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:Call me old fashion...

[Ed Avis]

Are these new changes happening out of some desire to resemble the old Windows software as little as possible?

Well, yes. It has long been a pastime among Microsoft's Office team to reinvent the wheel rather than using the standard Windows GUI controls. Perhaps the changes introduced in Office get adopted in the next version of Windows (for example the shaded gradient on title bars), perhaps not.

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.