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."

Comments

I'm not an expert...

[theotherlight]

...but it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window.

Re:I'm not an expert...

[bedroll]

Don't fault them for trying to better their UI. When you use it and it doesn't work for you, then seek alternatives. If it doesn't work for most people, they'll switch back, but you'll be able to fault them then.

Do remember that their office suite competes in a market that sees little innovation, because little is needed. This means that in order to maintain dominance they must either provide a technically superior product, provide a better user interface, or lock down file formats. Technical superiority is debatable, they may or may not do that already. Locking down file formats is what we DON'T want them to do. That leaves UI for competition. If they don't change it up enough then products like WordPerfect or OpenOffice.org will catch up with them in the UI and make it so that they have to compete via the other methods. Since technical superiority will probably always be debatable, it leads them back to locking down file formats... and we still don't want that.

Anyhow, if anyone can rewrite the rules of UI and get away with it, it's the people with most of the market share. They happen to be it.

Re:I'm not an expert...

[DrXym]

Just like Apple did. Quicktime 4.0 introduced the "brushed metal" look, as well as a bunch of non-native widgets and consequently occupied a prime position in the http://www.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm">Interface Hall of Shame.

Remember that it was Apple who sat on their high horse and said that every app look, feel and behave consistently. It made sense too. But then for reasons best known only to theirselves, decided that consistency was boring and have been changing UIs from one release to the next ever since. And each time there is more and more of that wretched "brushed metal".

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. For a while, apps could pick up the new look by using the common controls but even the common controls look antiquated these days and are full of horrible hacks for backwards compatibility.

The worst offender of them all is Unix (including Linux) where there are multiple competing widget sets and multiple competing themes. It's a wonder the platform survived before GNOME & KDE considering the combined might of IBM et al had come up with the shittiest widget set ever - Motif. Even these days with UI guidelines, and just two (!) predominant widget sets - QT & GTK apps do not look or behave closely enough to one another.

The one light at the end of the tunnel is most platforms now offer a theme engine so apps can look consistent even if they have their own notion of widgets (e.g. Java or Mozilla). It's just too bad that Apple and Microsoft see fit to keep the theme engine proprietary and even ignore it themselves when it suits them. I also wish that QT & GTK would share a common theme engine so that with a flick of a switch all apps, regardless of what C / C++ API is on top would render in the same way.

Re:I'm not an expert...

[thatguywhoiam]

Well, we know that there are problems with the way things work now. There are limitations. Apple are constantly being given praise for their "innovations" when their newer OSs have actually done very little more than System 9 in usability terms -- they're actually introduced some new issues, while simply prettifying what was there (and putting it on a far more solid base).

Oh, come on. I agree that OS X is less consistent than the Classic UI was, but you cannot say that they have been standing still with interface innovations. Off the top of my head:

- hardware-accelerated compositing and rendering (Quartz/Core Image)

- Expose/Dashboard
- previews of vector-based files (PDFs, AIs, etc)
- system-wide PDF support and printing
- universal spell-check
- Finder column view
- Spotlight searching
A lot of these are inherited from NeXTStep, but does it matter?... I can point to concrete improvements that affect me every day, and that's important. Photoshop without Expose is unthinkable for me now. I miss my spatial finder, and I hate that they keep fucking around with various 'themes'... but I definitely do not miss having 100+ extensions, 50+ control panel 'applets', a calculator that hadn't been updated since 1988 and a UI that would come to a screeching halt if I clicked a menu. There is progress being made and they deserve credit for things done right.

About the new Office 12 interface: its stupid that they just borrow elements (i.e.. glossy buttons, brushed metal with middle-lit gradient) because they think Apple made them cool. Microsoft is big and rich enough to come up with something really compelling and new. They just don't. They go with what they think is 'good enough'. Which is pretty bad to you and me.

Re:I'm not an expert...

[DrXym]

You really don't understand the Mac way at all. It's not about how the windows look or what color they are. It's about putting the same functions in the same places. It's about consistency among menus and basic program functions like open, save, print and quit.

Really? And there was I thinking Apple wrote some extremely comprehensive human interface guidelines which covered virtually every aspect of application design - where to place buttons, what background colour to use for windows and so on.

