Slashdot Mirror
Office 12 Exposed
damieng writes "The Programmers Developer Conference (PDC) has unveiled
the user interface for Microsoft Office 12. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X the menus now appear to operate more like a tab popping-out the right toolbar instead of a sub-menu."
I wonder if they're going to codename it Office Vista, in keeping with common versioning practices.
Four seconds after the article is posted, the site is down...
Is it really too much to ask that the editors use caching services as default?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
thats ugly looking, seriously. Although I'm not found of the OSX interface either.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
...but it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window.
The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river.
But this is an interesting trend: Apple has monopolized the headlines recently. ArsTechnica is all about Apple, Slashdot can't seem to get enough of them, and now Microsoft is emulating its Apple product?
What's next, Intel Processors branded with "Apple Outside" stickers on them?
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
anyone know where this is mirrored or can you put it up?
This is important because Office is often one of Microsoft's first vehicles for new GUI themes and functionality. It's also influential, many Windows developers will try to emulate the style Microsoft introduces with Office - presumably because it's known to users, and they consider it modern. (Too bad the site is already slashdotted.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Why do fancy graphics always get higher priority than usability?
Coming soon: Office Nano - productivity tools for managing post-it notes.
What's the problem with menu bars the way we know them? It's always the same... we get used to something and in the next version there's a brand new way to do the same thing, forcing us to get used again.
I wonder how big this thing is going to be. I mean, this is probably going to be the biggest, most bloated office product on the market. I am not knocking its features, but just looking at the system requirements for the previous Office XP, 2003, 2000, etc., this will be one BLOATED office product.
Doesn't it stand for "Professional Developer's Conference" ?
Am I the only one who's still on the standard Windows interface? I've never liked the themes that Windows XP included, really..
;)
I hate the way they design products nowadays. It's like the programmers are bound to watch Toy Story before they decide the looks of the shell?
Hopefully this version won't require a 256 MB video card, or else I'd have to switch to a non-interlaced and edged font, like System.
Full Tilt
It is similiar to an old friend. It gives me a comfortable feeling... knowing that everything is going to be all right, and the world is NOT coming to an end.
Grandpa: "See kids? The ocean levels are not raising, the ozone layer seems to flux from time to time (but it will still be around for many years), and Microsoft is still ripping off ideas from everyone else without even attempting to innovate."
and looked at it for 3 seconds and moved on with my life. as MS programs progress, it looks prettier and prettier (with obvious inspiration from the competition).
/.ed already
I gues is hosted on a beta server too
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
It looks like they used Microsoft Access 12 for their server's database.
http://pdc.xbetas.com.nyud.net:8090/?page=o12previ ew1
Here's another site with the images:
y 1015.aspx
http://bink.nu/photos/news_article_images/categor
[)amien
...here.
>> "Office 12 Exposed ... more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X ..."
So... Exposé?
of making sure that the UI for their #1 application never ever matches that of the OS. I can't understand how anybody can think this is a good idea. But seeing how Apple do the same thing, I guess somebody thinks it is a good idea. Though I don't hear anybody scream at Apple for plagiarising Microsofts ideas.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Disclaimer: I don't know how to put that link in as some text atm, but whatever.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
I'm sure Microsoft put some time and effort into this, but I don't like it.
Its hard to put my finger on it, but its inconsistent (button size, text placement, icon usage, drop-shadows, etc.) and asymetrical.
Just IMHO.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
For a while, we've seen many complaints about MS Office becoming more bloated and increasingly expensive without adding significant value to the customer. Now, MS is coming out with a new version of office that again offers no reason to upgrade, and now they change the interface? This seems to me like change for change's sake--they're grasping at straws to make it look like you need to upgrade.
What they are doing is taking an already extremely complex piece of software, and suddenly changing how to do everything. Suddenly, switching to OpenOffice seems like less of a change than upgrading to the next version of MS Office.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
why does it sound kinky
do we get to see a toolbarbutton-slip
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Office 12 screenshots
Even Less of the screen actually showing my document! Hooray progress!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Long time ago I my job was end user support for a our company office. It was when Microsoft switched from Winword 1.1 to Winword 2.0. If I would have got a dollar for ever question of the kind "once there was a menu/function/whatever in this menu, where is it now" then I would be rich now!
:-)
Well, luckily that job is history and I can watch the chaos from far away.
But of course, if you can't offer new functions you need to change the user interface so that it at least looks new.
Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X
And everyone knows this is the most important part of the new UI *roll-eyes*
Unfortunately I can't comment on anything else because it's been slashdotted. However these tabbed pop-up things sound like they're a change for the sake of a change. That is bad. Making changes to the UI can be good when they improve functionality and ease of use. Making changes to the UI so they can sell yet another copy of your favourite bloatware office program is not good.
Word has a lot of elements of a UI that are good in theory. Now if only they could work on their implementation of these elements.
My first impression: very crowded screens. Screen confusion taken a step further.
does MS insist on "revolutionizing" UI's? With all of the importance developers place on standardizations of code, why do they feel that does not also apply to UI design? Even my grandmother is capable of using a menu bar, and every OS has some variant of that.
Kent Simon Multitheft Auto
Fellow Cowards !
/ /xbetas.com
This site seems like a hoax site for me. It was not hosted by microsoft at all...
Check this http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:
I'm not talking about the document format this time but visual standards. Every single major Microsoft product seems to look different nowadays. Seems funny that they actually expect people to use the API et al when they don't use it themselves!
Personally I like having applications be consistant. Even Linux with GTK and QT differences are quite consistant. It seems for Microsoft autohiding the menu or turning it a bright shade of blue wasn't enough. Now Microsoft are throwing out the perfectly good menu system for something that takes literally and it seems constantly a fifth of the screen space. For someone who refuses to use any browser other than Firefox simply because with Firefox I can squish every single button and bar and menu onto one small line, that's deeply offensive for me.
Besides this you need to move the mouse from one end of the screen to the other on the larger dimension every single time in this stupid tabbed interface.
Ah well it's Microsoft, the company responsible for some of the worst interfeces known to man.
"We hit true WYSIWYG and haven't seen a real change since,"
Not with Word we haven't. I still can't print the exact same Word file on two different printers and get the same pagination. Thank God we're switching to PDF-based prepress systems to sort of eliminate this problem. If I'm in a rush and this problem occurs, I tell the support staff to just fudge the layout (insert carriage returns, screw with margins, whatever) to make it work so I can get something out the door.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
...I am so turning my phone off when we roll over to this version of MS Office. The cries of pain from people in the offices when they try to make sense of this new (borked!) UI will be horrid. Dibs not retraining them or pushing for OpenOffice which will keep the existing UI!
I ate your fish.
So how much space does office actually take up these days? Granted it's not that important anymore, but none the less the I challenge anyone to point out a absolutely indispensable feature in word that wasn't allready present in word 2.0.
That being said, I do think theres alot of practical features in Excel which probably have been in added within the last ten years.
But I guess it's missing the point; Think about the many companies which have quite a bit of their core business application built on ms-office and VBA(and sometimes just excel sheets). That probably wouldn't be the case if office wasn't packed with all sorts of obscure features. That keeps businesses using office, but on the other hand it probably keeps them from upgrading the latest version as it would most likely break their spaghetti coded vba app's.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery .
This looks more like a parody of aqua though
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
What happened to all the 'clean lines' of the windows interface?
This is like someone mixed Mac OS X Aqua with LSD!
My bet? This is an optional interface. This is not the standard interface. There are people in my office who *refuse* to use OpenOffice.org. Not because it isn't an MS product, but because it doesn't work *exactly* like Office 2000.
There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that they'll use *that* nastiness.
Doesn't MS realize that the majority of business users will be using the same old Windows 2000 interface? Doesn't MS realize that if they cut that out, the *natural* upgrade path will be something linux XFce w/OpenOffice.org?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
That interface is completely different.
...
Which means that you can choose to upgrade to Office 12 and retrain or your users.
Or you can sidegrade to OpenOffice which has a much more familiar layout to Office users.
Wonder which one will be cheaper to do?
Looking at the screenshots I see bling being put before usability. Whilst the concept is nice - having a single wide toolbar is like the old Wordstar help pages - how usable will it be? I can see even more mousing will be required...
In many ways it will be better than having multiple toolbars, but I can see instances where you'll be switching between 'Writing' and 'Tables' or whatever all the time, which will be annoying.
Compare to, e.g., Pages' inspector and side panels - whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word, the interface is pretty good for the most part. The tabs at the top of the inspector are kinda the same as the tabs in Office 12 I suppose, it just comes down to implementation. Certainly with a single floating inspector that isn't too wide, it is much easier to mouse around it than if it was the width of the screen!
Knowing Microsoft
Who cares how the menus pop? I'm satisfied with the way twm displays menus.
Seriously though. I'm much more interested in an application that doesn't get in my way and that doesn't crash. MS Word has an appalling track record with respect to stability and I wouldn't be surprised if it still dies on you every now and then. Do you know the feeling when you edited a document during that crucial hour you were productive and then boooom! word dies and you wonder in your rage -just a very short stupid moment- why Osama doesn't do anything about that! Somehow, the color of menus just doesn't matter in those cases.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I gotta say it's better than most people here are giving them credit for. It takes a few days to get comfortable with using the same system and once in a while I'd go hunt for a new command, but it has the added benefit of not having to go to a menu every time I wanted to do something; sounds trivial, but in the long run it's quite useful.
Is it a compelling enough reason to upgrade? I can't really comment on that, but the actual UI is definitely an improvement over what used to be.
Yea, let's make it look and work totally different from the way everyone is used to and even charge them for it! Do they really think that everyone is going to rush out and buy this when what they have already, works fine? Do they really think that everyone is going to spend the time to learn it all over again? Make it better, not different.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Actually, that might be the reason they're making such drastical changes of the interface. Making sure that people get used to the new way of doing things before the switch to OOo gains real momentum. Which would make it it harder for Joe Uswr to "make the switch" at a later time.
"Will wank off Linus Torvaldsen for fame. "
perhaps you meant Linus Torvalds
or maybe you just have a thing for scandinavians....
[Rant] Is it so freaking hard to post the link as a Coral Cache link???
i ew1
You just take the existing url www.test.com/stuff.htm and add ".nyud.net:8090"
www.test.com.nyud.net:8090/stuff.htm
Or for this site:
http://pdc.xbetas.com.nyud.net:8090/?page=o12prev
That's it! It's easy and would let sooo many more people see the article.[/rant]
Where do you see brushed metal anywhere in any of those screenshots? If by "Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X" you actually mean "Silver and shiney with a vague resemblance to every other shiny silver-based application out there" then you can just say so in your post without making baseless accusations like that one.
-Julius
I think you meant "forcing us to get used to it again," but I like the Freudian slip. Microsoft is using you, me, the lot of us, through vendor lock-in, childish marketing postures ("we won't support the open document format no matter what, screw Massachussets"), and bundling agreements that would make even the Mafia jealous (OEM's prices per-unit prices much higher if they don't sell 100% windows).
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
. . .requiring 95% of its user base to relearn everything they already know. . .
.did I just describe the state of word processors, or the state of enterprise software in general?
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the reason not to change to OpenOffice is to avoid retraining.
. .
They're starting to run out of chrome and tailfins. Now they're starting to put tits on the squid.
KFG
If they can't figure out what goes where while they are rearranging the save dialog, what hope do the end users have of finding things.
Only ONE post and their server is toast!
Oh Noes! They're actually running Linux.
version that cures sleep disorders for whole groups at a time. Otherwise known as Power Point.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
And this is from one screenshot alone. Totally cluttered, horribly inconsistent and bordering on unusable.
