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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."
Lets get rid of that ugly top menu and controls! And replace it with an... ugly top menu... and controls.
And call it a ribbon, so it's a new feature that suddenly compels people to purchase the software?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I dunno, maybe I'm just living in the past. I still use vi on Linux, I still use Notepad in windows whenever I can
Notepad??!?? Are you insane? It doesn't remember more than 1 undo. It can't even handle UNIX formatted files. How can you use something as powerful as vi in Linux and then use something totally half-assed like Notepad in Windows?
Have you tried Notepad++? http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Hardly an appropriate analogy - all of the things you described did not change the user interface - the steering wheel is still a wheel, the brake pedal didn't move to the glove box and there aren't only two tires now instead of four.
Microsoft changes things that don't help - all of the things your described help. If I'm a programmer, I still want power steering in my car. But word by default capitalizes words I don't want capitalized, uncapitalizes things I do, and dissappears menu items.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Indeed, this sounds ridiculous. Upgrade your Office installations because of storage costs? With 750GB HDDs on the market?
Power steering, anti-lock brakes, etc. are all seamless transitions from the "old" way, i.e. you do not have to learn how to drive a completely different way of driving to take advantage of them. With interface upgrades, you must re-learn everything. It's like if the steering wheel was suddenly placed where the shifter was, and the shifter where the steering wheel used to be. It just isn't going to happen, b/c nobody would use it. Why should software be any different? Is it really that difficult to add a few things and improve a few more by only making minimal, usage-compatiable changes to the interface, especially when you're PAYING for it and its supposed backwards-compatiablity?
thisnukes4u.net
Now, hold on. As far as I know every Office document contains its undo history by default. Which would be great if you could actually make use of these undos after you've closed and reopened the document, but you can't - it only lets you undo what you've done in the current session. So why's it there at all? That's junk, by my reckoning.
The silly thing is that you end up with a mixture of software using different widget styles since the style of menu to display seems to be burned into the executable. Some apps will have old Windows-style grey menu bars, some will have Office 2003 white menus with dropdown shadows, others the slightly different style used in Office 2002, some draggable and some fixed, but they're all doing the same thing. Even a stock installation of Windows with no third-party apps has different styles for window borders between, say, Control Panel and Command Prompt. Surely the sane way to do things is to have a standard Windows interface for 'please make a menu bar', and then when an innovation like draggable menus or hiding unused menu items comes up, it can apply to all applications consistently. Unfortunately I fear that the Win32 API is too low-level for something like that to work.
(NB I'm not implying that the free software world is any better; historically Unix desktops have been far worse than Windows for lacking a consistent look and feel between applications. It's improving, and distributions like Ubuntu are doing sterling work in trying to harmonize look and feel between programs written with different toolkits. At least a Linux system has only one copy of (say) GTK 2.x installed, so when the GTK appearance changes all the 'g' programs remain consistent.)
Some suggest that for Microsoft, the inconsistency in appearance is deliberate. Once you have the new Office 2000+x installed, applications from year x-1 start to look a bit out of date in comparison. You need to upgrade. Get a new version of Windows and your old Office version isn't quite right any more; you get a slightly dirty feeling using such old software that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the desktop; best to go and buy the latest one just to be on the safe side. You can compare this with the car market where styling changes are made from one year to the next to help make the old model look old-fashioned and encourage buyers to trade up.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Now that PHBs are faced with re-training everyone on the new MS Office, will OO.o be seen as a less difficult transition or will they blindly drink the MS kool-aid?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Someone needs to explain precisely how this "ribbon" feature adds value. It removes the arbitrary division and needless duplication between the functionality of the GUI toolbars and the textual menus that doubled the search-space when a user needed to look for a function that they knew was there but weren't sure how best to access. It combines the visual appeal and quick access of toolbars, with the fullness of capabilities that menus provide. When working in related tasks you used to keep on needing to click on the same menu, to locate a tiny textual menu item (or even subitem of menu item) -- either that or add a toolbar that quite likely wouldn't contain all the functions you needed anyway. Now that is history. You click on a type of action -- you see immediately *all* the functions at your disposal. And they remain visibly at your disposal, not forcing you to go back time and again to the same menu, just to check out which possible actions there are in regards to a given task. In other words -- the ribbon causes less time to be wasted *locating* the action you want.
I guarentee that Office 2007 will come with twice the amount of that garbage in it.
I'm still using MS Office 97 (sans Access) for most of my work. I still have a valid license for it, it does everything I need, and I'm still occasionally discovering some feature I've never looked into before (and every once in a while I find one of those "new" features is worth mastering). All in all, MS Office 97 is a top of the line product, quite rich in features, and much less burdened with crapchrome than more recent office suites.
When OpenOffice matured, I gained an excellent tool for converting newer MS Office formats to the MS Office 97 formats. That has removed the only serious problem I was encountering with MS Office 97. It also gives me an easier migration path to Linux, if and when the time comes to do that. I began using OpenOffice to backport new MS Office formats about 3 years ago.
BTW, I had MS Office 2000 and I've currently got MS Office 2003 available at work and I'm no stranger to them. In fact, I've got a minor reputation for being an Office guru-- I'm occasionally consulted about problems in Excel, Word, or complex document development. More often than not, showing the user how to avoid one of the gee-whizz features in the newer office suite finesses the problem, makes for a happy user, and enhances my guru reputation.
So I'm a very happy MS Office 97 user. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, etc, etc.
