Slashdot Mirror
Visual Tour of Office 2007 Beta 2
feminazi writes "Computerworld has a review and visual tour of the newest installment of Office. No more toolbars & menus; those have been replace with 'ribbons.' Of the various products in the suite, Word is the most changed. Styles are easier to invoke, but no easier to create or understand. A couple of the redeeming characteristics is the ability to save as PDF and XPS and an improved Track Changes. Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet -- and new and better visualization abilities. Lots new in Outlook including multiple calendars and direct support for RSS feeds. And the apps all work together better than before. From the article: 'The major change in Beta 2 was the introduction of Office SharePoint Server.' This means that Sharepoint Server is required, but it also means more & better collaboration and advanced search abilities are supported."
I believe the summary is misleading - Office 2007 will not require Sharepoint server (i.e. for an individual/independant user), though it will be needed to take advantage of it's collaborative features.
Here's a laundry list, but I don't think the stains will come out:
This is an extension of the abstration of the chevron menus... alter the user's environment based on usage. It doesn't work. I've used environments like this and it takes getting used to. You think it was confusing trying to show people how to use Microsoft products when the pulldown menus changed seemingly randomly? Wait until their "ribbons" change based on cursor position.
Hover mode for tooltips, maybe. But this will confuse users. I think it's clever, but I don't need clever. Also: ..., The preview mode is also available with other
icons in the ribbon, such as font and font size, but oddly not
for the paragraph-control icons.... So, a potentially
confusing behavior (feature) of the new WORD is inconsistent.
So, for those who recognize and like the style "preview" can be
confused by the styles not given preview stature for their icons.
WTF? If I've got anyone in IT putting 1,000,000 rows in a spreadsheet, I'm seriously considering demoting them. If you're going to have a million rows, get a database.
Microsoft trots this out every new release. It's never turned out to be true, it won't be true this time. Microsoft does however get the added benefit of requiring yet another additional piece of software (SharePoint Server) tying customers more tightly with the Microsoft leash.
NOTE: do not confuse greater interaction functionality with work together better. This is an important distinction.
Go read the seven page article. It describes an ugly mess of a new suite of products. When customers ask for simpler, noone listens, at least not Microsoft. For example, you want simplicity? You now must choose from one of seven bundling options (sounds like the new Vista): Basic; Home and Student; Standard; Small Business; Professional; Professional Plus; and Enterprise.
The listed prices range from $149 (student) to $499 (Professional Plus) with no price listed for the required SharePoint Server (volume licensing only). Oh, subtract $170 or so for the upgrade version.
If you or your company considers this, get ready for more incompatiblities with previous generations, and retro installation of plugins. That's okay within a company (to some), but think carefully about the impedance mismatch with the rest of the world.
Really.
if your data set is a million rows, you probably want to consider using something other than spreadsheets. I'm fond of the current limit on excel, it forces analysts to think about their tool selection sometimes.
"Ribbons" = "Tabs"
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The public beta 2 is actually availableto the public today.
Seriously - MS, openoffice is carving away the "Office 97 provides all our needs" segment & the collaboration market you're so eagerly chasing is... well lets say I don't think its got the potential you think it does.
I have a request tho' - I'd like the click+scrolly wheel zooms in a different direction for word & ie bug fixed. Please?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
spread out over seven pages. Why don't we get a warning for that in the summary, like we do with sites that require registration? like "SITE.COM[in desperate need of increased pageviews]"
This is going to confuse every single non-technical user on the planet, while benefiting pretty much no one. I can hear the questions now: "Where did they put the File menu?"
This space intentionally left blank.
Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet
....? use a fucking relational database! I don't want to think how blazingly slow that big of a spreadsheet would be, not to mention any dataset that large is going to almost certainly be something that is supposed to be used by more than one person at a time
what kind of a jackass
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
UI looks like MSN Messenger!
Is it just me, or do these new "ribbons" look alot like Apple Works? I RTFA, and it didn't seem to justify upgrading for the average user - which although a geek, I include myself (I still prefer my text editor!). Office 2007 appears to be Office 2000 (98 too) with a tighter leash to M$, with a few bells and whistles most people won't use.
I heard that the level of depression on the Office team is so bad that many have had to seek professional counciling. There are been a number of attempted suicides and most of the team just wants to leave.
If I've got anyone in IT putting 1,000,000 rows in a spreadsheet, I'm seriously considering demoting them. If you're going to have a million rows, get a database.
So those guys in R&D doing basic signal analysis should be demoted because they're using excel to plot some quick-and-dirty graphs using the 1M data points they've collected? Interesting.
People are going to think of ms office as much more than a set of standalone desktop applications, and more of an end to end system.
This makes sense in this day, and is a very effective way for MS to retain traction. The fact is that while the diversity of non-MS and particularly open source solutions is great, it's also a huge detraction since many people may choose an almost as good, almost as open solution over a confusing array of alternatives.
The last time I dabbled in the MS world, it wasn't particularly cohesive, but I have to wonder if MS is making strides with everything less "hack-y" under the covers. I notice more cohesion in the open source world as well, and am looking forward to what the future may bring in terms of rich content editing and collaboration, which will surely be exciting as long as the milieu remains open and competitive.
On the one hand, people complain about how Swing "looks funny" on Windows. Meanwhile, every damn release of Office has Microsoft deviating further and further from their stock UI...
1st response for a lame post
WTF? But I like my menu bars and toolbars, thank you very much. Menu bars has been a part of Windows since 1985 (and the Mac since 1983 thanks to the Lisa). I think most users would have a hard time understanding "ribbons"; I don't like it when programs try to be "smart" and hide features away from me. There must be an option to use the old menus and toolbars in Office 2007; if not, then I'm not buying it.
