image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think even this is a optimistic scenario, as more often, you'll go through even more failure (i.e. your business model didn't work, you run out of money, and so you had to abandon your first idea altogether) before you succeed.

</comment><comment><USER5> True, but as a current corporate worker I'd like to call attention to the axiom comparing a good day at work and a bad day fishing.

</comment><comment><USER6> As Edison Says: Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.</comment>


Are science and freedom incompatible? - <AUTHOR> http://mathoda.com/2009/07/short-story-the-historians-address <comment><USER2> what?</comment>


Show HN: My father's letters as a diplomatic courier from 1960-66 - <AUTHOR> http://billbrowndearmom.weebly.com <comment><AUTHOR> I built/posted this landing page for my Dad's side project based on this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10181793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10181793)

Lots of positive words that I have forwarded to my Dad :)

<comment><USER2> That was... fast!

Read those comments this morning, good on you. Best of luck to you both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a thought, in reading the PDF copy that was typewritten, it feels really nice to see the spelling mistakes, and get a sense for the original form that the letter took. I worry that in digitizing it loses a lot of the romance of the stories themselves. It could be really nice to have a book where the format includes a high resolution scan of the original letter on a white background, and then a digital copy of the text following it for reading. It would break up each letter nicely too I imagine, creating a cool rhythm. Just wouldn't want to lose the interest of the original documents.

<comment><AUTHOR> The book itself will include digital images of the actual letters, many of which are on this bizarrely thin onion skin paper. The letters themselves in some instances contain sketches that get lost in the transcripts as you suggest. Also included will be digital images of about 50 postcards and modern pictures of many of the items he bought, which he describes in the letters (i.e. Indian bronze table/tea kettle, wooding carvings from the Congo, etc...)

<comment><USER4> I believe the onion-skin paper had two advantages for messages intended for courier transport: it was really light, so more messages could be carried per courier (this became even more important for air-mailed communications; more messages per plane!); and it was also, for high-security messages, more easily folded up and concealed. (You might guess it was more easily destroyed under threat, too, but it's probably not—onion-skin paper is stronger than it looks!)

Oddly enough, in the military-fiction book I have on my lap at the moment, one of the characters has a rolled-up bit of onion-skin paper tucked into a hidden compartment of their jacket with a set of recent codes and ciphers on it. Similar idea.

<comment> david-given Not long ago you could buy special air-mail letters. These were thin blue paper, with an envelope front printed on one side and a gummed trip on the other. You'd write your letter on the back, fold them up and stick them down, and post at reduced rates (because they were guaranteed to be light, having no enclosures).

I haven't seen one for ages. I hope they haven't vanished completely; they were a really good idea...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting read

I used to write letters to my grandfather regularly then the telephone came

I wonder how the story will be on a time fast forwarded to 100 years. Perhaps whatsapp chats on an old phone? Now a days everything we do, we share it on fb/instagram

</comment><comment><USER6> He keeps mentioning the various girls he is meeting. Made me curious. Did he end up marrying overseas? Or was that all just for fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> He specifically got out of the service because he wanted to settle down and start a family, and he didn't think it was likely to happen for him with his schedule at the time. It remains one of the more pivotal decisions of his life. After the service he relocated to Miami and met my Mom (married with 5 boys).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great. I wish it was a more of a thing in our society for people to keep their letters as well as create oral histories.

</comment><comment><USER8> fyi, your letters are marked backwards. the helsinki link takes you to calcutta and vice versa.

Otherwise, very exciting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I enjoyed letting him know people outside of the family took interest in his letters...I am not sure he believed me - ha.

<comment><USER9> Sent it to a few people, and they all love the letters!</comment></comment></comment>


Man Charged as Operator of Online Market for Illegal Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/nyregion/operator-of-online-market-for-illegal-drugs-is-charged-fbi-says.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Well that was not entirely unexpected, with the Freedom Hosting details coming out it was pretty clear that the FBI put out a major effort to deanonymize Tor and once they have done that, its just a matter of following the packets to get to the goods.</comment>