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."
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.
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.