And here's the coral cache link for it....
i mages/category1015.aspx
http://bink.nu.nyud.net:8090/photos/news_article_
I have to say I really like it. Of course, I'm not a rabid anti-MS basement-dweller, so that might be the difference right there.
Is it coming out in 2012 than?
I'm looking at it from behind an OSX machine, and to me it doesn't look like OSX at all. It's plain old Windows style with a few new features (the Save dialog looks rather different). But for the rest they cramped the toolbars in the top of the window. Now that happens under OSX/Cocoa as well frequently, but the toolbars of Safari and Mail are a lot less crowded. For the rest it looks like they flattened every 3D aspect out of XP.
The primary reason computer-illiterate people can't figure out their computers (Windows ones, anyway) is because the interface keeps changing around with each new version. A multi-billion dollar company with vast amounts of money invested can't figure that out?
-brain
One of the screenshots is that of a signature pad (no, not the digital kind). I wonder, how secure do they intend to market this as? Since it's just an image it'd be trivial to lift it and drop it into another document, or to edit the document after the signature is applied.
I use Excel for 8 hours a day at my office and what I love most about it is that it is amazingly simple. You click the icon and it opens instantly, and from there the UI is great in my opinion. Looking at these toolbars, I can't imagine I'll like that new version. With a program like Excel, I just want the bare essentials on the screen and a ton of space for big spreadsheets. I'm sure the toolbar will be customizable, but will I be able to get back the tiny buttons that Excel uses now? If not, I hope the IT department doesn't upgrade my machine when this new version comes around.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
Now that microsoft is hooked on brushed metal, Mac OS X can move to something saner like the theme used in Tiger Mail or iTunes 5.0.
It is also amazing how microsoft UI engineers can twist the aqua/bruhsed metal themes into something that is both ugly and not usable.I bet Steve was counting on that as well.
The only real feature I want to see is 'Paste Unformatted Text' by default. I can't stress how annoying it is that word keeps the friggin format of the copied text when I try to paste. There may be a way to do this already, if so please I seek your advice. (And yes I know you can go Paste Special -> Unformatted text, but I want it by default when I hit Ctrl-V). Oh if you know how to do this in OpenOffice too I would appreciate that as well.
(With apologies to Poochy)
"Yo! I'm Excel! Yo I'm soooo down with you! I take calculations...TO THE EXTREME!!!!"
I don't think I've ever seen a more in-your-face interface *ever*. Interfaces are supposed to get out of the way and let you get the job done with minimal fuss...this takes it to the complete opposite.
It seems clear to me that Microsoft is really honestly losing it...their two cash cows, which drive the *entire* freaking company, are being pimped. They're being given cheezy makeovers and being pushed in your face in some desperate attempt to stay in the forefront of your mind, because what you're *doing* is not important, it's that you're using WINDOWS and OFFICE that's important.
TO THE XTREEEEEMMMME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The ONLY thing that I want in new versions of office is kick ass protection. Make the user jump through hoops, and stop all but the most determined users from pirating their software.
Only then will people start to realize that there are GREAT free alternatives.
You must be new here. It's always Windows fault.
I'm curious as to what the guys at OpenOffice.Org are making of this. Will they use any of MS's features in their product or anything of the sort?
The submenu's popping out side bars instead of menu's thing is annoying. They've been trying to get this to catch on the last few versions of office with the file->new and some other menu's. It's a stupid waste of time. It might be popular with people who've never used a computer, but when I do file->new in Word, I expect a blank word document, not a sidebar or a wizard.
And as usual, they manage to not only steal the Apple look but do everything to cheapen it and make it look as ugly as possible. Is there really nobody within the Microsoft moloch who has some feeling for style?
Good Gawd that's ugly! Well, it's not like I expected anything different from Microsoft. They just can't seem to get UI design right...
Sorry Windows folks, but Open Office has become the new standard. Wake up!
Make the antipiracy 'features' much, much stronger.
And sue people who pirate the software.
Please?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Or a better word processor.
Wait, when Microsoft apes Apple, it's a "balant ripoff"... so what is it when free Linux apps ape proprietary Windows-only apps like Office, Photoshop, etc.?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
at Toys R Us
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
What, so application developers can put even bigger, more intrusive sidebars?
Mayber they'll want to add more layers of tabs to the apps, or even better yet, tabs + sidebar + statusbar + searchbar.
Hey I just described Firefox and Mozilla!
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I challenge anyone to point out a absolutely indispensable feature in word that wasn't allready present in word 2.0
...
I agree, but I'll raise the ante -- Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS had all the indispensable features, and was remarkably easy to use. Even today I sometimes miss it
-kgj
-kgj
That is so totally worth the $300 or so it'll cost to upgrade!!
DAMN but this will boost my productivity.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's just Microsoft marketing...
Windows 95/NT was marketed on the premise that it eliminated all the confusion of having different UI's for every text based application.
Windows XP was marketed on the premise that the user could customize the desktop to their suiting, and developers could provide custom skins for their applications.
Now we have completed a whole cycle, and now every developer provides their own GUI style for their application.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
here is your new ui to emulate.
I find that when MS first shows new products, they usually have garish UI as to guage peoples reaction to it, but ultimately, MS usually cleans things up and implements the UI nicely.
After seeing early beta and previews of Visual Studio 2005, I was appalled at how garish and unsavoury the UI was in that application. The menus had this aweful gradient fill on them and looked out of place, and the rest of the interface was ugly and simply crap. Even the new dock window overlays were poorly implemented. A year later, and the current Beta 1 of VS2005 looks very clean and more unified.
Same goes with Longhorn where an eraly beta was just garish.
I think MS actually listens to your bitching and simply offers these previews in order to test the waters and see how people feel about them. If you don't like them, bitch loudly and it will change.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Hmm, I've had no troubles w/ Word documents printing. 3mb or 40mb, they all print just fine on all of our various HPs and Xerox' Now PDF from Acrobat, well now..that's a whole nother story. For every mb over 3mb, add another minute onto your print job. I've got faculty printing 300 page research papers in pdf format, yet only the first two pages will come out before the job dies.
What makes the existing Office versions (see caveats below) so useful is their extremely high level of hackability, with very little effort. Both from OLE and the internal Visual Basic for Applications (now Visual Studio .Net for Applications or some such nonsense), the entire (almost) document model is addresable in nice easy to bite chunks, and just about any task can be automated.
Aside from providing income to folks such as myself, it permits many of the limitations of the systems to be exceeded.
So, will these new "chunky toolbars" and property panes, and so on, be addressable using the current methods, in other words, does my current VBA/VS.Net code work... and can I leverage the new features?
With Office 2002 (aka 10 or XP), Microsoft introduced "Task Panes". These things include the XML interface, a substitute for WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" and a number of other useful things. But it is barely accessible to the automation/document model, and not extensible at all (except for the XML stuff, but that's another show). I would love to be able to add custom items to those "Property Screens" and add my own menu-like toolbars, to give my customers features that are (a) more usable (assuming that this stuff is indeed more usable, I'm not sure yet), and (b) looks like the out-of-the-box features (but work better).
Design for Use, not Construction!
I can see benefits for complete newbs using this interface and btw OO.org already does something similar with context driven menubars (sometimes it does get annoying when you have to click that little left-pointing triangle on the right hand side to get to a button).
Anyway. MS wants a completely new UI to lock all new users into it so they won't know how to use anyone else's UI and so they won't be able to go back to previous versions, e.g. at another company that uses Office 2k on win2k
Publisher is WYSIWYG, but *definitely* not Word. Not only can you not necessarily print the document with the same formatting on another printer, but Word will do reflows based on what printer driver you have, what you selected, version differences between computers, and all sorts of other things.
WYSIWYG is a terrible way to do documents anyway. You shouldn't be spending time making it look right, you should spend it writing the silly thing. I encourage people to look into things like LaTeX whenever I have the chance. It just works so much better for anything more than a quick note or memo. You get consistent and proper layout every time on better software than Word.
Word processor requirements haven't really changed since WordStar. All most people need to do is write something up quickly, and print it. If you're doing layout in a word processor, you've already screwed up. That is not what they are good at, and that's why publishers use things like PDF, TeX, etc.
I bet the designers at Apple are both proud and furious about this. It is a blatant knock-off of their design style, but it will now be on 100,000,000 computers instead of 8,000,000.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
I think the requirements of word processor users HAVE changed over the last 5 years. Your WYSIWYG comment brings something to mind - how many people still use word processors to print documents? Personaly, I use Word almost every day, but almost never print documents with it - either I'm reading a word doc on my PC or creating one and emailing it to someone else. Heck, even my business school professors would rather me email them homework rather than print it out and "manually" turn it in.
This has more to do with the printer description for the default printer that's selected than anything else -- printable area, installed fonts (in the printer), etc. This is why PDFs work better, since they're totally rendered beforehand to the PDF printer/distiller description. Acrobat can then print to the printer and tell it to ignore things like printable area, scaling, etc.
Stop making Frontpage!
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Some of you Microsoft apologists will disagree with the above, but you can easily verify this. Try to do a print preview in Word before you set up a printer on the machine. It won't let you! Why? Because they need to know the hardware to know what the hardcopy will look like. True WYSIWYG is device independent, i.e. they print it to match the on-screen look not the other way around as Microsoft does.
Why is this important? Amongst many other reasons, we need to know when we email someone a document that it will print out on the other guy's printer (most probably a different model than ours) exactly as it was meant to. Anything less is pathetic at this point.
AC
They really studied the common user which uses about 1% of all the options this kind of suite offers. Those users often really use there own style in a document in such a way that you can call it a file type. And they want it saved in a MS word document, because that is the way they find it back.
Clearly a feature and not a bug.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Microsoft is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Look, if they don't change the user interface and just keep on adding more and more high level features (those not used by the average user) to the product open source advocates will say that there is no point in upgrading, the UI is the same as it's always been and most of the new features aren't of value to the average user so switch to Open Office.
If Microsoft does change the UI to try and improve usability and give things a bit of a makeover you say that moving to the new version will require retraining so why not move to Open Office.
Microsoft will be damned by the open source crowd either way. I, for one, am glad that they are trying something new. As others have noted, Office has been mostly stagnant for the average Office user for several versions now (with the exception of Outlook). It's nice to see the UI get an overhaul and perhaps it will end up working better than it did in previous versions.
I fail to believe the current UI for Office types of programs (and let's face it, they are all mostly the same) is the be all, end all of interfaces for these kinds of programs. There is always room for improvement and now that Apple has some serious momentum and open source is continuing to slowly eat away at Microsoft's user base, they would be crazy not to make some changes.
A bit, yes. OTOH, it looks better organized, so I'll need to hunt through menus less to access common features.
Seems to me this interface is different enough it would almost require re-training for many users (I'm guessing the syllabuses are being cranked out by the one-week training class industry right now)? And, considering the retraining, what about the costs? Isn't this exactly the argument MS used against MA's decision to move to Open Documents? Really, looking at this interface, I wouldn't even consider unleashing it on my parents, who are already confused enough by the current Office Suite interface (chevrons in the pulldown menus, etc.)
As another poster kindly noted, I screwed up my timeline. The point, minus the timeline, was simply that using metallic backgrounds very much preceded Apple, so much so that it was the first use of the BACKGROUND tag.
I'm going to give you credit for this expression, which I like better than "jump the shark." Since it's got the word "tits" in it, it's not going to go TV or NY Times mainstream any time soon.
It's nice to see someone trying something different. It will probably be an improvement in usability.
The only issue I see is the background -- behind the WYSIWYG page. It is totally messing with my eyes. It causes optical interference like a zebra.