I find that Vista and Office 2007 seems to change menus around and get rid of long-standing GUI features for no apparent usability reason. What's wrong with the old Windows interface? To me, the Windows 2000 interface was the perfect user interface; I still use Classic on my Windows XP partition, and even my KDE desktop on FreeBSD is reminiscent of Windows 2000. I used Vista for a while; I'm not too impressed. Microsoft can take my copy of Office 2000 (I'd still happily be using Office 97 if somebody didn't give me his upgrade disks) and Windows XP when it pries it from my cold, dead fingers. When XP and Office 2000 become obsolete, I would have long switched to FreeBSD and OS X with OpenOffice by then (I'm already a FreeBSD user, too; I just need to buy a Mac to make the switch complete).
Why must they change the interface when the old one worked so well?
My company is a TAP and early adoption program member.
Been using Office 12 for about 2 months and so far I've got mixed feelings. The GUI is, well, pretty....people see it and immediately want to beta test it but then get all pissy when Outlook tasks won't synch up with their PDA.
Its nice, but is far from stable.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
So Word 2007 introduces yeat another obscure acronym?
What the hell is XPS?
Google says X-Ray Photoemission Spectroscopy. That is it's ony result, and it is taken from the place I would have gone next: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPS.
This new set of MS software (Vista, New Office) that they've been working hard on for the last 5 years looks really impressive! It can even beat.. I dunno.. Intel Itanium CPU in adoption speed and popularity! Good luck to them!
/me goes to Apple store to salivate a bit more over higher-end MacBooks
(Long sound of ship-horn. Bubbles)
I mean, there's nothing there that OpenOffice hasn't had for like -3 years.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I assume OO.o won't be "copying" any of them, correct?
If there is one thing Apple Pages got right (and trust me, there is only one or two things), it's the implementation of styles. I don't think I ever touched them in Word until Pages made the whole thing a lot clearer.
The scary thing is that the concept isn't exactly foreign to me -- anyone who has used CSS knows the principle. I just can't believe I ignored it for so long.
- oZ
// i am here.
I think when a company has this kind of leverage over consumers, it should be considered anticompetitive and illegal. What's the downside to tightening the threshold of the definition of monopoly?
Having developed a number of Swing-based applications used internally at an insurance company (by people in various departments), the main complaint was not about the look or feel of Swing. Instead, most users complained how long it took to start up the apps, and how slow unresponsive the GUIs would be.
In short, most of the complains were those that are leveled against Java in general. I'm well aware that a decent Java VM with a JIT compiler can outperform C++ in some cases, and that fairly fast Swing interfaces can be created with much care and effort. However, in the real world we don't have weeks to fine-tune and optimize our Swing UIs.
It is good that Microsoft is willing to experiment with this new UI approach. They do have the resources to do so. If it turns out to be beneficial, then similar work can be done on OpenOffice. If it turns out to be a major hassle for most people, then OpenOffice is already ahead. Either way, it will be a useful experiment, for both Microsoft and the open source community.
There hasn't been GUI hegemony within the Windows community for ages. At least with Windows 3.1 it was mostly the Common Controls and OWL. But since Windows 95 we have had some GTK+ apps, Java-based apps, WinForms apps, iTunes, WinAmp, RealPlayer, and a host of others with their own GUIs. There hasn't been a consistent GUI on Windows for over a decade.
>
> what kind of a jackass
It looks like you are trying to implement a relational database in Excel!
Would you like to...
I'm sure there will be lots of interesting commentary here on Office 2007, and I'm sure a lot of it will be along the lines of "New interface is goofy/sucks/bad for users/too different/etc." and/or "OpenOffice rules, why go MS?" and so on.
Which is all fine and good. Really. But the changes in Office aren't targeted at power users. In fact, it probably is true that the new UI will frustrate power users. So, why did MS bother?
Because for every power user, there are 100s of regular users. They want to do more with Word, Excel, etc, but have a hard time finding the features they want. So, this is the first step in this direction. It won't be perfect, but what does do is break from tradition in some interesting ways.
Believe me that MS has been sticking this in front of users and doing usability studies. And I'm willing to bet that enough regular users think that the new UI isn't so bad, that it's pretty cool after you get used to it, and it's easier to find features and play around with them.
All the live preview featues and ribbon bars and so on are to make it easier to regular users to goof around with changes without making them permanent. Also, remember that this is Beta2, so it isn't clear that all the live preview features are in yet, so it could very well be that paragrpah sytle previews will be in the final product.
Finally, I think it is important to note something about the ribbons. The ribbons don't change. This is not the custom menu idea, where menus "adapted to users" whihc just translated to stuff moved on the menus, and you don't know why. You choose a ribbon, you get the tools for that ribbon period. They don't move around.
Will it work? Hard to say. But I like the idea that the idea of Office applications is being looked at in a fresh way.
McCullough and Wilson wrote a paper about Office back in 1997 which ripped Excel to shreds on its statistical accuracy and random number generation. They reissued the paper in 2002, and Excel still had the same problems in Office2000 and OfficeXP. Many of the worst problems were still there in Office2003. Have they actually fixed the horrible errors?
1) Word's default font is now Calibri, not Arial. Calibri is a highly readable font.
2)The File menu is gone; now you have to somehow guess that the big icon in the upper left corner is its replacement.
3)The "most recently used" list is no longer limited to the last nine files
4)Track Changes now won't flag as "different" text that is simply moved, which is smart.
5) Ability to export documents to PDF and to their own pdf-like format, whatever that is.
These "Ribbons" sound like the changing palettes in Office 2004 for the Mac. I hate them. Because the palettes change, you have different functions in the same place depending on what you're doing. This makes it very difficult to get used to where you need to put your mouse. It's for that reason that programs are supposed to grey out menu items rather than change the menu - you get used to locations for a specific item and can quickly navigate there. Menus have the advantage of being out of the way, displaying the keyboard equivalent, etc. Palettes are great for tools that need to display visual feedback (such as a color picker), not as replacements for menu items. Look at Photoshop - practically no menu items are duplicated in palettes. Yet again, Microsoft shows a lack of understanding of basic human interface elements.
HOHOHOHOHOHOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHEEHEE...Snort.. Sniff, whew! Stop it. Your killing me.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
Actually, this is kind of handy despite what you are thinking. I once had to chart a large amound of data that was just x and y values. I needed to dump that data into some statistical program just to seperate it into useable values. A specialized program designed for processing data couldn't handle all of that data. Then again this was a special occasion.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
me: "Why can't we use Macs or other word processors at least?"
IT: "training costs. Costs too much to show people how to use different software. that's why we're all Office and all microsoft."
"training costs" excuse.... we hardly knew thee...
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I work at a company with well over 25,000 employees. Way to plan for catastrophic failure and massive support problems. I think we will pass on this dictum of yours -- based as it is on the presumption of incompatibility, which we really ought not to be accepting.
Like any monoculture, IT monocultures are vulnerable to attack, as well. Not that someone using Windows would have any trouble with that...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
So they are still trying to lock everyone into Exchange?
I predict this will not work. If the email in Outlook 2007 doesn't get much better IMAP support, I will push harder in my network to abandon it and replace it with Thunderbird or something else. And if the Outlook calendar doesn't fully support iCalendar for import, export AND remote WebDAV/CalDAV calendars, then it will not be hard to convince users that the limitations of Outlook are much worse than the bugs in Sunbird or Google Calendar.
Wow! I can't wait for all these great new features that Office will let me do to make my documents look great!
1. Change my fonts.
2. Change my font sizes.
3. Tell Word where a picture should sit on the page (c00l!)
4. Change my margins (I never new I could do that!)
5. 1 million rows in Excel so I can finally tell my database to kiss off.
All this and more with a great, sure-to-be-lagless preview as I mouse over EVERYTHING!
But don't take my Word (tehe) for it. This video tells me how my documents can LOOK GREAT!
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
I've heard that there is also going to be an Iconoclastic Demagogue version for the folks who don't fit into any of the other catagories.
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
Me too. I've never run into anyone who wants the menu items they don't regularly use to "vanish" or be available only when you choose to manually expand them. We all hate this feature. It doesn't simplify things, it complicates them by making us guess where everything is. Duh. Hint to MS and anyone else: When it's a feature we rarely use, we want to be able to find it on the occasions for which we do need it.
Another hint: people don't honestly need a "cut" and "paste" icon on your ribbon or toolbar or whatever. Even the people who use those wouldn't miss them much. Heck, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V and so on are among the only UI elements that are relatively consistent across windows apps.
Now we've got "ribbons" and right-click menus and so on all changing according to contexts that we can't always guess at. Do I have a set of "paragraph" options for this text in my table, or will this border be for the table cell? Ack. Pfft.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You stated this suite is an ugly mess, but I must disagree. Microsoft's reasoning for making the Office product suite so large is to assist businesses. If you don't require anything beyond a basic spreadsheet and word processor, why did you purchase MS Office? Word Perfect and Quattro Pro work fine if you want to spend money, or download one of the free substitutes. The public confuses this product as something they need, instead of as a major business productivity enhancement. MS Wordpad is fine for the Junior High book report. The public is asking for simpler because nobody is learning the new features! By using SharePoint with office, you can implement a decent document library system in minutes. I guess just look at the rest of the features and see why they charge so much for this.
:-)
My point is, if it doesn't suit your needs, don't purchase it. But please don't dog on an otherwise decent product. I do have to agree on your comment about Excel spreadsheets though
Damn, we won't get the ribbons until 2017! I may as well go out and buy copies of Office 2007 for all my OpenOffice-using friends now!
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
Probably OOo will copy some of the new UI features. Even if the features are not a good idea, Microsoft users will expect the UI to look that way, so OOo will have to follow.
I don't see what problem anybody would have with that. Microsoft copied liberally from its competitors to create Microsoft Office; now that they have a near-monopoly, why should other people be prevented from copying from them?
From TFA: "The ribbons have a dual purpose: to highlight features that users are likely to use most often or want most (but have trouble finding), and to promote features at the point they're most useful." Aparrantly Clippy is now a "ribbon". I, for one, am glad they have included this feature. Clippy always knew what I wanted to learn about in Office, and I am sure this will be just as helpful and un-annoying.
P.S.,
This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
God does not exist.
Help each other, for god helps no one.
Word
Outlook
Excel
Powerpoint
Hmmm.
Swing slow?
x .jsp
http://www.javalobby.org/articles/swing_slow/inde
I'll probably be modded down for this...
...because most companies are going to adopt it if they haven't already purchased a Software Assurance agreement with Microsoft. It's the way of things - assimilate. Resistance is futile.
But all kidding aside, most people in the business world can't find or have to be trained to find the features in Office that they have been paying for the last 10 years. Ever met an Excel guru? They're few and far between and usually harassed by everyone in their department or company. That's not a problem with most slahdot'ers so there's no possible way any of you will benefit from the new features.
But you will assimilate. Oh yes... you will assimilate.
I used spreadsheets to process loads of data samples, hundreds of thousands of points and frankly excel or any spreadsheet is ideal for preliminary data processing, as long as it handles the data. The grandparent should get his prejudices out of the way the fewer arbitrary limits any software has the better, what it's actually used for is irrelevant and up to the users.
Deleted
MS Word is a pain in the butt to do custom graphics with menu options all over for the most basic styles. Infact there is one post here about someone writing documentation in html and just saving it as a .doc.
The site is down so I can't see these new features like the ribbons. One of the common complaints about MS-Office is that many users request features that are already there but just hidden under a sea of menu's. MS tried with office2k and 2k3 to delete uncommon menu items in order for users to see the more options which utterly failed. Lets hope Ribbons work. I hope more advanced features like graphics and styles will be easier to implement as a result.
BUsinesses still use Office97 so of course MS wants to innovate to help users switch. Good for Microsoft.
