Microsoft Changes Office 2007 Interface Again

daria42 writes "Microsoft has modified its interface for Office 2007 yet again, after complaints from beta testers that the 'ribbon' system took up too much space on screen. The article discusses the resistance the new interface is likely to prompt in old users of the software, both at a personal and corporate level. From a format perspective, there are other changes to expect as well." From the article: "Hodgson also confirmed that Microsoft is working on tools to help enterprises automatically translate existing documents into new file formats being introduced in Office 2007. 'We've been asked by a lot of customers to provide tools to do mass migrations,' he said. 'There will be tools that will take a million documents and migrate those to the new formats.' One likely incentive for that migration will be reduced storage costs. Microsoft claims that file sizes for the new Office 2007 XML-based formats are up to 75 percent less than existing Office formats."

Comments

Re:Too much room?

[iocat]

I was all ready to make a reactionary, "why does MS keep screwing with what works" type post (as is my style), then I took a minute to reflect upon the fact that Word currently has THE WORST FUCKING USER INTERFACE IN HISTORY. Quick: how do you keep headers and footers from appearing on the first page of a document? If you know that it's buried in a sub-option of the page setup menu, sure, it's fine. But does it actually make sense to put it there? No way. There's no way a change in the Word UI could actually make the product worse than it is at the moment, (eg: the worst word processor I have ever used).

The Ribbon simply moves WORD closer to actually good applications, like QuarkXPress, InDesign, or WriteNow, a 68K Mac word processor from 1000 years ago, which basically had an early version of "the ribbon" and was actually easy to use and generate great documents from.