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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."
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 $170 or so for the upgrade version.
If you or your company considers this, get ready for more incompatiblities with previous generations, and retro installation of plugins. That's okay within a company (to some), but think carefully about the impedance mismatch with the rest of the world.
if your data set is a million rows, you probably want to consider using something other than spreadsheets. I'm fond of the current limit on excel, it forces analysts to think about their tool selection sometimes.
"Ribbons" = "Tabs"
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The public beta 2 is actually availableto the public today.
UI looks like MSN Messenger!
Is it just me, or do these new "ribbons" look alot like Apple Works? I RTFA, and it didn't seem to justify upgrading for the average user - which although a geek, I include myself (I still prefer my text editor!). Office 2007 appears to be Office 2000 (98 too) with a tighter leash to M$, with a few bells and whistles most people won't use.
Ctrl+scrollUp in Internet Explorer 7 beta now matches the behavior in Office 2003 (zoom in). Let's just hope that someone didn't "fix" Office 2007 to match IE 6....
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?
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.
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?
>
> 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.
That's fine, as long as you realize you're using a hack...you are absolutely NOT using the 'correct' tool for the job here.
It may work, and it may be done a lot, but there are actual tools for doing this sort of thing.
Part of the problem though is that a lot of people believe that every tool available for use on a computer is to be found in MS Office, somewhere. It's not.
To prove this, here's a thought excercise for you: Given the raw data you're crunching in excel briefly...describe how you would come to the same end result WITHOUT A COMPUTER. Would you pull out a ledger? Didn't think so. It's the wrong tool for the job.
Now, what people should keep in mind though, is it isn't _always_ wrong to use the wrong tool for the job. Sometimes the wrong tool works good enough or the right tool is too expensive or complicated or limited in it's availability for use. It's just usually wise to know when this is the case however and not start believing you are using the 'right' tool when you aren't.
The problem is, MS knows this very VERY well. Thus, MS Office products are chock full of every conceivable 'feature', hoping that you'll find a way to do what you need to do somewhere in there without going to someone elses software...damned if it's the right tool or not.
No Comment.
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.
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
However, in the real world we don't have weeks to fine-tune and optimize our Swing UIs.
And you really don't need to. I find it astonishing the way that criticisms of Swing that were fair 4-5 years ago are still being repeated. Swing has been fast since the later releases of Java 1.4. Swing has no performance issues on Java 1.5, and Java 1.5 apps start fast (I have just opened JEdit on my laptop PC. It started up faster than IE or Acrobat on the same machine. The menus and controls are instantly responsive).
If you have any issues with performance, get an up-to-date Java. Java 1.5 has been around for 18 months - there is no excuse!
Word
Outlook
Excel
Powerpoint
Hmmm.
Eh, not really. Excel is quick and it handles unformatted data quite well without having to write a script. Hell, sometimes I use Excel to "tame" a dataset before moving to another program. If I want to do a quick plot without dealing with importing lots of data, Excel is often the easiest option. If I'm dealing with a whole lot of data I'll set up a workflow with sigma or IDL and handle everything that way. Not everything is as black and white as you might think. I don't care about the 'elegant' solution, I care about the best solution, which for me means the fastest one that will get the job done right.
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/
So it looks like we may have to wait for Beta 3...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There, much better, a whole new set of complaints.
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
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.
Apparently the new Java evangelism strategy is lying. There are lots of nice things about Java, and if you have alot of hardware, it scales well. But its still not `ready for the desktop', get over it.
Sorry, but I am using Java for desktop applications that are used on a daily basis. No issues about performance; no issues about repainting. It seems to me that part of the continuing anti-Java envangelism is obviously lying.
JEdit does _not_ launch instantaneously, it takes almost twice as long as firefox.
And this is an example of the blantant lying. No-one was claiming that JEdit launched '_instanteously_'. The claim was that it was no slower than some other typical Windows applications. Simply working through a list of Windows applications until you happen to find one that starts faster than JEdit is not evidence against this, only evidence that you are desperate to try and prove Java slow, for whatever reason.
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.
"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
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.
This comes up again and again.
As an SQL Server developer, an Excel 'power' user and someone who manages about 20GB of statistical and performance data, I reckon I've got a clue here.
Show me a sample piece of SQL for calculating a cumulative average, without linking a table to itself, creating a new table or other weirdness. It's pretty hard.
What about a running total for certain criteria? Or percentile calculations, or means, standard deviations and so on?
SQL is just not good at statistics, even simple stats. It just can't do it without a *lot* of effort.
SQL-based databases are ideal for filtering and simple calculations, but terrible at doing real work with numbers. Sometimes Excel is a far superior solution to the best and brightest database.
A few pages in any direction? You've clearly never seen corporate spreadsheets or looked at numerical quality methodologies (such as Six Sigma)!
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?)