I would rather have MS try to redo Office in order to sell more copies to corporate america rather than raise licensing costs in order to force upgrades.
As much as I dislike windows and Microsoft's business practices I will say MS Office is a wonderfull app and one of their gems. It needs a UI overhaul and more groupware collaboration is what alot of IT departments need. I hope with VBA you can customize it too.
No I am not a MSFan boy either if you read my other posts.
http://saveie6.com/
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Plagarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Insert your own snide copy-related wisecrack here.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
So it looks like we may have to wait for Beta 3...
no matter what arbitrary limit is set, someone is going to hit the boundry and be upset because they could use "just a little more".
AKA "Reasonable limits aren't."
It is better to make your limits be unreasonably large than to discover they were unreasonably small. Best is to not have them at all.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Uh, click here.
A spatial interface like the ribbon will require serious retraining whenever that spatial interface changes. Microsoft may change it for non-productive reasons like adding more eye candy to boost sales or for more significant reasons like adding (and removing) functionality. Whatever the reason, the interface will change in the future and any motor memory you have built will be lost (or worse cause you to select unintended options).
Most of the user interface studies Microsoft quotes describe how easy it is to adapt to the interface from a menu based system. But that's as shortsighted an argument as judging 'file format' compatability based only on whether a new verison of Word can easily convert your old documents. While that is an issue, compatability judgement should consider the future and how much has to be thrown away when future changes come around. No doubt the 'ribbon' has two dozen patents on it so only Microsoft will be able to provide true forward compatability, but with something like a Word processor I don't think MS will have the patience, restraint, and concern to make sure future interface changes are as motor-friendly and compatible with older interface users.
While I'm sure it's fun to play with for a few days, the Office 'ribbon' is not a tool that I'd want to get hooked on. To my knowledge, the ribbon tech is unique to Microsoft Office. Will we be seeing ribbons in Print Shop Pro and Mathmatica using standard OS services? Will the ribbon organization be consistent across applications? Why would Microsoft want to chuck and undermine the standard GUI on their OS product with a horribly non-standard, incompatible interface like the one in Office? Because it will become like an addiction. Users will be unable to get along without it and unable to give it up for something else.
Perhaps we'll need to start a twelve step program like Office Anonymous to get people onto a forward compatible product.
At first I didn't like Pages either when I started working with it. But after using it pretty havily I think they just took a different approach on some things and I really like it now.
One of the things I like is how you can have images fixed and located on a given page, or floating along with text. That makes it useful as a DTP or as a Word replacement that handles images more reasonably.
I do also like how they did styles and how quickly you can build an index based on them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would be really interested to see a comparison of Office on the Mac and this new Office, you're right that it seems really similar. Could it be that new Windows Office users will see the same UI mac users have been using for some time now?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everyone seems to complain about the new UI. But is it possible to revert back to the old UI, the same way that Windows XP lets you change the UI back to the old Windows 95 user interface? (Go to Display Properties and change the theme to "Windows Classic")
Yes, I think the spirit of Clippy lives on in the new Office, which is why your document changes as you mouse over ribbon items - it's like a high-tech Ouija board where clippy tries to send you messages from the Great Digital Beyond via subtle font changes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does anyone else think MS changed the UI more to differentiate Office from OpenOffice or StarOffice than to increase usability. I'm not convinced the new UI is more intuitive or easier for new users, but it definitely looks different from other competing (mainly free) office suites. It almost makes me think that's the primary purpose of the new version.
rosewood: "Also, multiple calendars have been available in Outlook for ages. Multiple calendar viewing has been available since 2003 as well. Not the best summary in the world."
Yah. I also noticed this:
TFA: "Among the more significant new features: Excel 2007's new ways of visualizing data. For example, you can use conditional formatting to color the background of cells based on their value..."
That's present at least in Excel 2003, and I think maybe as far back as 2000.
How can someone review Office 2007 for what's new if they don't even know what's in the older versions?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
MSFT patented the new UI, broadly and thoroughly, Apple-style. So if OO.o has the balls to copy it (and face the patent infringement lawsuit immediately), they're welcome to it, I guess.
What's the fuss? I thought we all used OpenOffice, don't we? DONT WE? Free software is better right...right???
In related news, Microsoft has announced the when Vists is eventually released, icons will be called symbols.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Zimbra has collaboration software...
http://zimbra.com/
pieces of it are free, too.
it looks like a nice product.
Thats the worst put, some of these Excel people can be dumb as dirt, but when it comes to Excel, my god they can perform wizardry. As an actual example ive seen at work, there are spreadsheets that hit the 65K limit but they are so key to peoples job functions they find "work arounds", like creating "archive" spreadsheets once they hit the fixed limit and starting a new copy of the sheet that cross references all the archives.
Hell, ive seen people in excel basically create relational databases WITHIN excel. Dont under estimate what these people can come up with, some of its pretty damned scary.
Plus, atleast where I am, we have HUNDREDS of Excel workbooks and pidly ass Access databases that really should be in Oracle or SQL, but at the same time, they work. Our IT department is nowhere big enough to port and maintain each of these solutions to a more robust system. Plus, people creating these systems are pretty damned good at taking ownership of them. However, if they dont create the sheet/DB that last thing they want to do is maintain it. A double edge sword really.
For the most part both Excel and Access are necisarry evils, unless you have a huge IT budget.
http://www.networkmirror.com/UI4q2nIztkpJMyL0/www. computerworld.com/action/article.do%3Fcommand%3Dvi ewArticleBasic%26articleId%3D9000690.html
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Due to high demand the site is temporarily unavailable. Please try it again later.
, , , , , karma elon
Its called Marketing Speak 101. OMG Look!!! We have ONE MILLION ROWS!!! SOOOO MUCH BETTER THAN THE 65K IN THE PREVIOUS VERSION.
