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."

Comments

All You Need To Know:

[thatguywhoiam]

"Ribbons" = "Tabs"

WTF (interface changes)?

[linguae]

Right from the start, you'll notice the most significant change to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and many screens in Outlook 2007. Gone are the familiar toolbars and menus; they've been replaced by "ribbons" that house a variety of buttons, icons and graphics (see Figure 1). 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.

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?

Re:WTF (interface changes)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because you are not the target audience. You are a furry toothed hairy little man who can't live outside his comfort zone and doesn't like anyting "newfangled". This is designed for the average cube-drone to be able to use. The new interface is about making the software discoverable and making easy things fast, hard things easy and WTF stuff possible. Something FOSS has yet to grasp as an important feature.

Having actually used the product, unlike the rest of the fudraisers in this thread, it does all that very well.

Re:WTF (interface changes)?

[VGR]

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.

Hear, hear! One of the first rules of UI design is, don't move things around and don't change the layout. It's a lot easier to familiarize myself with a static layout than one that shuffles itself around. And how will I know to use functions I can't even see until I'm lucky enough to "trigger" the appearance of the controls which activate them?

An interesting book, About Face 2.0, makes a good point: Significant change must be significantly better. (There's a lot of things in the book with which I disagree, but I agree strongly with this one.) Ribbons are different but they're not better.

Menu bars alone are neither good nor bad; it's all in the organization. Organize a menu bar well, and it is a perfect UI: for any given function, the user should be able to intuit which menu will lead to that function, and the words that make up the menu path should, as closely as possible, form a phrase describing the function. (For instance, "Go --> Home" in a browser.)

Every time Microsoft tries to innovate for real, they fall flat on their face, because they're so used to buying up others' products that they don't know how to create anything original which is actually good. If "ribbons" are a true attempt at improving the interface, they are a miserable failure. Of course I'm more inclined to believe the whole thing is just a way to convince less-savvy users that Word 2007 really is a new product which is worth a few hundred of their dollars.

Re:WTF (interface changes)?

[ElleyKitten]

I just wonder, with geeks complaining about it changing so radically, how will normal users be able to deal with it? The other day the receptionist at my job was wondering how to check her yahoo mail at work. She had a yahoo toolbar, but appearently had never thought to try the "mail" icon. So many non-geek users are just used to going through their routine of what they know and have no idea what to do beyond that. How are they going to deal with a completely changed interface?

Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it

[mikesmind]

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.

While this may be slightly off-topic, hopefully it is interesting. Someone I know at work was looking to buy a used copy of MS Office. I suggested that he download OpenOffice.org. When I asked him about it a week later, he told me that he had downloaded it and was now using it. OpenOffice.org did everything he needed it to do and he really liked the price tag!

Now I will try to relate this back to the topic at hand. Now that Microsoft is radically changing Office, it is a great time to switch to OpenOffice.org. The interface is close enough to Office, that retraining is minimal. It is questionable how many companies will use the collaboration features. Generally features are used as justification for upgrading but often the additional features are not well-utilized.

Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it

[christopherfinke]

It's not the IT guys you have to worry about, it's the beancounters.

Exactly. My wife just called me from work (she's an accountant) and asked if I knew how to get around this error: "Spreadsheet is full." I asked her how many rows it had: "About 100,000." Apparently this isn't that uncommon...

Outlook requiring Exchange?

[rduke15]

From 2007 Microsoft Office Release System Requirements:

"Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 or later required for Outlook 2007 users."

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.

Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it

[VertigoAce]

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.

I just gave this a try in Word 12. It is a lot less drastic than you imply. If I have a word document with a bunch of text and a table in the middle, changing the cursor position does not change the current tab (where each tab is basically a set of toolbars grouped by task). All that changes is a little section of the window is highlighted indicating which tabs are related to table design. It's not intrusive, but conveys the point very clearly.

Office 12 does a lot to expose existing functionality to the typical user. Things that used to be buried deep in menus and dialog boxes are presented in a much more intuitive way. Try it out some time if you get a chance. Yes, the UI is different from most other applications, but it seems to be a model worthy of consideration for other applications.

Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it

[bheer]

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.

Are you saying that based on assumption or actual use of the product? I've been using beta 1 for some time and it seems quite natural to me. In particular this is dead wrong: "This is an extension of the abstration of the chevron menus". It isn't. 'Chevron menus' did not appear, you had to basically do a show-all and then choose an item, after which it would be visible until it fell into disuse. The ribbons have a tab strip above them so it's easy to see the ones NOT in front. The ribbons feel like the old Lotus SmartIcons *done right* (unlike the ghastly implementation in some Lotus products like Notes).

> The listed prices range from $149 (student)

Office 2002 and 2003 have been available at the same list price ("student and teacher edition"), and Amazon sells 'em for $99 (valid on _three_ PCs if anyone in your home is a student or teacher).

Nice Theory, but reality is different

[Serapth]

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.

Re:Nice Theory, but reality is different

[Serapth]

Yeah, the worst part is, if you tear down that savants Access DB or Excel spreadsheet, you had better replace it with something functionally superior. Im not saying technically superior, end users dont care about that. Im say it has to be feature complete with less bugs then the earlier system. Bug wise its normally not a problem, but feature wise it can be a nightmare. On of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of adhoc Excel solutions is the ease of customizations without involving IT. That is very hard to replecate in code, atleast in a time efficent manor. In the end, your solution may be more robust, scale better and be more tolerant to failure. Yet, if the end user finds his/her job harder, they are going to resist like you couldnt believe.

As to audits, yeah, that becomes a bitch. Then again, half the audits out there are easy to pass with a bit of sleight of hand. Many audits have conditions like "have or are implementing a solution that does blah blah blah". The are implementing part makes it really easy to get by without any real actual work.

Re:I guess it HAS to be better to sell it

[Angostura]

Actually I am going to disagree with you. I found the Chevron menu system execrable, I turned it off immediately, functions that Microsoft thought I might not want disappeared. It was patronising, comfusing and slowed down my work.

However, with the ribbons (which I have not used, I'm on a Mac here) they might have got it right. Whereas the chevrons left you with a 'where have my menu items gone' feel, the contextual ribbon changes should be instantaneous, and pretty intuitive - you click on a table and instantly the table-relevant tools appear in ribbon. There is no way a user can really miss, or misunderstand what happened. Interestingly MS introduced something akin to this in Office for Mac OS X in 2001 - the formatting palette is context sensitive.

Likewise, the format preview thing sounds eminently discoverable and understandable to me - not to mention a timesaver.

There will be plenty of opportunities for MS to shoot itself in the usability foot, but I don't think these are them.

Re:Longstanding problems fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

McCullough? Bruce McCullough?

I took a statistics class at Drexel he taught. He is a scary, scary man. Uses his class to reaffirm his belief in statistics. And I wasn't even a business or economics major!

Re:What about assistive tech (screen-scrapers et a

[LeRandy]

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")

NOT quite TRUE (in caps)

[theolein]

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.

Re:Requires Sharepoint Server?

[tokul]

Do you even know what you are talking about? Active Directory is something not even used by Office unless you are running a SERVER VERSION of Office, which 99.9% of the people using Office do not. Also the 'Active Directory' requirements are NOT even exclusive to Windows Server Active Directory Server.

Some Office features require sharepoint server. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 requires "one of the following servers: Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, or Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, plus the latest service pack (see Other for additional requirements). Running SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on Windows Server 2003 Web Edition requires SQL Server 2000 to be installed on a separate computer.". And in order to use clients with Windows Server, you will need server cals or Windows 2000/XP Pro license for each client workstation.

As for the CALS, do you NOT realize that each VERSION of Office is its own CAL? That is what it is, a client application, there are no additional server CALs needed. Even Outlook qualifies to be a full CAL for Exchange.

Nope. Exchange CALs give right to run Outlook. Outlook or Office itself does not provide Exchange client license.

Intuitive, yes (imho). New? No.

[cyborat]

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?)