Back in the day I used Word 2.0 as pretty much my main application for all types of word processing tasks and layout stuff. It mostly worked despite the size of hard disks, RAM and processors back then. However, the time taken to start up your PC and open a document in Word does not feel significantly different now from what it did then (I grant you that feeling is unscientific and subjective).
I don't remember the last time I used Word.
Mostly for creative writing I use Final Draft, for general text stuff I use Notepad and for format important stuff I would use an InDesign/Notepad combination. Likely some of these tasks will now be switched over to Writely since it is but a swift bookmark away.
Privacy concerns aside, Writely is considerably quicker and easier for most general text tasks - I see no reason why Word couldn't be this fast - or in fact faster since it would be local.
I find Word to be too cumbersome for most simple tasks, and too unspecialized for others. What percentage of Word users use more than 30% of its features? A very small number I would guess.
Admittedly I don't work in a corporate environment, but I can't help thinking that perhaps Word is just regarded as the thing to use in most situations, rather than using a faster and more appropriate text tool. I wonder what the accumulative total man hours lost is over a year for the Corporate World for them using recent versions of Word over a slimmer faster product...
Here's what happened: Adoption of previous editions of Office have been slowed by, among other things, objections over the cluttered and confusing interface. Microsoft tried in their own (perhaps misguided) way to improve that over the years, and in doing so, they added bars and panes ad infinitum - a taskbar, a task pane, a help pane, new context menus, etc. - without much fanfare.
Since there was no real set of organizing principles for the evolution of the Office interface, these new toolspaces naturally filled up in a hurry as different internal groups poured their junk into them. This wasn't helping to reduce the clutter any, so they simultaneously tried making the main application menu context-sensitive, further confusing experienced users.
All these parallel but disconnected efforts tended to defeat each other more than anything, so this time around, MS decided to try something different: Take about 200 different interface ideas, test them with focus groups, and may the best one win. After that, make all the UI developers retrofit their stuff into a coordinated workflow based on the new winner, which is where they are today.
Basically, this is a first attempt at escaping the chains of their poor UI legacy, and perhaps a risky one at that. They estimate that only power users will be comfortable picking the new UI up on their own. For average users, they expect that some guided training will be necessary - all combined, probably just shy of a day's worth.
Personally, I think they'd have been better off monitoring clicks & keystrokes of a *vast* test group using previous office editions, after which they could form a core set of the most important interaction elements based on the 20% or so most used actions. Also, it didn't help that keyboard shortcuts were never standardized across the Office suite; power users who expected e.g. Ctrl+Tab to do the same thing in Word as in Excel were quickly alienated, and once alienated, it's not easy to win a user back.
Pi Ran Out
GroupBar: I love this product, especially once I started playing around with some of the options. Why the current Windows taskbar doesn't incorporate all these functions is beyond me. Note: there is no shortcut created anywhere by the installer, go into \program files\microsoft research\groupbar and run from there. Scalable Fabric: I found this is the more interesting approach, however it's a buggy implementation and only good for playing around with. Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I did watch the demo video on the Microsoft site -- and I use the term demo loosely, since half of it was uninformative marketeze -- and I'm afraid I wasn't that impressed. I gave them a fair chance to redeem themselves, but their interactive demo wouldn't play nicely for me, so the video is all I have.
My conclusion, as I've mentioned before, was simply that it's too much "pretty, pretty" and not enough real changes that actually make a difference to how easy it is to create useful documents. If they're committed to a big UI change but still worrying about the niceties of how the ribbon system will work, I fear Office 12 is going to a missed opportunity to shift the emphasis radically in other areas that could benefit from a fresh approach (styles and templates vs. ad-hoc formatting and copy-and-paste is the most obvious case, IMHO), which is a shame.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Even if the article is about Microsoft, I'm surprised to find that people here don't like the ribbon idea at all. When I first saw it I thought the design was revolutionary and considerably more intuitive for users new to computers. Functions are better organized toward what the user wants to do as opposed to the vague categories we have in today's menubars that frequently require people to search multiple different menus to find what they want (Edit vs. Tools, View vs. Window). I do however agree with an earlier poster's remark that the design uses precious vertical space even though today's monitors are moving towards increased horizontal space. In Word this is tough to pull off because the primary use (creating an 8 1/2 x 11 document) demands vertical space, but surely there are other non-office applications that could benefit from this new style?
To those noting that DOC is 4 times larger than OpenXML, and are therefore gloating that this proves that DOC is bloated, how about Adobe's PDF?
I've just downloaded the just released ECMA Draft 1.4 OpenXML Specs. They are 5 files, available in both DOCX (the OpenXML version of DOC) and PDF.
The PDF files are 4 to 7 times larger than the DOCX files (except for the "Part 3 - Primer" doc, where the PDF file is only 1.2 times larger than the corresponding DOCX file).
For the main file, "Part 4 - Markup Language Reference", the PDF version is is 42MB and the DOCX version is 10MB.
Just adding some perspective.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
i've been using office 2007 beta 2 for quite some time now. their new ui is actually better and more user friendly than the old one. it is easier to do the functions you need in one click (mostly.) however, i just would want that old menus still be there because there are times when i am at a loss to a previous function in the menu and i can't seem to find it through the ribbons. other improvements (great productivity boost) that i liked is the 'preview' mechanism that displays changes to the text by just pointing to the selection. ex. the text adjust its size and font as you browse through the selection.
i install it in my laptop and when other people see it, they find it cool that they would also like to get a copy of it. but alas, microsoft started charging for the download of the software. i was lucky to have it before (the product key is not transferrable to other computers by the way.)
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