I have noticed that they've tended to group common tasks together on tabs which strikes me as a good thing. I hated the toolbar clutter and when I needed to go after some feature I didn't use regularly, it was a pain to hunt and peck around the menus. It seems to me that the grouping of tasks may eliminate a lot of hunt and peck.
Surely you must be kidding.
Hey! I just pasted those images into my project, how come they don't show up on the printout!?! Oh, wait... Now they've disappeared from the screen as well. I guess it's WYDGIWYDS - What You DON'T GET Is What You DON'T SEE.
Hrm. Maybe if I paste them in again and print it out before I save it. Great! I got it on the printout. Woops. But they disappeared on the screen again. I have no idea what acronym to use now.
But I DO know that I'll be switching to PageMaker or Quark.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
>> Word isn't WYSIWYG...
.02
I've never seen WORD not print exactly what I have on the screen. At least not in the last 5 years.
Now I agree, if I go from one print driver to another, or a PC with a different font or different version of Office -- then document portability comes into play. But this other PC shows on the screen what it will print.
That's why I use my PDF Print driver (win2pdf) and print my Word document as a PDF file if I plan on e-mailing it or giving it to someone else to print.
OpenOffice has this same problem of document portability.
My
If I didn't have to deal with resumes and IT clueless HR people I would be with Wordpad.
If MS was really interested in taking us forward, the save dialog would be the first thing to disappear. There's no reason not to just keep changes logged on disk and move to a commit/checkpoint model. Document recovery does it anyway. Save continually confuses new users as anyone who's introduced their parents to PCs will know.
To have the save dialog, looking ridiculously complex, as two of the top dozen pictures of their new UI is obscene.
With this amount of effort, it's a shame MS isn't serious about innovating & improving our experience of their systems.
Will it run under GNU/Linux ;-) ?
Not really. A Windows XP Theme is used for all applications that use the standard windows components. Just like a KDE Theme is used for all applications that use the KDE API for their interface.
Of course everybody can write their own set of widgets (and way to many people do), but that was the case with 95 too.
Whatever happened to OneNote? I for one use it to take notes during all of my classes, and I don't even have a Tablet PC (Speaking of which, why aren't we seeing any more of those either?). There really aren't very many programs that are like it... And it's more or less the only reason I still use any Office apps.
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
Yes, device independent because you should CERTAINLY be able to expect that whether you print on a 48" Plotter, a 8.5" X 11" ink jet, or an HP 3X5 picture printer that the output will be EXACTLY the same.
They moved away from the legacy bar and toolbar paradim and merged them together. This implementation is better than before as the old menus were absolutely horrible to use with a mouse. The longer the menu was, the more difficult it was to use. Their solution this problem was the menu hiding system and we all know how useful that is. The current system incorporates the use of Fitts' Law to make it easier to use than before. The larger the target, the easier it is to hit.
The different functions of the buttons are clearly grouped eg. the paragraph group suggest that using any of the buttons and settings contained in the group will only apply to paragraphs.
I believe the different icon sizes are used because supposed to better according to Fitts' Law. Larger targets are easier to hit so the more commonly used buttons are made larger. Since space is limited, the buttons that are less frequently used take up less space.
I think the text on the buttons serve two tasks. The first is to convey the purpose button may provide eg. the picture button will let you insert a pic of some sort. The second purpose is Fitts' Law. It provides a larger area to target making it easier to hit.
It may not look symmetrical and consistent but these changes in user interface make the program a whole lot more usable from a usability point of view.
The link below has pictures as well as describes why they make the UI changes.
s ep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx
Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office "12" Core Applications:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/
"we're switching to PDF-based prepress systems to sort of eliminate this problem"
Now there's a point. Why can't stuff like Word and Acrobat match their pagination to the screen pages? Fly pages and covers mean that the page number on the index page of a document doesn't match with the screen page number - not great at all.
Can't they ignore non-numbered pages, or stick some kind of smart-linking in there?
This is why OS X's use of a PDF-based graphics model was such a good idea. What you see on screen is how it's going to look when you print it (further solidifying the presence of Macs in the publishing industry). The Windows graphics model in 2005 is just embarrassing.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It would be great if there were some details about the list of new features and big advances of this brand new office suite.
If such a list is short when compared to the noise of the ringing bells of advertisement, then I would have called it Office 11 Plus reather than 12.
Infact menu fading effects and arragement, colours, skins and the likes come as eye candy.
We'd need some more brain candy instead!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Presumably this is also the Avalon-skinned version of office?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I guaran-frickin'-tee our IT guy will get at least one call from a peeved user that can't 1) get Windows to recognize their inked signature or 2) get Sharpie off their LCD monitor.
I hereby propose "Strauser's Rule of UI Design":
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
IIRC, in the early days, one of the main reasons Windows gained momentum was the standardized way that users interacted with applications.
Have they forgotton this or are they just stupid?
I for one will be sticking with Office 97. At least it looks like a standard application...
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
The web is heading towards less 'standardized' UI with the benefit of technologies like RSS and CSS. The belief that there is one way to display information held with print, and while it offers a logical place for things to some inexperienced users, it's static nature is yielding to customizable interfaces that are suited for specific purposes and users. Software has been following slowly with 'customizable' toolbars, but still lacks the flexibility that anyone other than a basic user would benefit from. It is time that software be more than skinnable.
For decades Microsoft has been telling developers what they consider to be best practices: color combinations, window behaviors, button actions, etc. However, they contradict them with their own software. The best example is the file open/save dialog. They tell developers to use the one built into the OS so every app is consistant. Yet with each release of Office they use custom dialogs so they don't match any other.
So should they keep changing the UI? Maybe. But they frustrate users when every app on the same system acts differently. Generally the desktop should determine the UI characteristics and the apps should share them. Upgrade the desktop and the UI for all apps gets updated. The hodge-podge of user interfaces presented by Windows confuses and frustrates users.
The first rule of good user interface design is to be consistant.
Developers: We can use your help.
I also like the strange setup where at the top it says 'Desktop -> Pat -> Documents', which somehow translates to C:\Users\Pat\Documents below.
Huh?
I might give a damn about the product if they strip the activation "feature." If not, I am sticking with Open Office 2.
Thank god Microsoft has finally given me some eye candy. Those standard menus that have been used are too boring with everything lined up in list form. I want a whole bunch of differently sized buttons, in a range of bright colors, so that I can personalize my writing experience. I want to be able to have buttons for every little thing and for the whole set of buttons to change based on context. Word processing needs more excitement!
Not with Word we haven't. I still can't print the exact same Word file on two different printers and get the same pagination.
That has nothing to do with WYSIWYG. The question is, when you change your printer preference, does the pagination of what you're seeing on screen change to what will be printed? If WYS on the screen is WYG on the printer, that's WYSIWYG. If it doesn't change, then there's a problem.
Search Box Magnifying Glass - Mac: left side, Windows: right side
Can anyone come up with any others?
Someone really needs to do a double-blind sometime. Get some screenshots of an unannounced Apple theme, and some of an unannounced Microsoft theme, and see whether people masturbate over the Apple one and shit on the Microsoft one when they don't know which is which.
This is an excellent point, and most here know it to be true deep in their hearts.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The worst thing I've found about Office is the appalling modal dialog windows for common functions. Not one of them is resizable. The font/style selector dialogs are the worst culprits. At times, it's downright unusable when you have to apply and design a lot of new styles. I can only see one screenshot with a dialog window and it's not resizable. I don't have great hopes for this new version.
Yeah right. The same people who still switch the Windows XP theme to "Classic Windows" swore they'd never give up their precious Program Manager in Windows 3.1 when Windows 95 came along.
:)
Those people will use what is given to them, especially in a corporate environment.
And it's those people that keep holding back GUI progress, in my opinion. They're usually also the same people who couldn't program their VCR.
In all fairness there is more than one application for publishing on Windows. You can use PDF if you like, Post Script, OpenOffice, etc. While I'm assuming you meant MS Office, don't discount the multitude of options. I used to use a Mac, they can be useful, but the user base has far too many zealots (even than *nix) for my taste.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Not being a UI demo, I would like to here from others who actually saw the demo.
From what I can infer, they have disregarded standard menubars entirely and moved to some tab switching toolbars. This gave the designers more room for icons, more varied button sizes, and not everything has to be described in two or three short words. This gives better visual destinction, which would be good for beginners and probably not bad for experts.
While tabbed UIs do imply hidden UI controls, so do drop down menus, so I won't complain there. My concern is that you have now created a moded UI. If I'm writting a document, and want to insert a URL, in drop down menus I click the insert menu and the URL menu item to get my URL dialog and am returned immediately to my previous writing context. With tabbed toolbars, it would seem I need an additional click to return to my "Write" mode toolbar. I'm sure I could just type while in "Insert" mode, but I'm more likely to need a "Write" mode function before I need another insert. This UI tends to favor a moded interaction: write my document first, then return later to do my inserts (tables, illustrations, text blocks, URL links, etc.).
The part I really don't understand is the second tab highlight. In one Word screen shot, you see a Write mode toolbar (with blue highlight on "Write") and a purple "Picture Tools" over "Picture Tools" highlight. In another screenshot, also in Write mode, the item "Contoso Legal" is highlighted in the mode bar in nearly the same blue. In an Excel screenshot, there no mode hightlight, but a green "Chart Tools" over the last three items "Create", "Layout", and "Format". I assume these "titled" items are somehow context specific, but are they other modes or drop down menus? And in either case, why do they need so much color to draw attention during other modes?
Also I notice each screenshot has first File, then a separator, undo and redo buttons, followed by the modes. Is there a mixing of UI models here?
Anm
kind of disappointing really.
You'd think they could have come up with their own ideas.
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M.S. Word is a /Word Processor/ not a layout program. If you're that worried about carriage returns, margins, etc., you shouldn't be using Word.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Professional Developers Conference!
NOT
"Programmers Developer Conference"
What exactly is a "Programmers Developer"? That doesn't even make sense...
Hurray editors!
http://brandonbloom.name
Not even that, but I'm confused by how it says on the one hand "C:\Users\Pat\Documents" (which is nice, I'll admit, and much more straightforward than the Documents and Settings thing they've got now), while on the other hand the files being shown in the window above are listed as in Desktop\Pat\Documents. Umm...?
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?
Only one of which you would feasibly use Word to print using. Seriously, the comment wasn't saying that a plotter should be the same as a 3X5 printer but damn, who uses word to print pictures? That's not what it's for.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
While I do think you have a very valid point, I think you're maybe taking it to an extreme.
If you were printing on a 3x5 picture printer or a 48" plotter, one would hope that you know what you're doing and you've got the right document size.
And I think that's what this argument is missing. Seriously... no mention of document size... If I choose A4, it should print out on any printer using A4 paper stock and should have the same margins, same line breaks, same pagination, etc. that I see on my screen.
Well, I've always thought it was somewhat retarded; most people work on a document in portrait-mode, and the monitor is laid-out in landscape-mode. The horizontal waste-space, of course, is used in some other applications (example: photoshop), and is also used by the OS (application-switching, etc.) - but both Windows and OS X default to putting their application-switcher on the bottom of the screen (ie - more infringement on portrait-mode documents). Menu-bars infringe on portrait-mode editing. So do button-bars.
This was one reason why I liked the Macintosh way of integrating all application menus with the system menu bar. That, and the fact that it was adjacent to a screen-edge, easier to target (I read Ars Technica too).
The only sensible approach I ever saw to non-typesetting word processing, was the monitor that flipped 90 degrees, to allow you to work in portrait-mode.
Of course, professional typesetters work in landscape mode, because they do two pages at once, they're doing the pre-binding layout.
