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Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1 Is Out
lastberserker writes "The first official beta of the next MS Office is out. PC Magazine already has review with screenshots. Check these blogs for more details on new UI, new file format, and the killer app; plus much more in your friendly neighborhood Wikipedia." From the PC Mag review: "Instead of the cluttered, hard-to-navigate interface that sprouted up haphazardly over the past 20 years, Office 12 introduces a new interface based on tabs that organize sets of functions under headings such as 'Write,' 'Page Layout,' and 'Review,' plus a combination toolbar-and-menu called the ribbon, which displays a different set of icons and menu items depending on the tab selected, and displays different sets of icons depending on whether you're working with text, graphics, tables, or other kinds of data."
FTFA: "Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect, and you still have to learn their sometimes-obscure inner logic before you can master them." It still thinks it can create my document better than I can. No thanks. doc
The new interface has nothing to do with being better. They have a competitor which looks just like it... Coincidence huh? Bollocks it is. The new interface is to break that link. Car manufacturers do exactly the same.
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One thing I will give MS credit for, is the ability to make their GUIs look like their old GUIs (so my XP machine looks a lot like Windows 98 to the casual observer). Maybe there is a "look like that crappy old version of Word that you're used to" option. That would be ok.
* Please don't suggest I switch programs and use something like Quark, InDesign, or a free and better WP program. I am forced by the tyranny of standards to use Word.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Let this be a lesson to the openOffice people. Many people, including myself, have said time and again that openOffice should not be copying Microsoft Office, but instead try to be original and just be a great office suite. By copying MS Office, you are just letting Microsoft define the rules of the game, and you'll always be playing catch-up.
Now office 12 is out, and they've completely redesigned the interface. openOffice have three options:
1) Keep their current interface, and risk looking very outdated in a few years.
2) Put masses of effort and wasted time into copying the new interface, and let MS keep defining the rules of the game.
3) Start to be original and concentrate on making a great and original product.
All the above applies to file formats as well. So much of the effort but into being compatible with MS's horrible formats could have been better spent elsewhere.
Firefox did not become a great browser by copying IE, it did so by being a well designed product and adding original, easy-to-use features.
What are the training costs and migrations costs with this new Office suite? If you just are about to spend some retraining costs you might as well spend it on a free alternative with no vendor lockin, especially since youre changing document format. Why lock oneself in again.
Most of my users know Office by their picture memory, they never read what the toolbars say. The change for Office 12 will be bigger than the change to OpenOffice. I suspect thats the case for most users. Its going to be fun watching Microsoft talk about costs for switching to OpenOffice and at the same time tout the virtue of migrating to Office 12, without mentioning the very same costs.
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First - I love Microsoft Office. I have been a Microsoft Office lover since Excel was released on Mac. I also love Open Source, but still prefer my Microsoft Office 2004 for MacOS X.
Secondly - Office 12 is suicide. Ordinary users hate GUI changes. It doesn't matter if the new GUI is good or not. There are probably tens of thousands of users here on Slashdot that agree on the problem of persuading people to make even a small jump from Windows 2000 to XP - or even worse the impossible switch to Linux or Mac.
Microsoft fumbling with Vista and Office 12 is to become the worst business miscalculation ever made, and our grandchildren will read about it in Economics 101.
Meh. I think the Ribbon functionality, which is merely a 2005 version of the text help menus in Wordstar et al from the 80's, will actually remove a lot of the frustration of using Office for the casual user such as me.
The point in its favour are:
- no more crappy small icons on THIRTY possible toolbars
- all commands are available in the ribbon
- the ribbon scales to lower and higher resolutions
- irrelevant crap is hidden until you active something that makes it relevant
It's probably the best item of UI engineering to come out of Microsoft ever, fixing the Office toolbar nightmare.
Is it ideal? Who knows. Maybe there is a better UI for providing access to a thousand possible commands within an application in a point-and-click manner, but nobody has bothered to implement it yet.
I have found reading the comments on this thread extremely funny. What I thought to myself reading the article is that the Slashdot crowd with either...
a.) Heckle the new interface as looking stupid/being ignorant/taking up too much space on the screen
b.) Talk about how the interface change will be an opportunity for OpenOffice
I am not surprised to be proved correct. Here is what is really going to happen with the new Office. First, they will have an option in there to make it look like Office XP/2003 for those that want it. I watched a video with an interface designer from MS who said as much and it makes sense - they have always provided a way to make newer software look/behave like it's previous versions (2000->XP interface for example). Second, as they have incorporated more and more new features to Office over the years the menus and toolbars has gotten very cluttered. I find it makes perfect sense to me for Office to step back and reasses/reorganize the interface and how people use it to make getting to these options a little more intutitive as well as take advantage of the increased screen realestate that many newer monitors/flatpanels provide. I have an LCD where, at my resolution, the toolbar icons are almost too small these days. I would also like the idea of Office tailoring it's interface to the task I am trying to accomplish and helping me see what options are most common and really relevant and useful for my current what I am trying to do. This is, by many accounts, the peak of Office and it's userbase so if there is ever a time that they could leverage that to have people learn a better and more impressive interface it is now.
I like the new interface and I am going to buy the $150 Student/Teacher version when it comes out. I think that, unlike the differnce between 97, 2000, XP and 2003 where the feature differences are about office and document collaboration and other rather unsexy little sorts of things many users did not need/use, this version is about a nice looking new interface and capabilities to more easily create nicer looking new documents, charts and presentations with more eye candy. I think that you are all wrong - they changed this in a way that will get people excited about Office again and that they can easily tell the difference between it and the old versions in such a way that will have some word-of-mouth advertising between friends and coworkers who will show it off to others and talk about it. For those IT people who posted - I expect there will be a demand for the first time in years from your users and managers will be asking for it and about it.
Instead of rejoicing abuot their coming fall you should realize that this is what MS needed to do to really address OpenOffice and further differentiate themselves and their new version. I really think it will be a large sales success in ways that XP and 2003 was not and a new standard for the other suites to follow. And, most ironically, it will be it for the exact reasons that you all think it will fail.