I remember people complaining about Excel's row limits in like 1992. It's been the #1 complaint for years, and we're long past the point where you could pretend that it is a hardware issue or something. This single thing is going to sell more upgrades than the last 200 feature combined.
Bottom line is that "marketing speak" (give the users what they want) is better than "programmer speak" --- OMG! INTERNAL LIMITS!!! TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE!!! USE A DB LOLOLOLOL!!!
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Imagine that you open the Office application.
Imagine that you open Your Document, and you see tabs on the top
Imagine a 3d logical structure: each tab contains... A DOCUMENT!
Put all in one: One tab is your presentation letter, the second is your several spreadsheets on project A, the third spreadsheets on project B, the fourth Visio Graphs, the fifth Visual Basic code of the macros in the document, the 7th the HTML version, the 8th, finally, you presentatation of it all.
A dynamic interface that lightly changes depending on the sheet and on the presumed intentions of the creator, one common single file compressed as much as possible, one single application to open. That would be an OFFICE.
There, much better, a whole new set of complaints.
For "regular users" read managers.
... sold!
Your manager will love the new "helpful" ribbon system. And soon as the salesperson comes showing them the wonderful features. "It highlights the tools you need" and "it lets you change the graph styles really easily"!
It's all marketing.
I know the syndrome: I work with a bunch of mechanical engineers and they cling to Excel like a comfort blanket because they'd rather use something they know, even if it involves tons of laborious mouse clicking for operations (like plotting graphs) that are repeated over and over again.
My current version works just fine - why would I pay to upgrade?
I just want to point out that the menus (file, edit, view, etc) were not *replaced* by the new Ribbon.
The old menus still exist, they are just turned off by default with the Ribbon enabled. For die-hard people who don't want to give the ribbon a try, the old interface can easily be brought back.
I also want to point out that there was once a time when people thought WYSIWYG and icons were Bad Things. I see the Ribbon as a possible next step in the evolution of a GUI. Task Panes in 2003 were a great step forward and this might be too.
-David
Ribbons, eh? Well, where i come from, they're called tabs, and they're sooo 2005.
I knew IE would be the last browser to ever get tabs, but jeez, i figured it'd have them at least before Word...
Han shot first.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3524_7-6529451-10.htm l?tag=ss
hehe, my image word is "screwed"...
Is it just me, or do you find that every version of Office seems to get further away from following the system's defined theme/UI.
For example - how the hell does a screen-scraper work out that something looking like four crayon-ed squares is in fact a "File" menu?
What about if you can't use a mouse? The menus let you get to the features anyway, but now there are no menus, are you supposed to remember the shortcuts?
What if you have a limited visual field? Now instead of being able to put all the features you need on a daily basis in the same place so you can find them, they are consistently scattered about the program, meaning you have to switch modes all the time - and heaven forbid you mouse over a table while you are trying to peer at the icons...
And if I have put a high contrast colour scheme in my setup - so that I can read the icons and menus easiest - why the hell should MS office be the only major business app to completely disregard my favoured system theme, and instead use its shiny corporate swoooshy effects on the toolbars, so I can't read them properly - every other major app seems capable of obeying the default system theme - If I use the "Windows Classic" theme, with non-standard colours, it might just be for a reason.
IMHO this fundamental UI changes in Office have more to do with stop-the-office-software-commoditization reasons that graphical-user-interface-design ones
so, what the final user likes or not will have minor impact in MS ( strategical ) product decisions
Funny you should ask all this... given that Microsoft and the Office group are probably the most educated experts in the accessibility field.
As for Screen Scrapers, try looking up something called "Active Accessibility".
Not to mention that apparently you can turn all of this new UI flash off.
Oh, and the high contrast scheme is a special setting in Windows - Office will obey it. Trust me.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Thanks for replying, I'll eat my words (mostly). Anyone with mod points feel free to mod down (my) OP.
I did see somewhere that C|Net reckons the menus can't be forced to reappear - but you can hide the ribbon - but the proof is in the pudding.
However, my comments about obeying the system theme remain. If you fit into one of the predefined categories eg. "High Contrast", then Accessibility will make Office obey - but what if, for example, you are dyslexic, but read better on a pink background. There is some evidence to support that simply changing the colour of "white" improves the ability to read the text. Office won't obey that, because it doesn't fit in to MS' idea of "assistive tech".
I personally don't have too many sight issues, fortunately. However, with the switch from Office XP to Office 2003, I found that the gradient (coupled with the more cartoony look of the icons themselves) made it harder to discern what they were. And I found the blue toolbars when you have Windows in "Fisher Price - Blue" mode lurid, and overly distracting. I searched high and low to make the toolbars flat again so I could see what I was doing, but apparently MS knew better.
Functionality wise, I'm happy with Word '03 - I don't hate the app. (I don't use it any more though - LyX is my new best friend - WISIWIM-U "What I see is what I mean - usually")
Making features easier to find/discover is [apparently] one of the biggest benefits. Word has a zillion features, and most people use about 10.
Anyway, I'd recommend the blog as an interesting read for those people interested in user interface design for a product with hunderds of millions of users.
Girl 2: She is better than ever!
Lisa: She still embodies all the awful stereotypes she did before!
Smithers: But she's got a new hat!
Repo man's always intense.
Outlook works and 'collaborates' quite well with ANY Mail server I just spent a few months maintaining a Java application that sends, amongst other things, ICal attachments to Outllok clients attached to an Exchange server. ICalendar is an RFC, in other words a standard, and its been that way for years. But Exchange mangles any attachment that it sends on to Outlook (used to crash Outlook 2000, now just won't work in Outlook 2003/Exchange 2003) Exchange does not understand the mime type text/calendar. Neither does it accept standard fields in the ICal itself. The company for whom I was doing this application had a trouble ticket with Microsoft and Microsoft openly acknowledged that Exchange server does not understand standard calendar attachments, but that they would not fix it. EVER.