But for these two exceptions; the rest of us are forced to edit portrait-mode scrolling documents, on a landscape-mode monitor and OS GUI. And every revision of word that comes out, takes more and more vertical space away from the document, as more and more menus and button bar noise is added.
Sure - you CAN customize Word to display button bars as vertical pallets. But that doesn't answer the menu problem.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Just like on Windows XP, Documents is listed on your desktop (try clicking the up arrow on a save dialog enough, you'll get to the dekstop).
On XP, Desktop -> My Documents takes you to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\, the user probably doesn't see their username on the desktop, but clicking on Desktop -> Documents probably takes them to "Pat's Documents".
I do agree, \Users\ is a better name for the directory than "Documents and Settings".
Maybe Microsoft have borrowed Gnome's "desktop == $HOME" idea. This would be pretty nice, I find it much easier to explain this concept to people, than explaining to them that all their files are actually hidden in a mysterious location that is one level _above_ their desktop.
A shame... I was hoping for something that looked at least a little like the Office of the Future on this site: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/office.h tml
It is amazing how some of the Office 12 grabs look like OS X... has there ever been a case of something new from Apple looking like something old from Microsoft? I'm racking my brains.... (ouch)
Don't be an asshat. Obviously, there are limits to what can be achieved, but documents should be identical to the extent possible. Why is it acceptable that I can often print a PDF to two different printers and get essentially the same output, but when I print to those same two printers with Word the output will be nowhere near identical? If the two printers are capable of producing the same output for a given document, then they should be made to do so.
Consider this from another angle. Suppose I am distributing a document electronically. I have no intention that it be printed so I don't care about different printers. However, I do want it to look nice on screen, so I take some time to make sure the lay out is right. Then I send it out with the reasonable belief that it will display the way I created it. But lo and behold, I get back reports that it looks like crap! When I look into the problem, I find that it's because of the different printers the users have. The document displayed on their computers as it would print on their printers. How absurd is that?
Now you might respond that I should use a tool designed for that use. But I did. Microsoft claims that Word is WYSIWIG, so it should be suitable for this use. It's a blatant lie, and it's time that Microsoft delivered on the claim or stop making it.
AC
I agree, that's fucked up.
They went from %systemroot%\profiles\%username% to \Documents and Settings\%username%, and NOW they're finally doing a \Users directory? Whats going to be in the next version? \Home? Fucking assholes.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Word will do reflows based on what printer driver you have, what you selected, version differences between computers, and all sorts of other things.
So what you're saying is with Word, What You See Is What You Get?
You may not realize it, but you just did a pretty good job of defining WYSIWYG. The whole idea is that what's shown on screen will reflect what will print. If the display changes to reflect different printing conditions, that's good.
No, not all applications get the XP theme, depending on how your app is implemented, you may need either a .manifest file, or better, a manifest resource in your exe.
Except when it's Seg's fault. Just who does this Seg guy think he is anyhow? And what's so special about his wife Page?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
For all its worth, I feel that if any department is really making any strides in good UI development it is their Mac department. If Microsoft can the integrate those benefits into their other products, then good for them.
I just have one pet peeve and that Office 2004 (for MacOS X) still needs to support the Cocoa clipboard data types. This one little issue causes it to embed images that can't be displayed on the PC side. Remember that Office use OLE containers and will include what ever data type is put into the document.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'll tell you who...the everybody average joe computer user who Microsoft tries to build its software to work for. Unfortunately, by trying to please everybody, it really doesn't fully meet anyone's expectations beyond the simple word processor function.
Well, I see that if you Google on "tits on a squid" my original use is all that shows up, so I guess it's "mine." I promise not to sue anyone who uses it though, unless they put an "i" or a "G" in front of it. I admit it, I could use 35 mil, and I'd settle for dollars or euros, not pounds.
The NY Times can substitue the politically correct euphemism "Feminine mammilian secondary sexual characteristics superimposed onto a coleoidean companion," or "Fmsscsoacc" for a snappy and easily pronouncable acronym.
It's not really a replacement for "jump the shark" though. It means something a bit different from a differenct point of view.
It refers to adding a powerful attractor to something that isn't otherwise very attractive; and may even be innately repulsive, but whose actual value and usfulness is, ummmm, "questionable."
And to a certain extent it'll work too, especially as displayed on the sales floor the squid is all dressed up in a Wonderbra(tm) and a tight blouse unbuttoned just so. The instinctual response to reach out and fondle will be very strong.
Of course, sooner or later, after you get it home and out of the shrink wrap, you'll start to realize you're getting all hot and bothered by feeling up a squid, at least if you've reached the primate level of evolution. That still leaves the problem with management.
"Jump the shark" is the "consumer" point of view phrase for an attractor having lost its attractiveness.
B.F. Skinner already coined the phrase for this from the marketers point of view. He noted that you could train a pigeon to do extrordinary things, so long as you never broke the task/reward cycle. If you did that the pigeon in question would simply ignore all further attempts to train it to do anything at all.
He called this "losing your pigeon."
How apropos.
KFG
I only took the argument to the extreme because if I just said an ink jet versus a laser jet, it wouldn't have been much of an argument.
Why don't we complain about something really bad about MS Word...READING LAYOUT!
Please don't make stupid points.
If you're printing an 8.5x11 document on a 48" plotter you should expect that either it prints in 8.5x11 and looks identical to a printed page on a standard HP printer (leaving alot of un-used paper around it) or you tinker with the printer's scaling settings and stretch the document out to fit on your 48" plotter.
If you're printing a document on a 3x5 photo printer, then either it should scale down to the size of the printer, or be severely cut-off (3x5 out of 8.5x11).
Printers aren't intended to work like web-browsers, with fluid layouts forcing the font and features of the page to flow around one another without changing sizes. A document is suppost to be constistant in layout and should simply resize or crop to suit the printer.
More to the point, why would anyone by trying to print out a legal contract on either a 48" plotter or a 3x5 photo printer. Please disengage your head from your ass.
While I agree that the latest version of MS Office is the catalyst for continued evolution in the UI of other apps and the Windows OS itself, I can't help feeling dismayed by the fact that it is STILL HAPPENING. The last version of Office that didn't make me want to throw my PC through a plate-glass window was Office 95.
This is history repeating itself like that bad burrito I had for lunch at Taco Bell. As a user I find it frustrating when--at every major release--MS decides to screw with office at least enough to throw me off balance. Access to dialogue boxes sometimes change locations, and even worse, MS insists on showcasing its latest extremely annoying features by setting them to automatic mode--talking cartoon characters that want to write my letters for me, auto-formatting that insists on "correcting" the spelling and typeface of a snip of source code pasted into a document so it looks like heiroglyphics, etc...it's almost like the MS Office team is mocking me--"we are the standard so we can mess with your mind all we want---suck it up b**ch!"
MS Office is also the bane of my existence as a developer as well. Office has its own set of wigits and pointy-haired types don't seem to grasp that...."Make it look like Office" is easier said than done--you'd either have to make MS Office a dependency of your app or re-invent the wheel and make your own (and as others have pointed out, the result is often a substandard reproduction). While there are sometimes cool litle "innovations" in the UI of each new release of Office, more often than not they are mot consistent with any usability guidelines and it seems that all they serve to do is encourage other developers to practise the same behaviour.
After looking at the screenshots (which are pretty but don't seem to indicate any amazing advances in usability to me) I'd have to say there is one bright side to the situation: With every successive version of MS Office the adoption rate slows down as the bloat and annoying changes increase. Some time soon it looks like "new and improved" MS Office will look look and work less like the MS office we are accustomed to than OpenOffice, GNOME Office, etc.
So...not only will licesning costs and system requirements be the highest in the market for new MS office, business might also migrate to a competitor because users will be more accustomed to a more traditional interface like OpenOffice and training costs would be lower! Not that would be a kicker. Oh yeah, and I'm betting the likelihood that the new document formats (whcih will be the default I'm sure) will NOT be compatible with present versions of Office, so the compatibility argument will not hold water either.
Such a thing couldn't happen soon enough.
Most of the PDF file size must be artwork, hundreds of pages of text can be in 1 MB of PDF. Look at the quality settings in Distiller, possibly set too high for office printing (use "print" rather than "press" default settings).
Not really, but my overwhelming feel was that pretty much all of the good stuff was ripped off from Apple's Mac designs.
My question is, since they patent everything nowadays, how much does MSFT owe Apple for the license fees to use all of that?
Sad, so very sad. Guess all their original developers must have left for greener or more challenging pastures.
Also, not sure why, but the whole Office felt very Japanese to me - much more so than before.
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Won't this sort of debunk their "We have a lower TCO because you don't have to retrain" mantra?
Both Word and Acrobat handle exactly what you described just fine. Learn how to adjust the page numbering scheme before you bitch.
Check out this picture [nyud.net] and despair.
...
Will be saved in: MS Word Document
File Type: C:\Users\Pat\Documents
This implies that you can't name document types, and that once again the users will be buried in meaningless details they care nothing about.
Sad, very sad
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Adobe Indesign does a great job of presenting a usable interface to a complex piece of software. Changing fundamental user interface metaphpors is not necessary. The problem is that the folks at MS can't seem to understand that simpler can be better. Half the menu items are replicated in and clutter the toolbars; the toolbars are long rows of buttons without good visual cues as to their action. They are terrible, and now MS is coming up with an even more complicated solution to the problem they created. A simpler interface using palettes of logically grouped tools, combined with fixing the broken typography (auto ligatures, proper auto hyphenation, proper math typesetting instead of Equation Editor, etc.) would go a lot further for getting real work done than these types of efforts.
Oddly enough, Office 12 and iTunes 5 look very similar. Do I detect a conspiracy?
7 versions of office might actually work, or perhaps better yet, 7 versions of Clippy, representing different demographic subtypes:
don't forget:
Canadian Clippy: "That's a letter, eh? Why aren't you writing colour correctly? You should center the word centre too, eh?"
French Clippy: "You write with no passion! Why do I bother helping you, you know nothing of how to write! Come back when you learn how to write if you want my help, monsieur!"
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No its as stupid as LRUsorted menus. I dont want to FUCKING read all entries in the menu every FUCKING time to find the entry i want just becuase it moves around in the menu. I want to open the menu and select the fourth entry which will be the same operation every time.
I also want to know that I cant use a special feature on the current selection, I dont wnat to read all options and theing "maybe I forgot the name, which other option might be the one im searching for??? hmm maybe its in another menu... nope, lets check the help... (5minutes later)
Don't be a fool. I'm talking about printing pages geared towards 8.5x11. The types of printers I'm working with are usually an HP 4000TN, a Laserjet 5 and a Canon Imagerunner 8500.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Pages is supposed to be a much lighter, easier-to-use word processor with some nicely-designed templates and an easier interface. It was to be the lithe, agile Mini-Cooper to Microsoft's Dodge Ram pickup truck. You might use Word to haul lumber or mulch, but if you're just driving to the store, Pages will get you there quickly and in style. ...good ghod that metaphor got mangled. No matter...
As I write this, I think I'm beginning to understand. Word and its misbegotten ilk are the most feature-crammed, bloatiest of Microsoft's primary products. Those hordes of features, rising up like clouds of rabid fruit bats on the horizon, make them hard to use. The Pages interface, on the other hand, is lighter and easier to use. If Microsoft could get a light, easy-to-use interface on Word, maybe people could find the features they need faster.
I think that's it! That's their idea! They're going to borrow from Pages' UI to make Microsoft Word just as easy to use, I'm sure of it! They're going to put the Mini-Cooper's controls on the Dodge Ram pickup! And I want some of whatever they were smoking when they came up with this harebrained scheme!
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Duh!
Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. Though it does provide page layout features, it's not Word's primary focus.
