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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."
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New File Format - This as you know is the area that is most near and dear to my heart. We are finally fully opening up our file formats in Office. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will all three use new XML formats as their default formats. These formats will be fully documented and anyone can leverage them to build solutions, or even to build a competitive application. If you're interested in this topic, just keep reading my blog (and look through all my previous entries.
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This infuriates me. They act as if they were the ones who came up with the idea of a new open format for office applications, and then talk about how near and dear to their heart it is. This sounds more like a hallmark commercial than a msdn blog
4) Keep their current interface, and attract all the previous Office users who cannot stand the new interface with all this "ribbon" baloney.
The ribbon is a huge mistake that flies in the face of almost every UI design principle. The fact that all the menus change depending on both the tab you are currently on *and* the document you are writing, means that all gains you get from your motor memory is lost, you will have to *constantly* be reading the menu and taking double takes to make sure you are doing what you think you are doing.
I think one of three things will happen:
Despite the history of option 3, I think the fact that this UI is such a piece of crap that we may have a real chance at 1 or 2 this time.
As a seldom user of Word Processors (both Word and OpenOffice) I have to say that I hate how much digging I have to do to find things on the menus. Where do I look to add footnotes? where do I change the Footers? How do I turn this into columns again? At least if there was some sense to where these tools were buried, I might be able to find them. The changes to the Word menus is enough to make me consider using MS-Office again. (for the 1 document a month that I produce).
I know most people don't care, but Word still can't properly typeset a document. Type an "fi", and you'll see what I mean (they should change into a single glyph). Even OS X's TextEdit (similar to Notepad on windows) does it. Hyphenation in Word is totally jacked. Just try to full justify a document - all the spacing is incorrrect because it doesn't properly hyphenate words. Maybe I'm all wrong, and they'll have fixed this in Office 12. I guess I shouldn't prejudge, right?
or because...
...
C: The old interface is complicated
D: They ran out of actual features to add
E: The code base is too hacked so non-cosmetic changes are too difficult
F:
G: profit!
Seriously their old interface has dozens of toolbars with rows and rows of icons, some of which come and go as you click on things. *If* you spent hours customizing it you could get something minimal and/or usable *for you*. It was complicated and ugly.
The new interface has all the actions for a particular user-centric task. Yes, you have to keep flipping tabs to do things but it's clear which tab you should be on, and on each tab it's easy to find the action you want. Most people probably had to hunt around in the menus anyway to find obscure things, now they just stay open as a big fat tabbed-toolbar area instead.
I think it's a great change for something so complicated and with so many actions. I would also add a small global area for the last N tools/actions used though, to gracefully handle the case of when you do something that would have you switching back and forth tabs.
A new interface!? (gasp!)
Think of all the money that's going to go into have to retrain users how to use office apps all over again.
Now that Star/OpenOffice look more like Word than the Office 12, maybe it's more cost effective to skip Office 12 and jump right to Star/OpenOffice route!
Seriously though, I find it interesting that there is talk of the training cost when switching to Star/Openoffice, while each version of office moves everything all around so I can find things...all in the name of earnings - opps I mean productiviity improvement.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Whenever i hear whining about *NIX desktops apps not having a consistent interface, i point people to Office and Messenger.
I agree though, this seems to be change for the sake of change. I don't really see how that UI can be much easier for an user to, well, use, but it surely looks a lot better. Even if it completely destroys all Windows UI conventions so far.
The new UI and killer features is an attempt to rectify the situation... with totally new ui, users feel like they could get left behind if they don't upgrade.
I find myself wondering, would Office have a new and improved interface if OpenOffice didn't exist? What incentive would Microsoft have to make their product better without the competition there? Whether OpenOffice gains any significant market share, it sets the bar a bit higher for Microsoft. OpenOffice will continue to improve and nip at the heels of MS. If they don't give people a reason to pay the big bucks, eventually they'll stop doing so.
