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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."
I wonder if they're going to codename it Office Vista, in keeping with common versioning practices.
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.)
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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.
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.
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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.
thats ugly looking, seriously. Although I'm not found of the OSX interface either
It's not the look that really matters - we've gone through endless cycles of what looks "neat", skinnable apps, and now 3D spinning apps (though I find it hilarious that the brushed aluminum look is being attributed to Apple. I used brushed aluminum on my first website about 15 years ago. It's hardly a unique appearance).
What is really interesting, however, is that they fundamentally changed the usability of the application - the manner in which toolbars look and layout has changed, as have many of the other user-interaction elements. This is something that Microsoft has been very hesitant to do, as one of the reasons people stick with Office through the versions is consistency - Drop Office XP in front of someone who used Office 95 a decade ago, and they'll largely find it the same (just with more/better features).
With Microsoft significantly changing things, they have the risk of it being such a schism that people seriously evaluate the option of going to Open Office or other alternatives. If your users are going to need training, and are going to bitch and complain about their cheese moving, then you might as well re-evaluate the whole thing.
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
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.
it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window.
This is how improvements to user interfaces can be brought about. In theory, Microsoft had a good GUI with Word. In practice, it was a complicated, bloated piece of shit that was a nightmare to try to use, especially if there were more then one user using it.
It appears that Microsoft has taken the complaints of users (well, complaints I've had for quite some time anyway) and worked on a new GUI that addresses these concerns. There's no reason the GUI should look the same it did back in Word95.
One of my big problems is that the toolbar is too complex. There are too many submenu's, trying to customize it so it displays relevant things (and keeping it's settings which was always buggy) was always a chore. The whole "let's hide most of the menu in the drop-down menu" thing was annoying. Now with it being in the toolbar represented via graphics, with a very small amount of parent menus, I'll be able to find what I want much more easily. This is a good thing(TM).
Is it different? Sure. Will some people be confused? Definitely. Is the difference a great enough improvement to deal with the confusion? IMO, most definitely.
Now if only they'd do something about those damn Virus-writer (sorry, "Macros") and make it less bloated and buggy.
And this is from one screenshot alone. Totally cluttered, horribly inconsistent and bordering on unusable.
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.
They already tried that one with the help, it didn't help.
At least with menus, you can browse around hunting for what you want, instead of a more wonderful Text adventure interface.
You: "I want to know how to make that green thing have red bits around it"
CLIPPY!: "It looks like your trying to murder kermit, please select your favorite weapon"
Your right though, available operations should be context sensitive and intuitive, but done in a clean enough way to not distract the user, nor hide themselves too well.
MS got closer by having the common menus expand by default after you use them once, but thats too fixed, the common menus for the task at hand should be available as you use them, and should highlight their functionality when your hunting (mini previews maybe?).
Putting too much emphasis on the right mouse button is also wrong, some people NEED an initial click button on screen to know that something is available, otherwise the feature WILL remain illusive forever.
liqbase
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!
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
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.)
15 years ago, you say? Huh. Where did you get your time machine?
Anm
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."
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?
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
What's really needed instead of configurable toolbars or ones with lots of options is a most-recently-used bar. So I could have an empty bar with Spotlight style search, and I type in "font c" and pick "font color" item. Or select it from the menu. Then it's on my recently used bar until it gets pushed off.
Really for most documents I only use a few tools, and I use them a lot. But these change over time (drafting, editing, proofing, etc) but I'm WAY too lazy to only configure the bar with JUST those few tools and then go into the configure... panel and choose more each time, which takes way too long.
I think what Microsoft was trying to do is have everything one-click away. So they started by putting 10 toolbars, but then people can't find what they are looking for. This new interface represents a compromise, where people can find what they want because they are grouped by function (with the other functions not visible). But what happens when you are reviewing changes to a form with headers/footers or something? You'll be clicking all around and panels will be changing and flying around everywhere!
My big beef with the office programs is that the vertical space, which is by far the most important, is literally 25% full of toolbars and junk! All I really need is a small 24 pixel-tall bar with 10 of the most recent tools on it, and a search field / 'start' button / or menu to find what tools are out there.
Theoretically, yes, so long as those 16- or 32-bit displays were still used with a plain terminal interface. Obviously if you're doing image work, it's a feature upgrade. Neither of these are usability improvements though. The new displays could be used by other systems to improve usability – for example by providing more advanced colour hinting or whatever – but they do not, in themselves, aid it.
I mainly agree with this, particularly in your particular niche (obviously the alternatives are useful in different contexts too) of desktop computer usage. OpenGL is a bad example in the context you use it, since it's effect on the interface is purely cosmetic — the fact that it runs faster is valid, but no more valid than saying that buying a faster computer will make it more usable. This is not really what this is about.
I must've been missing some clarity there — the glitz I was referring to was in the Windows interface, not the OSX one. I felt the parent post of my last post was accusing MS of ripping off Apple on the sole basis that they had a nice-looking gradient on the widgets, and was completely disregarding the fact that the actual functionality and layout was completely different.
I think I may have come across as hating OSX, which is just not the case. I did say that Exposé's letting you see window contents was an "innovation", for a start. But there is a lot of lumping praise onto Apple where they don't deserve it, and there is a lot of making fun of MS where they don't deserve it, and I think that the (very numerous) shortcomings of OSX need to be mentioned from time-to-time.
But I don't hate OSX. I like OSX. I think it does a lot of things right. There's a large "Apple can do no wrong" feeling buzzing around sometimes though, and it just simply isn't true.
Actually, MS says to use the standard dialogs so that that you're consistent with the OS. The thing is, Office is usually a prototype for the next OS dialog, so whatever goes into office eventually goes into the OS too, and if you're using the standard dialog, you get that when the OS does as well.
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