It always bugs me when people confuse the basic purpose of programs. If you want page layout, use Publisher, or PageMaker, or InDesign.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer. Honestly, that's what Microsoft makes Publisher for, because Word isn't designed to do that.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Yes, it should print exactly as it is on your screen, and it does. What it doesn't do is print exactly as you see on your screen on someone elses printer, because it will often look different on THEIR screen.
If you are printing on legal paper instead of 8x11, you don't want it to stretch the text of an 8x11 page to fit on legal. Nor do you want it to stop printing when it gets to the bottom of the 11" page. You want it to change its pagination based on the document you are printing to, and to fit the margins of the printing device. That's what word does, and that's what its designed to do. it would be broken otherwise.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You may not realize it, but you just did a pretty good job of defining WYSIWYG
Nah. He described WISIWIG, or "What I See Is What I Get", which isn't the same thing at all. WISIWIG is similar to WISIWYGALAWHIP, or "What I See Is What You Get As Long As We Have Identical Printers". That's less useful. Much less useful. True WYSIWYG should be totally independent of time, place, hardware, moon phase, etc etc.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
New ideas aren't that trashy (even for me, which haven't used MS Office for ages), but in overall I would welcome more cleaner and simpler interface, not so colorful. Of course, if it is what clueless user wants...then it is so.
And also I see new feature bloat - nothing that would allow to work me more successfully.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I'm seriously interested in what situations you've had that result in different pagination. Was it because there were different margins? Was a font missing in one case and not in another?
The Word app is near-maximized, and the app measures 969x639 pixels. The document space, meanwhile, measures only 668x476 pixels, or barely more than half (51%) of the available screen space. So nearly half the screen is taken up by the app itself. If that doesn't violate the most basic of design principles I don't know what does.
Would you work on a desk where half of your space was taken up by the building infrastructure and to write on a page you had to move a sliding window to the part that you wanted to use? Of course not, it's a foolish way to work. And with each version of office, instead of getting better to a solution, we're getting worse.
There are features that help out, like full screen mode, but it's an after-the-fact, band-aid solution instead of proper design in the first place.
My best solution so far, which works modestly well, is to run one of my displays in portrait mode. In Word, I turn off all unnecessary toolbar buttons I don't need to get my toolbars to a solitary strip across the top of the screen. (If you can learn the keyboard shortcuts for dialogs and actions you don't need most of those buttons anyway, and it'll help you work faster.) All I have left is the title bar, menu, 1 toolbar strip, the rulers and status bar. Everything else is devoted to the document, as it should be. At 1024x1280 I can nearly fit an entire page on the screen at 100%.
Give it a try, if your equipment allows you to. You'd be amazed how seeing an entire page at a time makes you more spatially aware of where you are in a document, and helps you do simple tasks like layouts. I think that working with my document in an "overview" mode helps me write better, too.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Is it just me, or does something not look quite right about the "Will be saved in" and "File Type" in the following screenshot?
1 0626/original.aspx
http://bink.nu/photos/news_article_images/images/
"who uses word to print pictures?"
seriously, every non-techie I know. to them, print a picture means open word, drag and drop the picture in to the word doc, stretch it to the size they want (not holding the same aspect ratio), and print.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Because Acrobat is designed to solve a different problem than Word is. Word wasn't designed as an electonic means of distributing documents. It was designed to be a word processor, not a page layout program.
I'll probably be market redundant for saying this so many times, but WORD IS NOT A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM.
It's designed to make your content look as good as it can on the device you're printing to, not to make the content layout as designed on the printer you're printing to.
A simple example is the difference between legal paper and 8x11. Please don't tell me you expect Word to print on Legal paper the same way Acrobat would for a document designed on 8x11.
That would be stupid.
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So you're saying that Word should assume you're going to print to a "standard" 8.5X11 printer?
It also seems like you're saying that a document should NOT be consistent, because if it is either resized or cropped, it is no longer consistent. I'm not in the printing business, but I do print documents as part of the business I'm in. We have multiple brands and models of printers and I have never had a problem with it printing differently (other than color quality) between two printers from Word.
It is possible that I just don't do the kinds of things that the person I replied to does, but I haven't had to print a test page out to make sure it was how I expected. I've used tables, pictures, headers, footers, and all of that and it has always come out on the page I expected.
And what if someone does print a legal contract on a 48" plotter? What would you consider WYSIWYG results to be?
Speaking of Pages, I really like the simple interface. The floating palette lets you find everything quickly, and the fact that a window is a document (thanks to OS X's document-oriented interface) helps make it clean and easy to use. There's very little clutter.
If I were to design any complex Cocoa application, I'd do it like Pages.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Now color from computer to computer will look the same with MS now supporting ICC profiles
WYSIWYG? Hardly. it is more:
WYSIWYP -What you see is why you're Pissed!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
IIRC, Vista was supposed to have icon preview for your office documents. From what I saw in the images, all the icons look the same (all docs, all excels etc.).
Did they take that out also? I mean really, a new UI is enough for a 2-3 year delayed release of a new Windows version, no need for any real improvements...
From a Microsoft interview:
Larson-Green: No, we don't have a "classic mode." We surveyed customers to find out what would help people transition, and they told us they really wanted us to help them move forward, rather than doing any kind of classic mode. In addition to redesigning the UI, we've added a lot more functionality in Office 12. Faced with the same challenge of making all this new functionality available in the old UI, we couldn't keep the old command-oriented model and make it easier for users to find new features, so we decided to make a bolder move.
I second that!
I get more complaints due to word defaulting to READING LAYOUT on various forms then all other Office issues combined. This was never a problem back when we had Office 2000.
In soviet russia, letter writes you!
Like GIMP?
It looks like a mockup to me. Which means you can't believe everything you read on it.
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I'm torn here.
"Tits on a teddy-bear" rolls off the tongue better, but "tits on a squid" sounds funnier.
First off, let me state that, while I try my best to be objective with my comments, I am sure that because of employment reasons, I am going to be biased towards a pro-Microsoft stance. Secondly, any comments I make are my own personal feelings or thoughts and are not Microsoft's comments or stance on any matter.
I started using the new UI about a year ago...maybe more actually. When I first saw it, I though 'wow...this royally sucks and our customers are going to think it sucks'. I felt this way when it was in its early implementation...however, even when most of the necessary commands were there, I still felt this way. I found that I didn't know where to go for the commands and was just wishing that I had the old menus back.
However, after using it for a bit...and as the UI became more fine tuned and icons were placed in the 'correct' location...I have found the new UI to be growing on me. I don't need to pull down many drop down menus and almost always, the command that I need is available for me very easily. I have recently been working with some older versions and now find that it is much slower for me to do tasks in previous versions of Office.
Just wanted to say that, from personal experiece, this new UI has grown on me and I find that I really do like it. If, a year ago, you had told me that I would feel that way, I would have laughed in your face.
Steve
Microsoft has occupied a peculiar middle ground. You can always bet for example that MS Office will dump whatever look and feel was used previously and then there will be a few years where every app tries to emulate the new look before the cycle repeats
I have to wonder how much of this is due to marketing - I mean, can you really justify (to yourself) spending money on upgrading something that most likely works ok as is, if it doesn't look like a completely new product?
The option is totally unnecessary in almost every case. For full-bleed documents, it would be an useful option to have, but the vast majority of documents have big fat margins that exceed the unprintable margin.
The other problem with Acrobat, previously mentioned, is the unprintably huge PDF size sometimes made with bitmap graphics, unless Distiller is set to reduce print quality or the printer timeout is set long. That's some real innovation there, Adobe.
Also, for Word, have you tried using Generic Postscript as a workaround? Any office printer from the last ten years or so understands postscript, so if you use the same printer driver on the same version of Word presumably you would get the same pagination. I assume your situation is something like a law office or government agency rather than a service bureau.
With great power comes great fan noise.
hopefully I'm not committing a crime here. But one interface that I truly like is that of Dreamweaver. Even though I code by hand, it always seemed to me that it was very easy to use. I really like the property dialogue on the bottom of the screen. It changes depending on the element I have selected. If its an image, I get image options. If its text, I get text formatting options. A table, table options. Etc. Why not create a word processor in this fashion? Just open up dreamweaver or a screenshot of it and picture it. Throw out your ideas that it creates code. pretend it is simply a word processor. The top toolbar has it broken down into very simple groups starting with "common" Theres a text group, a layout group, (and others that aren't really related to a word processor.) Take a moment to think of some groups you would put there for common word processor tasks.
The bottom toolbar has the very nice properties dialogue box.
The right pane has the File structure of a given site. Substitute this idea with that of creating projects that contain word docs. I can create a new project that contains all docs for a given client. (think of a lawyer and all his docs he keeps. Wouldn't it be a nice organization feature? I'll leave that to your imagination.
I for one think this is a really interesting idea for organizing a word processor. Perhaps Adobe saw the same thing? Perhaps the next Acrobat will have a similar interface? Very interesting idea IMO.
Let's not forget Sheets, which attaches dialog boxes to it's parent window. This allows model dialogs per window (instead of locking the entire app), makes it clear which save dialog belongs to which document, etc.
Unfortunately, few carbon applications use them.
Most of the keyboard shortcuts and menu keys haven't changed in a very long time. For instance, Alt+o+p has always been the menu keys to open the paragraph dialog.
Since a lot of us who write for a living rely on the keyboard (I hate taking my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse--it slows me down) as long as the shortcuts and menu keys don't change, it's still Ok.
As an aside, I also HATE personalized menus. When people ask me for help with Office apps, one of the first things I suggest is turning this hell-spawned "feature" off.
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http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/s ep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx
Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office "12" Core Applications
This has some demo pictures & an interview.
some questions...
Why did Microsoft decide a new Office UI was needed?
Can I upgrade to Office "12" but keep the old UI's look and feel?
Which applications will get the new UI?
read, evaluate, judge, lock & load
"Do you want to write a memo!?" He asks, confidently.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
when we have VI!!!!111
I challenge anyone to present a feature used by the majority of users in current word processors that was not available in either Wordstar or WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Other than the cosmetics of the user interfaces, I don't see any real change, and the increased bloat in these things makes it so that our fancy Pentium Fours feel remarkably similar to 10 Mhz 286 machines running the old DOS software.
Dave
/* No Comment */
I think the new fancy GUI looks like unfinished crap. I really really hope they'll dump the current colours, and crazy ugly gradients. Atleast, please, give me the option to go classic.
Looking on Office 2003 it looks like that MS will do some kind of pseudo-classic 'skin' though.
Or tits on a bull/boar. I fully acknowledge the shoulders of the giants that came before me.
.or, ummmmm, so I'm told.
.tits on a squid, geek attractors that fool you into not thinking of them as just hunks of rubber, or something slimier. But they "work" as designed, or they wouldn't "work" at all.
However, these phrases simply mean something without use, that serve no function whatsoever, like, say, a GOSUB routine that never gets called. That wouldn't be tits on a squid though.
Because, inspired by George Lucas, tits on a squid does not merely refer to mammary glands that don't work. By "tits" I mean "hooters."
Air bags, Angel Cakes, Bazongas, Betty Boops, Blouse Bunnies, Cupcakes, Fun Bags, Grand Tetons, Grapefruits, Hand Warmers, Headlights, Love Bubbles, Macaroons, Sweater Kittens, Warheads. . .
In short; Boobies.
Boars may have tits, but they don't have boobies. George Lucas' squids have boobies.
And like George Lucas' squid boobies it's very important that the boobies are actually boobies, otherwise they wouldn't work as an attractor.
The tits on a Realdoll(tm) aren't at all the same thing as tits on a Teddy Bear. The tits on a Realdoll are boobies and function as such. .
Camera in a cell phone, XML support in a relational database manager. .
