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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."
...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.
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.
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"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!!!
LL
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
. . .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
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
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'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 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.
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.
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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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?"