I did search but I couldn't find the section that said "Quicktime designers are exempt from these rules". And it was QT 4.0 that started this bizarre fetish for brushed chrome. Of course OS X has rewritten the rules to support it natively and to declare that "application windows" should use it. So now every app and its uncle uses the effect, turning OS X into a sea of brushed metal and non-standard buttons.

And Apple have seen fit to let their revamped HIG apply to XP too. The new iTunes 5.0 has chosen to throw out all sorts of MS Windows conventions, such as a title frame, and it even uses Aqua style scroll bars in some places. I could understand it from Microsoft since WMP is a bloody disaster, but Apple (and its users) have traditionally been fanatical about apps following the HIG.

I wonder what happened to that zeal and why some see fit to make excuses for them now.

I'm seeing a pattern here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do fancy graphics always get higher priority than usability?

Re:I'm seeing a pattern here.

[Swamii]

Users like it. True story: I spent 2 weeks adding some great new features and usability enhancements to my app. I spent 5 minutes changing the icons used in the app to nices ones. After deployment, the first 5 things I hear from our users is, "Wow, the icons look great!"

Never underestimate the importance of a beautiful-looking user interface. I'm especially talking to you, GIMP devs!

Don't mess with something that works

[rodsoft]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why do they have to break their own standards?

[strider44]

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.

Re:Hole With No Bottom

[Rude Turnip]

"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.

Re:Office Vista?

[LLuthor]

Don't they already?

1. Professional Enterprise Edition
2. Professional Edition
3. Small Business Management Edition
4. Small Business Edition
5. Student and Teacher Edition
6. Standard Edition
7. Basic Edition

Retraining?

[hattig]

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 ...

Re:Hole With No Bottom

[kfg]

. . .requiring 95% of its user base to relearn everything they already know. . .

Don't be silly. Everyone knows the reason not to change to OpenOffice is to avoid retraining.

. . .did I just describe the state of word processors, or the state of enterprise software in general?

They're starting to run out of chrome and tailfins. Now they're starting to put tits on the squid.

KFG

Only new feature I care about

[Alistar]

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.

What do you call it when Linux apps do it?

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:ewww

[Nuclear Elephant]

I can't see it because the site is now down, but if it's like the Mac version of Office, it will have a style window with dynamic transparency which I find extremely useful. If you're using a source document behind your window, the style window (and other windows) will gradually become transparent so you can see through them - and when you move to use it (for changing a style), it goes opaque again. OSX has had very useful/functional features like this for years.

Re:Microsoft continues the tradition...

[TomorrowPlusX]

I don't know where you hang out, but here as well as on almost all OS X forums, there's NO END AT ALL to people whinging about OS X's interface inconsistency.

This is NOT an example of everything-MS-does-is-bad-but-if-Apple-does-it-it' s-OK. Apple does it and people bitch. MS does it and people bitch. Hell, it happens on linux too, and people bitch about it there, too. So stop pretending MS is the only one being bitched at about it. It happens everywhere, and people get pissed about it everywhere.

Re:Hole With No Bottom

[aaronl]

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.

Re:Hole With No Bottom

[Mignon]

Now they're starting to put tits on the squid.

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.

Re:This is important

[DrXym]

The sad part is that people have to copy the behaviour since Microsoft sees fit to keep them proprietary. This might keep the likes of Infragistics and Stingray in business but it's a waste of time for everyone else.

It seemed for a while that the "common controls" would allow apps to pick the new look and feel of any changes introduced by Microsoft, but the common controls are so antiquated that this is no longer the case. Apps don't even look native in XP using the common controls unless they ship with a special XP manifest file.

Tech support hates them already

[Just Some Guy]

From the signature dialog:

Type or ink your name below or click Select Image to select a picture to use as your signature:

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":

Remember that stupid people will read your words, too. Consider the worst possible misinterpretation of anything you write, because it will always come back to you.

Mixed messages

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:Hole With No Bottom

[man_of_mr_e]

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.

Re:Office Vista?

[FragHARD]

Don't forget the versions put out by third parties

1.Free d/l ISO
2.Free d/l multiple .RAR files
3.Free d/l multiple .ZIP files
4.$2 dvd in singapore
5.$1.85 dvd in hong kong
6.$1.72 dvd in thailand
7.$1.25 dvd in china with telltale removed

Re:Office Vista?

[Tim Browse]

Let me fix that up for ya:

French Clippy: "You look like you're trying to fight a war of independence. Would you like some help with that?"