Because if you can be induced to buy the boobies, you've bought the squid.
KFG
Yeah, my dad says something is "as useless as tits on a boar pig".
www.clarke.ca
Exact same file. Different printers. It happens with Word and Excel. I once had a very large model in Excel containing hundreds of financial statements that required very precise and consistent formatting. On my default printer (Canon Imagerunner 8500), it looked fine. When a support staffer went to print (HP 4000TN?) and saved the file, what would normally have been 4 pages turned into 4 pages, plus 4 extra pages of blank print area.
Now I mandate that all my spreadsheets go from Excel into PDF prepress only. Otherwise, it's a big waste of time resetting the formatting.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
My friend has Longhorn Beta 1 installed on his machine. There is a \users folder, make no mistake.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer.
The problem is that word is actually quite crappy at "making it look good" if you simply enter your text in the most straight-forward way. Users want it to look good though, so they often "tweak" it by adding whitespace, etc., and then distribute their document expecting it to look the same for others -- and then when other people open it, the result looks even more crappy because of all the tweaking done by the naive user.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
If you set the DOCUMENT to use an 8.5"x11" page, that's how it should display. Then it should warn you if you're trying to print onto a different size piece of paper, or if your printer can't cover the page area at the edges.
Hey, it looks like IE6.0.
I want them to fix the 65k limit on the number of records.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I believe you meant to say,
does any of this predate 'nipples on men' from 'Time Bandits'?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
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I am having a great deal of difficulty writing this, because I can't find words that are sufficiently vituperative that aren't obscene or hackneyed.
This makes Apple's "Metal", as dumb an idea as it was, seem like a paragon of consistency by comparison. I mean, look, we have a brushed aluminum theme, we have toolbars replacing menus... and the toolbars themselves being replaced by sticky menus that look like folder tabs, that pull down more toolbars...
And they're actively confusing.
Look at the first picture. "Write" is selected. What does "Write" mean? Well, I'd assume that it had something to do with handwriting or with saving files, but no, "Write" simply seems to be the default tab... but the next tab is marked "Insert". I have no idea what "Insert" means, but it can't be "insert mode". Can it?
Then there's the "Table Tools". It's hilighted in orange. What does that mean? Who cares? If it's not selected it shouldn't be hilighted. If it's selected, then Write shouldn't be hilighted.
I can go on, but there's just too much brokenness in this. it reminds me of the horrible sidebar-and-borders and jello-not-aqua junk on IE on the Mac, except this one goes to 11.
I have a friend who is more creative: he decodes a file from usenet then searches the cache for it. If he finds it he opens it using IE, then saves it where he wants using the Save Image As function. Then he opens it using Firehand Ember (which he actually regestered). He used to just print them out but that got kinda expensive.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
Create a macro with the following content:
Then assign Ctrl-V to the macro.
Having spent a not insignificant portion of my life interacting with the output of printer manufacturers and (saints preserve us) the output of said manufacturers' driver developers (shudder), I'd say it's most likely because the different printers have different printable areas. A difference in vertical printable area size is the most common, hence affecting pagination.
Nope. :) I meant it the way that I wrote it. Whenever I have a chance, I encourage people to look at LaTeX.
The idea of the one you propose is OK, but the "you" should be "they". People is plural, so you need to use a plural pronoun. That would imply that when someone has available time, it would be good to look into LaTeX. I try to imply that people should look at it right away, because the way that they are doing it isn't the best way. That is more forceful, but doesn't say that they are outright wrong.
By hundreds of years, as does 'nipples on men' itself, which at times recurs as a great theological question.
KFG
I've looked at some of the pictures and it appears that some of the dialog boxes are in XP style. Just look at the signature dialog box, Document Inspector and even the Visual Studio window frame!!!
OK, this could be because it is just a preview and will probably be in the same style through the packages upon release but surely if this is the case it would have been easy and sensible for the developers to ensure the same look and feel of the GUI was implemented fully from the beginning, not mix styles and provide the consistent GUI nearer release.
[Word is] designed to make your content look as good as it can on the device you're printing to, not to make the content layout as designed on the printer you're printing to.
and it even does THAT poorly! have a look at Pages and see what word processing should be like. Your (well... my) content actually does look good, rather than some ho-hum word document. (personal experience)
the same thing goes for Keynote vs PowerPoint, and I'm hoping for an Excel killer... at that point i'd delete office if i didn't have so many incoming... word documents.
Off thread topic, on overall topic... Who beat office with an ugly stick... AGAIN? O_o
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
I believe the cannonical version is "as useful as tits on a bull". Or maybe not.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Also nice that someone else remembers NT4, the last time when there was any real doubt about whether NT4 or Linux made the best server &&|| hacker's desktop.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Check out this video which talks about the new Office12 UI:7 20
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=114
haha. You're kidding right?!? I've been in design for over a decade and quite honestly the Mac dominance in publishing has been steadily declining for at least five years. In 2000 publishing from a PC was a pain in the a** even using quark and PS fonts (and I would justly avoid it like the plague). Today, I do most of my design work on a PC. And you know what, except for the odd publisher with old equipment, it works just fine. And that is a good thing.
There are options in the Windows world, but it's nice when every app in OS X gets free WYSIWYG and PDF saving thanks to a graphics model that also happens to use a standard printing model (the subset of Postscript that is PDF).
I wouldn't discount an operating system because of some zealotry. Linux has its share, and Windows does too (see the Microsoft-can-do-no-wrong fanboys over at the various Windows-oriented beta sites, for instance).
"Sufferin' succotash."
Unfortunately, that's a problem with training really. Most people really don't know how to use tabs, and styles, and adjust margins, etc.. They use spaces to line up content, or they use returns at the end of a line (rather than a paragraph).
It would be great if users didn't need training, but I don't see any way to avoid it. A word processor is not an electronic typewriter, which is what most people seem to use it as.
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Like everyone else, I'm just going off the screenshots here. But it looks like, with the use of a set of buttons to toggle additional toolbars, that Office 12 is adopting the same approach used by WordPerfect 3.5e on the Mac. I've only used it a little, but it does seem pretty handy and intuitive.
- AJ
I'll probably be market redundant for saying this so many times, but WORD IS NOT A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM. It's designed to make your content look as good as it can on the device you're printing to, not to make the content layout as designed on the printer you're printing to.
BUT PEOPLE WANT TO USE IT FOR A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM ANYWAY!!! We get college schedules that they get some secretary to "layout" in Word, and then they wonder why it rewrapped when we send them a proof. Then they pay us to fix it so it wraps the same as their laser-printed hard copy does. But at least they didn't have to pay a graphic artist to lay it out with a real page layout program.Well, actually, it's interesting that you bring this up. Pages has the benefit of hindsight and is more of a hybrid program. Word is a legacy application who's peers were "Mac Write" and Ami Pro and such.
In reality, there's no reason why there should be dedicated programs for Word Processing, Page Layout, and Presentation (other than making 3x the money for basically the same features). All three are really the same thing, with differing forms of layout. They could easily be combined into a single application with different view modes.
You could have a "fluid" mode for word processing, a "fixed" mode for page layout, and a "slideshow" mode for presentation. Granted each function has different semantics, but that should be easily accounted for.
My point was, really, that Word was not designed to be a page layout program. Not that it couldn't be designed to do that, but that's not what it does. it's like complaining that Excel isn't a good database, or that Access isn't a good spreadsheet.
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Nope. That would make sense, but it's not the problem.
You can define a document with nice big margins which will print perfectly fine on two different printers, and it will STILL paginate differently, because for some reason Word adjusts the FONT METRICS based on the printer chosen.
And people use screwdrivers to pound nails too.
I agree with you that clearly the need is there for a hybrid program, but I doubt Word will ever be that program. It just wasn't designed for it.
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Yeah but even worse: Thumbnail? Alpha channel?? Layers??!? Hello, I'm typing up a fax cover sheet, it doesn't need alpha channels and layers! What, are they going to start including compatibility with Photoshop Filters so you can apply Ripple and Brushed Strokes filters to your memos to your boss?
InDesign.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I'm sorry, but haven't you heard of the amazing new ability to email a document to someone else? If they don't see the same thing I saw on my computer then what is the point of WYSIWYG?
Since this isn't a problem for Microsoft, why in the world would they be switching their page display/printing subsystem to the 'much more simular to pdf/postscript' Metro technology? Maybe the fanboys just want to claim it's not broken until we fix it in Vista?
You must be a student; either that or you spent your entire life in academia.
In the real world, making documents look nice is part of things. Have you ever written up a resume? I've probably spent more time formatting it and figuring out just what to include and exclude based on how it lays out, in order to squeeze as much content as I can into those two pages. Try doing that without WYSIWIG.
Also, do you really see LaTeX as a viable option for secretaries, technically illiterate lawyers and the other 95% of people that find computers hard to use?
Granted, TeX is the choice for major publishers and people that actually do printing, but half of the time, they get their manuscript as a word doc and convert it to TeX.
Publisher is well known for it's draw backs, it's not a professional industry choice for layout and it serves the market of "People who want to lay out a page with more flexibility than word, but less technicality than a professional page layout program."
Using office products/publisher to create wysiwyg documents, is as trialling as using html 1.0 to create wysiwgy documents.
I mean that Publisher actually was targetted at doing page design. You can place things arbitrarily rather than doing screwed up table formats and space padding. Word is a document editor, not a page layout system. People seem to think that it is, but it does that absolutely horribly... makes Publisher look like a real layout system.
I definitely don't mean that Publisher is any good. Pretty much every other page layout system out there is better.
Here's what I've seen with Vista:
- Explorer doesn't have a menubar
- Windows Meida Player doesn't have a menubar (true already unless you show it)
- Internet Explorer has de-emphasized the menubar
- Office 12 won't have a menubar
There is one conclusion: Microsoft is eliminating the menubar. Will it work? Only time will tell.
Now look what you made me do!!
*points to sig*
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
OK, I might get flamebait for that, but I trully believe it. THIS IS UGLY.
On the other hand that was the first thing I said when I first saw Office 2003 as a beta tester. And I keep using it.
I will try it of course but I think that at least for me OpenOffice time has come.
And to most of the world, WYSIWIG is not mere "UI cosmetics"
Just because Word can do some page layout related functions doesn't make it a page layout program.
Just because you can save data in rows similar to a database doesn't make Excel a database application either.
I also don't see how any of the functions you mention are strictly page layout oriented. Tables certainly aren't, since tabular data is useful in a word processor. Clipart is also useful in a lot of ways that aren't strictly page layout oriented. Image wrapping? Now you're just being stupid. A word processor can't image wrap? That's news to me.
Headers and footers? hell, even Word Perfect and Word for Dos had those.
As for HTML export, don't make me laugh. Word's HTML export is worse than it's page layout capabilities.
Just because you CAN use a screwdriver as a hammer doesn't mean you SHOULD, unless you have no other tool.
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"Ah mon, you be tryin ta write a righteous lettah? You be definitely needin a big spliff first, mon!"
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Or dare I mention FrameMaker which gives you wwysiwyg and the ability to spending time writing the silly thing too.
Despite all its short comings its a really good word processor.
And Office 2000 is happy with me... I don't need something "Fancy" to write out all my letters of hatred to Micro$oft for making five billion versions of the same damn operating system... You would think that they would at least TRY To focus on one to make it the "Ultimate" Version.. but no... I know why they did it.. they want to make a TON Of money on certifications.. Well Jee golly... I am happy with my MC$E For NT 4.0 and thats where I am staying! Update: Sorry.. Five Billion and ONE Versions... Dont want to misadvertise Micro$ofts Products...