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The autocomplete feature is a *very dangerous* thing to have turned on in Excel by default. Unfortunately, no one knows about it until it bites him in the ass. Now and then we'll have to enter a list of ticker symbols into a column in Excel. If the next ticker symbol is similar to the previous one, autocomplete will automatically fill in the last ticker symbol. If you're working at a brisk pace, it is very easy to notice this error. The end result is that you can get a screwed up portfolio statement because Excel fscked up your tickers.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
This item is a great example of how not only office, but Longwait will be hailed despite the products probable weaknesses and continued wholesale theft of consumer priviledges. Sadly, millions of consumer will gladly overpay for the priveledge of having the control of their computers handed over to another corporation.
-What's the software license like? Hmm, probably more restrictive than the scary license on SP3.
-How much does that feature cost? Am I authorized to use it for one year or more? Can I redistribute it?
-Open document format? Hmmm me thinks it lacks interoperability. Wait, don't tell me the interop problem isn't Microsoft's right?
-And it's OO.org's problem THEY aren't innovative enough.
-Overpromising more features that will be fixed "the next service pack."
The good news is I'm guaranteed software maintenance employment as long as Microsoft continues to make these crappy products. Sadly though, it's sure to become the equivalent of a janitor in terms of salary, ubiquity and priviledge.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Run Excel as a client/server app.
Is my crack habit out of control, or is that 40-year old technology that was replaced a couple of decades ago by n-tier solutions?
The chutzpah involved in pushing this as some kind of new technology, itself, is some kind of Killer App, where the victim is the market.
Patents to all t3h h0meez, for this startling, innovative, heretofore unseen wonder!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I don't mind spending five minutes editing a well-documented file format, ONCE, to get X to work.
I do mind having to spend ten minutes digging through random menu options to get a software program to not do something dumb.
Um, I would qualify X 'auto-detecting' resolutions and refresh rates that could reduce my monitor to smoldering plastic as 'somthing dumb' too, and calling it 'well-documented' is the exaggeration of the day. Tools->options->autoCorrect doesn't take 10 minutes, does it?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff MS does poorly, but Office is not one of them (actually, I think Office:Mac is the finest version, but thats a tangent). Seems like we've crossed the line from honest critique to irrational hatred...
Yeah, that's really going to help the average user.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It wasn't Slashdotted. The effect hit yesterday, almost a full day before the post was made here. This is what happens when thousands of people go to download ISOs from a handful of servers at the same time. Speeds dropped from more than 700KB/sec for the first few to jump in to under 60KB/sec for those who started late within about six hours.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I am doing a diagram right now in OO "Draw" - not quite the same as Visio in terms of features but then it's not trying to outguess me either at every turn. Frankly I far prefer Draw to Visio for most diagramming work.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "No integration" either, since OO can read/write MS documents and also integrates quite nicley within the OO suite of products.
And Microsoft having more UI designers than OO does developers? I'd sweep that fact under the rug given what they've produced thus far. Not to mention that if you bother to read "The Mythical Man Month" (or just work as a software developer for more than a few months) you quickly realize that someone with a lot fewer UI designers is going to be a lot more effective in the long run.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All Microsoft would have to do if they had no competition was just keep pushing upgrades that provide only subtle changes but create incompatibilities for older versions. A certain portion of their sales would be because of people who get automatically upgraded because of software assurance. The rest would be dragged along because of a need to maintain compatibility.
That strategy is ultimately more profitable because it requires less investment in real devleopment effort.
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This is a very nice product, and Microsoft has proven once again why they dominate all the Offices around the world, but for some reason half the posts on this board are bashing this new product?
If OO came out with a version even comparable to Office 12 I am certain the posts would mainly be praise about how good it looked.
Myself I cant wait to try it, for a few months I was using OO, but then one day I tried to open 3 documents at once...Now I renamed my Office Writer shortcut to 'Export to PDF'.. mainly cause thats all its good for. Once Office 12 is released I can finally uninstall OO :)