The thing is, if Microsoft would bring out a version of Office that was bug free, no one would ever buy upgrades. Even with this snazzy new interface (or perhaps because of it) I cannot see it becoming an overnight success until years have passed and companies have to upgrade because Microsoft no longer offers support.
OSS often is a royal pain in the arse, but Microsoft's marketing tricks negate a lot of the technical wizardry they otherwise show.
If we let them do away with the "file, edit, view, ...." standard then what are they gonna try to get away with next!?!?!?!?!?!
\.
"Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet"
Anybody who puts that much data in a spreadsheet is a complete fucking moron.
There's a time to give up spreadsheets and go to databases and that's about when the spreadsheet needs to be scrolled more than a few times in any direction...
A spreadsheet is nothing more than a crippled visual database with the ability to automatically calculate calculated values. Duh...
This is merely an example of adding "features" just to have a marketing bulletpoint.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The reason for all of the FUD here is that for all of the demands here that Microsoft "innovate", deep down, most slashdotters don't *want* Microsoft to innovate because that makes Microsoft all the more difficult to compete with. For example, Office 2007 makes OpenOffice.org look rather primitive, so many slashdotters feel compelled to belittle any and all of Office 2007's improvements. To put it in simple turms, Microsoft haters are scared that Office 2007 will blow the competition away.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The features in Office already overburden the old UI as it is. So trying to maintain that old UI for Office 2007's new features and the features that will be added in subsequent releases becomes an exercise in futility. Also, Microsoft truly believes that after a short learning curve, the new UI blows the old one away, and want to encourage (if by force) people to use it. Otherwise, peeps would be tempted to stick with the old UI even if they would've vastly preferred the new one.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
"Outlook works and 'collaborates' quite well with ANY Mail server,"
Uh, no it doesn't. That's like saying Pine can collaborates quite well with any mail client.
"if your Mail server supports POP3 or IMAP, you are quite set with Outlook."
If by set you mean using only half of what Outlook offers I guess we agree. If everyone was quite "set" by using ANY mail server with Outlook why the heck do you think the OSS community has been going nuts for over 6 years trying to make a real exchange alternative?
The grandparent is right. Bottom line is Outlook leads to Exchange, Windows 2003, AD, and a lot of other stuff. Your flat out lying if you say otherwise. It may not "require" it out of the box but that is where installs ends up going many times. Anyone whose been in IT for a few years and works with Microsoft products will back me up. Mind you I'm not even saying this is a bad thing, its just the way it is.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Actually, the last three deployments have been using Java 1.5. We got the exact same comments regarding the Swing applications feeling slow. This was coming from people who couldn't tell Mac OS X from Windows, let alone a Java app from a C++ app.
.NET in any way? The one .NET/WinForms-based app we developed received many of the same complaints regarding performance as did the Swing-based apps. If they are using .NET, it may cause problems for those users who are still only running machines with 1 to 2 GHz processors, and only 512 MB of RAM.
While the 1.5.x JREs are indeed better than the earlier ones, they still are only approaching usable. Non-technical people do notice the difference, even if they have no idea what Java is, or even that it's being used. I really don't know what to tell you. You seem quite hard-set in your idea that it isn't a problem. But speaking from experience, it is a very real issue.
It will be most interesting to see if Microsoft is able to make this new GUI design performant in any way. Does anyone know if this version of Office uses WinForms or
I go to their "Specification" page and have to go through a very ornery click-thru license agreement basically retaining all rights to Microsoft. Then I find the link, and it appears to be an .exe program that installs a Word file, and this is the specification itself. I'm on a Mac, so it appears that I am unwelcome.
I don't want to hear about this thing again until either ECMA or ISO have voted.
I'm not in that 80 percent, even though I don't know where you got those numbers from. I did try out MS Office 2007 Beta today. I was completely unimpressed. Simple things from items that used to be in the Standard and Formatting toolbar (such as Open and Chart in Excel) required two clicks instead of one. Some tab choices (such as in Excel, Chart was under Insert instead of Data or Formula; how intiutive is that? In Excel 97-2003, it is on the default toolbar) were completely unintiutive to me. Zero customization of toolbars and menus are allowed; if you don't like it, tough. Almost everything that can take me one click (or two clicks at the most) in Office 2000 required extra clicks in Office 2007. My text seemed double-spaced anything I pressed with ENTER by default (I had to click on a different style to get it to ). When I uninstalled Office 2007 and reinstalled Office 2000, I felt a sigh of relief. Office 2000 allows me to adapt the application to my needs (customizing toolbars, for example). Office 2007 wants to force me to do tasks the way that the "grand UI gods" want me to do it, whether it is suitable for me or not.
I'm not opposed to learning new things. I'm currently learning LaTeX, which is a very good typesetting language and packages that produces high-quality documents. I constantly learn new programming languages and other subjects. Learning is my passion. However, when you are learning a tool, you want to work with tools that are best for you. MS Office 2007, frankly, doesn't cut it for me. It feels like a downgrade from MS Office 2000 (and some would say that MS Office 97 is the high water mark for Office, but I use 2000 instead of 97 because of better compatability with dealing with 2002 and 2003 documents).
Now, in defense of Office 2007, I would say that they have done a spectacular job with font anti-aliasing; I felt that I was using an OS X machine (compared to Office 2000). Office 2007 did open my older Office documents quite well. However, it isn't worth the purchase to me, and I'll still hang on to my Office 2000 disk. Just like many WordPerfect 5.1 users still haven't "upgraded" to MS Word, I won't "upgrade" to MS Office 2007; if I must buy MS Office, I'd get the latest Mac version (provided that they don't Vistafy that version).
I LOVE OFFICE!!! YAY!!!
Ribbons are better seen as toolbars on steroids.
Each ribbon is accessed via a tab, hence your confusion.