Just me
Excel isn't a good database
That doesn't stop my dad from storing thousands of rows of data in it...
The thing is, I'm not sure that's true. Word's presentation of the written word is nowhere near the level of a decent DTP program, or something like TeX: things like paragraph justification, kerning and ligatures are naive or missing altogether, and this sort of thing sets quality typography apart from its amateur cousin. Most people wouldn't know that quality if you showed it to them with red rings round the changes, but they would still be affected by it as they read.
As others have noted around here, Word isn't really a page layout program, either. Again, its facilities are far surpassed by even fairly basic DTP packages. Try doing a two-page spread in Word with an image split across the seam.
You'd think a world-class word processor would be good for dealing with long documents, at least, but I was once told in an official Microsoft reply that this wasn't what Word was meant to do. (This was after submitting a bug report about Word repeatedly taking out the whole PC while dealing with a 300 page technical manual with fairly extensive but unexceptional use of numbered lists, section headings, and the like.) Even if it can handle larger documents these days, the cross-referencing, indexing and such are nowhere near the power of a system like TeX, and again I can't think of anything it can do that a decent DTP package couldn't.
Word can produce basic web pages, but without the quality of HTML and site design/structure facilities routinely offered by more specialised web editors.
So it goes on. Word processors today are very much a jack of all trades, yet master of few. About the only thing they have going for them is relative ease of use and customisability. Even for ease of use, similar "hybrid" packages like Apple's Pages are overtaking the more overweight beasts, and I know few places that really use the kind of customisability today that Word is theoretically capable of offering.
Faced with this sort of position, it's hard to see how Microsoft can hold off the challenges against its flagship application from all sides for long based on pretty colours alone. Revamp the layout engine to produce decent typography (particularly the neat touches that require no user intervention), sort out the styles, templates and programming facilities so people can actually make good use of them, fix up the support for formal, structured documents to provide the best indexing, cross-referencing and numbering facilities available, and then we'll be getting somewhere.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Indeed, nor does it stop people from trying to use Word as a page layout program.
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There are many(!) people who have commented here about "lack of innovation", "they have nothing to add" & "differnt UI festures".
... and in a more discoverable way.
... people are only commenting on the UI ... there is much more to Office 12 than just the UI changes. But i guess people forget that when all they want to do is bag it.
All i see is a great way to access more of the office features in less clicks
That IS innovation.
More than that
I think we'll see an increase in operating systems that can scale a UI properly first. There are certain natural limits on the useful size of a screen for most purposes, and high-end screens are already around that mark.
What kills current systems with high resolutions on (relatively) small screens is the number of UI features that become almost unusable. Windows will scale some fonts, for example, but not always reliably and many applications get their dialog boxes and such messed up. Icons are still 32x32 or 64x64 bitmaps. Web browsers won't automatically scale up images to match the text zoom.
This is improving -- the new generation stuff from most of the big players starts to address the problem -- and once some of the basics are fixed, higher resolution but mid-sized screens will become a lot more useful. Then you can banish all the toolbars to normal size somewhere, zoom everything else to a useful size, and get on with whatever useful stuff you wanted to do. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Linux is not even where Windows 2000 is in terms of usability. I use the Mac but there is nothing really new in terms of how the system works compared to all other (windows mainly) systems, although it is beautiful. I give MS credit for trying to change the computing style for years to come. NO MENU BAR on Office, explorer, IE 7 (small one) and the media player. Time will tell if this is the way to go with a VERY, VERY graphical GUI. Interesting though.
I think I will go get the 400 dollars out of pocket and go buy a copy.
can't wait can't wait.
WYSIWYG is a terrible way to do documents anyway. You shouldn't be spending time making it look right, you should spend it writing the silly thing.
Spoken like a true propellerhead with zero social skills. You don't like WYSIWYG, and that's fine. How dare you tell people how they should and shouldn't use their computers or what they should and shouldn't prefer.
I looked into Latex for scientific publishing when I did my astronomy masters. What a horrid piece of software. WYSIWYG (or close to it like Word) allows people who have no interest in learning about markup (let alone specific forms of markup - Latex may not always be the markup of choice through a person's lifetime) to lay out documents as they wish to see them on a piece of paper.
If you want to write the document first then worry about layout that's fine, but others may want to lay it out as they go. (Makes sense to me - like writing code comments as you go it's often better done right then and there when you're thinking about it even though it does split your concentration).
Many people are very visual about how they do things. Artistic types in particular often don't warm to abstract layout schemes. This doesn't make them stupid compared to you. They just think differently and/or have different requiremenst.
Do yourself a favour and lose the narrow minded elitism.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
M$ Marketing person: How about we use as much screen estate as possible rather than use current efficient paradigms?
M$ Executive: "Great. Let's make sure we keep file formats proprieatary while we're at it, while externally preaching openness. Also, let's make activation a royal pain in the ass, and for heaven's sake, sue customers who resell retired licenses."
M$ Developer: "Whatever. Just pay out my stock grants when they mature but before the stock crashes then I am OUT of here to start my own gig. By the way, you guys are idiots. Microsoft has seen its heyday."
" it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window."
Oh $DEITY, don't even get my started. One of the things I loathe the most about Microsoft (and believe me, I've got a hell of a long list) is their love of gratiuitous, pointless changes. Changing the names slightly, moving things somewhat, changing the accelerator keys and the shortcuts, so you can never be sure what any key will do on any given day, or what a menu option will be called in this program.
It's bad enough for me, a geek and a keyboard junkie who is often six steps ahead of the computer (and that's another thing, how the hell is it can a computer running at 2,000,000,000 cycles per second with enough memory to store a dictionary fifty times over can't keep up with me, a lousy typist who hits the backspace key every third keystroke?), since I hit one series of buttons and end up having it do something else.
But then I have to write documentation for the poor unsuspecting users at work, who might be using one of four different versions of Windows (and two different "Start Menu" variations for XP) and three versions of Office. Most of thes people don't know that Word isn't part of Windows in the first place. So first I have to write a ten page document explaining how to identify which version of Windows and Office they have. Then I have to write like 20 different variations of each document/procedure/whatever, or try and explain the possabilites at each step. So what should be a simple, ten step quickie instruction sheet to do something simple turns into a tome that needs a binder just to haul the damn thing around in.
Farking Microsoft. Sets the world back six years every time they release something.
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
This rant was brought to you by the letters M and S, and the number 32.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
"...you should really compare Explorer vs Aqua vs GNOME vs KDE."
"Explorer" isn't the name of the Windows GUI. "Explorer" is the file browser, like the Mac Finder or KDE's Konqueror.
That said, I don't know the name of the Windows GUI itself. I know the "trim" in XP was named "Luna", but the rest of the GUI is basically the same. In Vista, it's "Aero" or "Aero Glass" is supposed to be the radical new GUI, but since it's still vaporware, it remains to be seen just how that materializes.
The only name I've ever seen for it is "USER", from the USER.EXE and USER32.DLL that implements the basic UI components for Windows. But "USER" isn't a very practical name. "GDI" is low-level graphics primitives (much like Xlib in nix land), not the higher-level GUI. "Common Controls" (COMCTL) refers to the standard dialogs for open, save, print, and such, but that's not the GUI, either.
Anyone here know the "code name" or whatever for the actual GUI introduced in Windows 95?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
hrm they are using fitts law for the window managers close / minimise buttons. thats a good thing (tm)
shame I can get the same usability with a fitts-law-style metacity theme and open offfice on ubuntu
I don't think WYSIWYG means what you think it means.
If Word paginates differently on the screen than the printer, then it ain't WYSIWYG. We can rhen argue about whether WYSIWYG is even a good idea, but at any rate it appears Word doesn't have it.
You've got it backwards. Try worrying about layout FIRST and THEN doing the document. That seems to be your problem. You wouldn't try to design and build your house, WHILE you were moving in. And you certainly wouldn't wait until it was all in to turn around an paint the walls. Trying to lay out a document as you go may seem easier, but it'll take longer, and look crappier. Consider it an advanced form of outlining. You DO outline, don't you?
Try LyX the next time you decide to venture into the land of TeX. Things will seem a lot more reasonable.
As for commenting while coding, I can pretty much TELL when I'm reading the results of that process. The comments are often almost flippantly terse. As if what a coder is doing at that moment makes so much sense to themselves that they don't see the need to describe it much further. "foo gets baz, it's rough but I'll fix it later" That's great, I could tell that by looking at it, but WHY the hell did you decide to do it that way, and what were your plans for fixing it?
Track changes. (With those beautiful margin bubbles.)
However, if you've ever collaborated with someone on a paper, you will realize what a turd Word can be. Worst case, you get a document where the person actually hit the tab key to indent paragraphs, and is completely unaware of things like styles and cross-referencing. Most of the time, it would be a huge time-saver if the person just sent you raw text in notepad so that you don't have to find-and-replace all of the tabs, double-spaces after periods (typewriter days I guess?), and carriage returns between paragraphs. Even if you have never been trained to use Word properly, these things would annoy you.
Word works well for quicky-stuff, but it can be an utter nightmare for more that a dozen pages or so, especially if you end up printing on anything other than your own printer. LyX and latex? Ehhhhh, you really don't need those unless you are doing something big and collaborative. It is fantastic for anything that you do often and can make a template, though.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Apple has stolen it.s share of gui's
The subject line is right on.
Thats the problem with apple for 25 years you've
said the same fucking things.
Gunillablue
Actually, it is my job to tell people how they should and shouldn't use their computers. That's part of what being IT management is. You get a rought idea of what needs to be done. As a result, you form a good way of doing it, and then implement that solution. Then you train the users on how that solution works; that way they know why they do what they do, and are competent.
LaTeX is not all that hard to use. Making styles isn't that easy, but that's not something you need to do, or at least not something to do often. As part of an IT infrastructure, you could have styles already created and distributed with the software installs. Many of the default styles are fine straight away.
As a couple other people already said, it is clearly the wrong way to do it as you go. You end up with a poorly thought out mess. Occasionally it looks decent. If you use a system designed for publishing things, then you don't *need* to worry about layout as you type, or after you type. You already decided on a style and never need to mess with it again.
You seem to advocate not learning anything about the how or why of anything you do. If people *learned* how to use a computer, none of this is an issue. If people understood that they have to actually do *work* to make things happen, there would be far fewer problems.
BTW - I'm a very visual person myself. I can understand the allure of a visual layout system. I happen to believe that using the bad method when there is a better method *is* stupid. I see that Word is a bad way to do it, and so I learn to do it another way. You are talking about a refusal to change your way simply because it's your way.
If I did everything the quick and easy way, I would be doing a pretty bad job at most everything I attempted. If I only considered options that I already understood, I would cut out most other options. I'm talking about being flexible and willing to consider that another way might be better.
They meamt to do this
Doh
I prefer to call it "Microsoft is monkey fucking with the UI - again".
I know exactly what WYSIWYG means. You are aparently confused about what we're talking about. Word does print as you see on the screen. YOUR screen.
Word does not print the way you see on YOUR screen on someone elses computer, because the printer characteristics are different. It prints the way it looks on THAT computers screen.
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Let me get this straight: you don't use macs because there are many mac zealots? That is like being against abortions because China enforces its one child policy through abortions.
Yet another fine innovation in the field of batshit insane UI design! They may finally take the crown from the Windows XP Start "Menu" as the "Most Hilariously Bizarre GUI Element".
fish and pipes
B.F. Skinner already coined the phrase for this from the marketers point of view. He noted that you could train a pigeon to do extrordinary things, so long as you never broke the task/reward cycle.
