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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."
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?
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.
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
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.
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.