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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.
...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
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.
It looks like they used Microsoft Access 12 for their server's database.
Here's another site with the images:
y 1015.aspx
http://bink.nu/photos/news_article_images/categor
[)amien
...here.
Yes
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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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Even Less of the screen actually showing my document! Hooray progress!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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.
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!!!
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
[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]
. . .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.
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
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.
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.
You must be new here. It's always Windows fault.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
15 years ago, you say? Huh. Where did you get your time machine?
Anm
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/
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."
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?
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.
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
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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