Actually, in operant conditioning the strongest and most persistent behaviors are ellicited by random rewards, not consistent rewards. The subject, upon figuring out that it can get the reward every time it completes a task (such as pecking a spot 100 times) slows or stops pecking immediately after a reward because it knows it is a long way from the next reward. On the other hand, if the subject never knows if the next peck might result in the reward, it exhibits much stronger and more persistent pecking behavior, often to the point of exhaustion. And since the next peck can always be the one that gets rewarded, getting a reward has no effect on pecking frequency.
That is why in major corporations the test subjects, oops I mean employees, seldom know the amount of an upcoming raise or even if they will get one, and promotions seem to come out of the blue, i.e. pseudo-randomly. Employees will work much harder if they are thinking "maybe this year I will get the promotion", just as the pigeons think "maybe this peck I'll get the corn"
I have collaborated and suffered Word. But it's not the fact that it's WYSIWYG. It's the fact that it's buggy.
When I played with it Lyx was buggy and crashed more often than word ever did. Straight Latex is a nightmare unless you're interested in spending hours learning the markup. It's like trying to write HTML by hand. Programmers will do it, but the lay person shouldn't have to - and I'm talking computer lay person who might be a specialist in another field.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Isn't the meaning of "tits on a squid" more like (but not exactly like) "to polish a turd" than "jump the shark"?
... Malmoe, Sweden
Mvh: Ezel
Prosp long and liver.
Even with WYGIWYS... why should the pagination change when i change the *resolution* from 300dpi to 600dpi on the same printer? I havnent changed any of the layout, just what the resolution, yet the pages are now out by something...
That isnt just pathetic, its downright retarded...
shouldn't it be that you create the document layout defining paper size ?
so, if the size changes, the only thing that gets done to the document is scaling, unless you specifically change paper size ?
Rich
Maybe you weren't into computing before WYSIWYG document creation was common. It used to be printers only understood ASCII. The only way to determine what your document would look like was to print it out. If you had bold or underline, that was included using tags, much like HTML. What you saw on your screen was the text including the tags (~raw HTML). There was no "Preview" button, you had to print it to find out what it would look like (and you thought forgetting a closing tag was bad in a /. post).
WYSISYG was a great step forward. You actually saw the formatted text on the screen and saw where the line and page breaks were going to be. What you saw on the screen was what you got when you printed.
Now step forward to today, and for some reason people seem to think WYSIWYG means What I See Is What Everyone Else Will See On Any Computer Or Printer. That's something completely different. Something formats like PDF were meant to fix. Problem is, they're still limited by the hardware. If someone creates a document with the assumption that the printer can print within 5 mm of the paper's edge, but your printer will only get within 10 mm, you're not going to get the same result. Its that simple, and there's nothing MS can do about it. Nothing Adobe can do about it. Its reality. Deal with it.
Because if you promise a reward for a specified task and reneg you will lose your pigeon.
.unless, of course, you know you can just replace them with a new pigeon. The "McDonald's Method."
Say, pecking exactly 1000 times or Christmas bonuses.
But I was speaking to consumer spending which is more like a counting experiment than a work load experiment. The consumer spends a preset amount for the delivery of a promised reward.
Feed a buck into a soda machine and if you don't get your soda you get pissed off, right away.
Feed a buck into a slot machine and don't get a "soda" and you feed in another buck in anticipation that you're "getting closer."
Which still depends on paying off often enough, and in sufficient quantity, to prevent losing your pigeon. You don't want people thinking your slot machines are "unlucky". .
Bottlers work both sides to sell the most soda. They can't sell you soda at all other than on a promise/reward basis, but they can attach the random possibility of getting another soda to the sale.
Oh, wait, this sounds exactly like what employers do; and you lay off senior staff because you have made them the most explicit promises you can't reneg on without losing your pigeon. The worker you replace with will work harder because the senior person existed, in anticipation of someday extracting those same promises from you. . .
Getting layed off.
Oh, wait. . .
KFG
WYSIWYG is a terrible way to do documents anyway.
Applications like Adobe FrameMaker show that wysiwyg can be done well. I certainly don't spend my time 'making it look right'. Generally, I spend no more than a day (out of a 120-day budget to write a 600-page manual) on formatting, and that includes creating the formatting from scratch. That's pretty productive.
Even better, we rarely encounter problems with Frame that we don't understand and can't solve easily. Word, on the other hand, has us going "WTF" on a regular basis.
If you're doing layout in a word processor, you've already screwed up.
The layout has to come from somewhere. Suggesting that users shouldn't be allowed to change the layout to suit their needs is rather arrogant.
You aren't just using a word processor, though. FrameMaker is good for authoring, sure, but also for publishing. It does full page layout, but it presents it in a way that it is easy for you to edit your styles. If software like Word had used a similar approach to FrameMaker, we wouldn't be having this discussion. :)
My point about layout in a word processor is that it doesn't do that. Word is an excellent example of why the current word processor concept doesn't work for page layout. Word processors are great for writing things down. When you want to actually publish to the web, or to paper, and have it look right and consistent, now you have to import it to a layout system. Perhaps what you did in Word is good enough, so you publish to PDF so that it looks proper on other machines, printers, etc. It won't change when you email it to someone with another version of the software.
So, I'm not saying that users shouldn't be allowed to change layout, just that it works better when you separate layout from authoring. If all you needed to do was, say, pick your style, and then say what thing is a heading, what thing is a paragraph, etc, then you get more done. This is because you don't worry about the layout/style every time you write something. So you set your style/layout up, and just keep reusing them.
I guess I should correct my statement. It went like this:
I used to use a Mac, they can be useful, but the user base has far too many zealots (even than *nix) for my taste.
It should have gone like this:
I used to use a Mac. They can be useful. The user base has far too many zealots (even than *nix) for my taste.
I don't use Macs because I moved to a system that carried more software (back at System 7ish). As a seperate issue, I personally find that the Mac world has way too many extremists per capita that refuse to accept the possibility that Mac OS isn't the Holy Grail, but merely another option. The *nix comment is because I largely use Linux and Unix systems, which I realize Mac is Unix based now. *nix is notorious for zealots as well, which is why the comment.
English... It's amazing what a couple of poorly placed periods on my part can do.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Nope, I was using computers before IBM decided to bring out their PC. Trash 80's and Commodore pet's anyone?
Actually, back in the DOS days MS Word would show text that would print differently (bold, italics) in different colors. Since the typefaces of the day were built into the printers it was totally understandable that what you saw on the screen was only simular to what you got on the page.
Today is a bit different! If I use the default margins on my document and two different print devices render my page differently than this is a bug and not a feature! I understand that it is possible to buy a crappy print device that cannot print too close to the edges of the page, but with standard margins this shouldn't be an issue. Sadly, it still is.
Microsoft and I both see this as a problem. One that Microsoft will be fixing with Metro in Longhorn/Vista. If you'd rather go back to punching cards, than more power to you!
Yeah, and even when not crashing LyX isn't very polished. I guess I am saying that for collaborative projects like documentation or even frequent research papers, the time spent learning markup-style word processors is well worth it. If you expect frequent revision of a moderate-to-large document then it is also worth it. Word is good for one-shot jobs written by one person and printed on one printer. I use it all the time for that! (And unfortunately for updating documentation written by others at work as well...)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But let's face it. The average requirements and usages of word-processing software have not really changed in five years or more. We hit true WYSIWYG and haven't seen a real change since, but they keep revamping the interfaces and tweaking the DRM and releasing it as "new versions."
The requirements have changed tremendously, but developers don't realise it. The next step (that is long overdue) should have been to free-form editing (wikis, random note collecting tools, thinking-editing tools such as mind maps, better outlines) and collaborative tools (wikis, simultaneous editing, integration with IM/IRC-like chats, better sharing). While MS Office has moved a tiny little bit in that direction, they haven't really changed the core functionality of the office productivity software. Which is a pity.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I'll probably be market redundant for saying this so many times, but WORD IS NOT A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM.
The problem is three-fold.
1) everyone needed a page layout program, not something else
2) what else is Word if not a page layout program?
3) how long will it take MS to realise that Word is being used as a page layout program and fix it to perform this function well?
How can you have a word-processing software that doesn't make pagination correctly without just marking every damn page break manually? It's like an e-mail program that doesn't send your messages to correct recipients. Or only does it sometimes.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
You seem to misunderstand the purporse of a word processor. A word processor takes text, applies styles, and paginates to fit the desired output device and paper size.
That's it. That's what a word processor does.
If you want page layout, use a page layout program instead. Don't try to fit a square peg in a round hole. All the other page layout style tools Word has are, in fact, attempts to make a word processor fit in a rount hole, and as you can tell, it just doesn't work very well.
If you turn Word into a page layout program, then it won't be a word processor anymore.
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Who said a program can't perform two functions? Do you still use one program for writing e-mails and another for sending them? Do you use one program to download files and another to upload them? One program to design presentation slides and another to show them? One program to enter data and another to make calculations with it?
No matter what egotist purists like you think, it's a very real use case. A person needs to write a report, add images, diagrams and print it so that it looks nice. This is what Word is used for, this is an exemplary case.
You probably want that person to work on the text first, then export the result into some Publisher application, add images, format the headers and footers, add cool formatting and stuff and print. But what if one needs to make some changes? Delete some text? Add some text? Shuffle text around? And actually there is no "what if". It happens every fucking time. This is the most typical scenario - prepare the first draft, have your editor/boss make tons of changes, make another draft and so on and so forth. And of course, when your boss reads the document, he wants it to look like it will look to the client, he doesn't want to see just the text. So do you want the author of the document to export the text from Publisher, import it into Word, then repeat this 10 times?
Frankly, that would be idiotic. Creating layout and editing the text are not two separate processes, these are two aspect of one process - making a good looking document.
Nobody cares really what you think about holes and pegs. The market wants a word-processing + page-layout program. Microsoft is trying to answer that need, but doesn't fully succeed. But to say that the customer is wrong is stupid and just shows how little you understand the actual user's needs.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
No, I don't expect people export text into a page layout program.
In fact, Word works pretty well for page layout, so long as you only print to the device it was designed for. But at its heart, it's still a word processor, not a page layout program.
The problem here is that lots of people WANT word to repaginate for the device they're printing on. That's it's correct function, and the function it was designed for. Changing that function would break it for lots of people.
If, however, you want a program that guarantees precise page formatting will stay the same regardless of the output device, then you need to use a program that's designed for that, ie a page layout program.
What this boils down to is that different devices have a different idea about things like margins, font metrics, etc... a 10 point font on one printer can be the same as a 12 point font on a different one. Being a word processor, it relies on the printer font rendering when at all possible.
A page layout program, however, is different. It renders all fonts itself, thus it can guarantee that rendering will be identical (or as close as possible) on every device.
This is the difference between word processing and page layout, and why Word isn't a page layout program.
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What do you mean repaginate for the device? If both printers print on the same format paper (A4), I expect them to produce the same document. I may accept slightly different colours, different resolution, somewhat different fonts, but if the documents paginate differently, the program is not working as it should. In the very least, Word should provide a "Preserve formatting" option (on by default) and save positions for all lines of text. Should be trivial. Also, if Microsoft bundles different fonts with different versions of Windows, I think it has a responsibility to warn its customers that due to that fact Word may fuck up their formatting. I am sure people will be delighted to learn about that "feature".
What you are saying about 10/12 point fonts doesn't make sense. Most people print on A4 (Legal in the US) paper and expect their pages to look the same. In fact, Word has a feature to rescale A4 documents when printing on Legal paper (and vice versa) to preserve pagination. So the behavour you describe is clearly not the preferred one.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Looks like the designers of the new Office interface decided to chuck Fitt's Law out the window -- trading the already wasteful menubar-in-the-window for screen "buttons". I predict more repetitive motion injuries as a result.