So, I guess I will be using my copy of Office 97 for a while longer.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Chances are it shares the confidential data of customers not key to the MS plan for global monopoly much better with competitors. How can it be that there are no competitors allowed to survive in this key desktop productivity space. A product consisting of several hundred, or even thousands of DLL's, is like a building with 8,000 doors: impossible to secure.
As in your parent post, you should read Jenson Harris' blog.
Until you've read the meat of that you really can't comment to intelligently on what their goals are for the massive user interface changes in Office 12.
This is a real risky move for MS to move away from menus, and if you read the blog you can see that every decision they have made is carefully reasoned and then tested with users in the lab. They can't afford not to.
They have also been conducting tests examining learning time and impact for new users - to measure the obvious confusion that will be caused by the change.
The Office usability team have no problem with menus in general (or toolbars as long as they have text labels). They are trying to address a different problem - the fact that Office's rich and deep functionality has out grown those interface models. There is so much in the product that people can't find it all and there is nowhere to put new and useful functionality.
(You can argue that Office just has too much functionality - which is probably true for some classes of user - but that is another argument!)
This isn't about UI issues from the last 20 years. This is about issues for the largest and most complicated applications the world has ever seen being used by "every day" users, and how to expose only the functionality that they need when they need it.
Ribbons are just toolbars on steroids, plus _CONTEXT_
Why present the user with a table menu and all of it's functionality when you aren't working with tables?
Time will tell if the ribbon solves these problems, or just causes more, but your arm chair judgements of their worthlessness based on your "20 years" of reading usability studies is pretty weak if you don't even seem to know they problems they are trying to solve.
If you're doing any kind of engineering analysis in Excel, you need to learn some new tools.
It's called Matlab. If that's out of your reach, there's Scilab. Anything but Excel. Christ.
That's like repairing a computer with a fisher price mallet.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You've never used it, but you hate it. You don't know why it was made that way, but you hate it. You don't care about the numbers behind it, but you hate it. You've never seen a returning using who found ten 'new' features that they have always wanted that have been in the app for years, but you hate it.
You're journy to the Dark Side is compelete.
What are you, a fucking imbecile?
It's called awk and grep. Jesus fucking christ.
If you deal with log files on a daily basis then you better learn to use some decent text processing tools.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
nt
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It's called head. And tail.
Head and then open in Excel. Why would you try to open the whole thing at once?
Use tail to get an idea of the range of record IDs or whatever.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
... can't work their way around a copy of R or Scilab (free), then I think they should be fired.
That's like a administrative assistant who can't speak english but can sign ASL really well. *eye roll*
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I do not believe that most people posting here have any idea of what makes up a good UI design. Microsoft has made a vast improvement over previous version of Office with this new UI. The interface is very intuitive and displays functions that can be used in well laid out way. There is great feedback from this user interface with most actions. They have almost eliminated difficulties that arise when using the mouse. Do you know what most users have a problem with when using a computer? I will give you a hint, it rhymes with "house". Why do you think that the mac OS places their menus at the top of the screen? It is so that a user can move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen and only have to worry about moving the mouse horizontally when selecting a menu (makes it a lot easier to select a menu this way). Back on topic, no more selecting menus and trying to position the mouse in the correct place to expand other sub menus. Functions are now quick and easy to select. When scrolling through areas such as fonts, the document is updated in real time. However, I do think the file stuff could be improved. The equation editor stuff is a good add to Word. How can you not like being able to quickly insert a integral symbol or many specific functions such as a Taylor Expansion? I believe that this new UI will be easy for all to use and will leave the user happy. Come on people, give some credit where some credit is due!!!!!!! Also, for those who are complaining about the Excel spreadsheets having too large of a capacity and that users should be using a database should do some homework before they post. Have you ever heard of Excel Lists? Guess what, you can make a Excel spreadsheet into a database. Plus, you should never place constraints on a user unless there is a good reason for it.
Whenever I use office I'm like, "This thing has a blasted lot of features." I've never had a hard time discovering features. Even when I don't want to find features I discover new ones.
Seriously, it does seem like the wrong goal.
are on the MSFT payroll? "I am on a mac but they may have gotten it roght"? puh-leeeeze.
No, if they keep the old version of the UI for compatibility, they will have a huge burden to maintain, and will never be able to get rid of it. To this very day you can hit slash in Excel to access the menus because that's the way Lotus users were used to doing it 20 years ago.
Managing one UI for thousands of commands is hard enough; managing two is twice the work. Additionally, anybody making an add-in for Office 2007 or higher would have to make their UI twice because they don't know which mode their users would use.
dom
did i still see toolbars in outlook? and it was still the tube-based rounded ugly toolbar. why was ribbons not fully extended across all apps in office?
http://windowsconnected.com/photos/office_2007_bet a_2/default.aspx
How did this site evolve from a vendor-neutral discussion of information technology to become a forum for Microsoft to preach its religion? Seems like a few hours ago the lead headline was not "SharePoint Not Required", as it is now.
>> The public confuses this product as something they need, instead of as a major business productivity enhancement.
.doc extension is a closed specification and the most widly used document extension. I am also aware that OpenOffice has incomplete compatability for the .doc extension. I've tried this and things go all over the place when you open a .doc file created in OpenOffice, in MS word. What are the larger companies going to think when they open the document and it's an ineligable mess? Their just going to get really pissed with each other and the IT dept cos' ITS ALWAYS THEIR FUALT REGARDLESS OF THE TCO WE SAVED.
.doc extension is far to convenient to ignore.
Unless im mistaken and correct me if i'm wrong the
I'm trying to get at, yes they do need to buy microsoft office because the
Excel is very widely used data mining tool (see: http://www.kdnuggets.com/polls/2006/data_mining_an alytic_tools.htm).
:-) and preliminary reports from larger sets. In practice, the data is seldomly in the DB when it is being mined because that is just so darn slow (unless you have bought a multi million dollar systems - in which case you absolutely have to use is even though it sucks as otherwise somebody has made a stupid desision to buy it...). How long does it take to open small (60 000 rows - to be able to do it today) data set in Excel and then for example do a pivot to it to see all the combinations of the values? Not time at all. Now, import that to your relational database and do the same report from there.
