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."

Comments

This is disgusting

[denverradiosucks]

[QUOTE]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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

You forgot option 4

[brunes69]

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:

1. Users will spurn Offce 12 and not upgrade, keeping their current version
2. Users will spurn Office 12 and switch to alternatives
3. Users will take it up the ass as usual.

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.

Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains

[ThaFooz]

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...

Default File Format Fraud!

[Nom du Keyboard]

By making the new default file format their so-called open XML format, MS is ensuring that by default you will save you documents in a format which, at this moment, cannot be read by any other word processing program, including older versions of Microsoft Office.

Yeah, that's really going to help the average user.