Slashdot Mirror
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."
But you already get more document space than you used to with the ribbon UI!
I like the ribbon.
Articles about GUI's without images make baby Jesus cry. Google gives these as the old design, hope it helps.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
Well there's a bit of junk in the OLE serialisation format but not a lot.
The new formats are zipped by default. The zip files do contain the data as XML rather than a binary format which must be a small loss but it's gained back by zipping them.
It's actually very usable when you've learned your way around it (e.g. to edit the header and footer in word you go to the 'insert' tab in Word - hmm?) and many of the old key commands still work, e.g. ALT-E S for 'paste special'. But not in Outlook, bah.
yeah, actually i would chuck all those things out. Driving a motor vehicle without those features is not difficult. With proper instruction and practice taken with care it needn't be dangerous either. Driving at an appropriately reduced speed means traction control and abs are unnecessary. Power steering helps turn the wheels when the car is stationary, something which is bad driving practice anyway. People need to realise they are steering a couple of tonnes of sheet steel and upholstery at breakneck (50mph) speed. It shouldnt be too easy, and it shouldnt be taken lightly. All these 'driver aids' simply make people more complacent. The idea of ABS and traction control is that if you make a mistake or the conditions throw an unforseen problem your way you wont simply crash and die. However, more and more people drive as if the ABS etc are there to be taken advantage of all the time. If on a dry day you see your ABS light flickering all the time as you drive, you are driving too fast and braking too hard.
2p
I've always preferred http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/ myself. As fast and as minimal as notepad, with support for mac and unix line-endings, no size limit, toolbar, etc.
Definately well worth trying.
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / xenogamous.com / transference.org / quantam sufficit ]
Are you kidding? I remember running Office 2000 on my Pentium 166 with 64mb RAM, and it chugged along happily. I even tried installing Office 2003 on it, didn't seem like it was bad. It was too far out of date to be used, but Office 2003 didn't seem to complain.
Notepad on the other hand... has it even learned to do syntax highlighting yet?
Ahhh, Notepad. So small, so simple. But truly, if you want a really useful notepad (that's also GPL), try Notepad++. I've made it a standard part of every Windows install.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
for those of us who haven't seen the ribbon ui in action
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It also wrecks the grammar in your internet posts.
Granted, he misspelled "disappeared", but it's quite legitimate to use it as a verb, though usually in the sense of "Pinochet disappeared the protesters". Sometimes Word does seem rather dictatorial in the way it insists you do things .
I read that as "one likely media spin" rather than "likely incentive."
The main "incentive" is to migrate all your documentation to a new format that none of your older systems or employee's home machines can access -- unless you pay for upgrades. Paying around $300 for an upgrade to Office2K would pay for about 480GB of IDE PATA drives -- per user.
That's a lot of storage, even with bloated .DOC files of embedded images and spreadsheets.
Those sites which have "millions" of documents probably hang on to them for legal reasons, such as the financial services sector's 7-year history requirements. They're not allowed to "migrate" those documents, because that would change the archived data.
I also can't fathom why anyone would want to migrate millions of documents to a new format if the new version of Office can read the older document format. It's not like MS Office tools can directly scan the document repositories used by large corporations -- they're stored with search index databases and accessed through specialized tools, not mounted as network drives.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.