It is used both to analyze smaller sets (less than 100 million rows
The 65k rows limit was very limiting. The first time I tried OpenOffice I immediately checked the limit there... my surprise was huge when the limit was 32 000 rows (not even 2^15 or 2^16 as in Excel). And as Excel 2000 otherwise beats OO in usability, I didn't look at OO any more.
So, get rid of all the limits! Why should it not be more than about million rows? I can see no reason. (Yeah, if the computer is too small then it doesn't fit into the memory, but that's a different thing.)
I have seen alot of people, and some people here, make parallels between the contextual UI and adaptive UI's and making the same conclusions as to the problems. They are, however, NOT the same thing and don't have the same problems. Adaptive UI's are constantly changing, so you cannot learn where things are because they will not be there the next time. Contextual UI's DO NOT CHANGE. All your old tabs are still there, all the Write, Review, Insert, all in the same place. If you need to get to something, it will always be in the same place. Contextual tabs just hide the things you don't need when you don't need it. Who the hell EVER needs to have the "Format Table" options unless you are inside a table? Ever? So why not hide it until you are in a table, and then show it? That is what the contextual UI does and that is how the improved vastly on the mass of toolbars of old. If you look at the research they did (echoed by many people), they found litteraly hundreds of people would have dozens of toolbars open because they were afraid if they close them, they would lose them and not be able to find them again. But most of them are things like Format Image, which are dissabled the whole time until you select an image. The new UI open and closes the relevent things for them, meaning the UI cleans up after them as they go, making the whole experience alot nicer.
There's some pretty snazzy features there.
I wonder if they've gotten around to adding the feature where if you install Microsoft Office on a system set up for Australian English it installs the British English dictionary, rather than installing the American English dictionary and making you jump through hoops to get it to work the way that it should work by default. It perplexes me that they can do so much in the way of magic, yet after however many releases of the product something as basic as this remains broken.
En-route you get to learn neat morsels about the way Word is architectured. For example - trying to fix it through one strategy it appears to keep 'losing' the setting you've set up. What's actually happening here is that the text already in your document has been localised as US English, and whenever you move into those blocks the setting reverts back to that based on context.
The default is wrong on the oldish version I've tested it on for the Mac but it was a lot easier to fix than for Windows.
Either way, I don't buy the "well it's possible to configure it" excuse for stupid defaults: in order to fix a default installation you need the original install CD (and I think you need admin privileges as well). Many users never bother and end up with documents that get frowned on because Australia is standardised on UK English. And when I'm that user and I don't have the ability to fix it and the local sysadmin thinks it's unimportant it annoys the hell out of me.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Note the lack of mention of saving in
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Cos I'm forever landing on cell IV16384 and wishing that I could add just one more column.
"Surely the most significant new feature in Excel are the tables? You can now turn sections of your spreadsheets into tables, which allow you to manipulate them as tables."
Okay, that sounds interesting, I think, but isn't a spreadsheet already a table? Do you have a more in-depth explanation, or maybe a link to one?
Thanks...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's not risky at all. The corporate world is so locked into Office that if MS decided that the Office UI were to be implemented in the the moon language of pink unicorns and the colour octarine, they'd still all buy it like clockwork - despite the protestations (correct or otherwise) of the Slashdoterati.
Office 12 is going to continue the proud Office tradition of raking in the cash and keeping MS in the pink.
Peter
Excel is for the VISUAL EDITING of a limited set of datapoints with manageable dimensonality.
You aren't supposed to try to load your whole dataset at once into it, only a representative subset. Why would you use an application that tries to load every single datapoint into memory at once just so you can run batch processing type functions that operate on subsets at the data at a time? It's not like you are going to tweak any individual cell. It just seems ass-backwards.
No, there are plenty of better tools. For example, Programmer's Notepad or Texpad, which will allow you to visually examine the head -1 to see the exact column layout and make a good guess as to the seperator between fields of various types.
If your error is in the middle, (detected by WHICH program, I might add? How would you scan that many lines in Excel visually to find that problem anyway?) you could just use a sed statement with a line notation (or an expression that MATCHES the kinds of errors you're having) to elide the ill-constructed line.
If you can't reasonably expect to spot the problem by visually scanning in Excel over the cells because you've got datasets that large, then you shouldn't be using a visual tool anyway.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It's nice to have a collaborating office suite (sharing docs and all that), but wouldn't it be better if everything the O/S offers can be shared?
For example, let's say that I want to make some game art. If the O/S was collaborative, I could be in one office painting the textures while at the other room the game developers test the textures in real time.
That would be true innovation, Microsoft.
The concept of doing away with menus and making the available tools show in a sub-section of its own (what Microsoft here is calling 'ribbons') is nice, but not new.
Autodesk, for example, had a very similar system down pat in 3D Studio Max years ago. I have seen many other apps utilizing this system through the years, and happen to like it.
Of course, shortcut keys via keyboard are often the best for repetitive stuff, but for many re-used commands, it has always been an annoyance to repeatedly have to scroll through ever-lengthening menus to perform simple tasks.
Having a nice layout of buttons available when in a 'menu mode' is a good idea. But it's not new. However, I wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft patents it.... *sigh* (or have they already?)
I am sure that you are aware by now that MS06-019 specifically addressed a set of issues that Exchange had with iCal and vCal MIME types. Perhaps your attachments were somehow partially exploiting the vulnerabilities in Exchange and were thus being mangled on the way through.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
"http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/ and search tables (the search isn't working atm, so I can't link you directly). That has several posts on tables."
Cool. Thanks for the link. A quick glance seems to indicate tables aren't anything new from a structural point of view, but rather, a lot of smaller features that make using a speadsheet a lot easier. Which is all to the good.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.