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Microsoft Changes Office 2007 Interface Again

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tweaking dept.

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."

6 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Call me old fashion... by ExE122 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are these new changes happening out of some desire to resemble the old Windows software as little as possible? Is there some kind of necessity to change the interface? Does it need a complete overhaul?

    I'm sure lots of people are gonna respond to that with a resounding "YES", but I personally have gotten used to what it is. It took me years to learn the ins and outs of Office after computers stopped coming bundled with MS Word. Even now, I've done away with that side-by-side view in Outlook 2003 and moved everything back to the same way it was in 2000. This goes the same for most other programs which throw in an abundance of menus and graphics to try to make things TOO user friendly. Nine times out of ten, if there is an option for the "traditional view", I'll take it.

    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, and I don't feel any desire to get used to any "ribbons" flying across my screen.

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    1. Re:Call me old fashion... by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ask anyone off the street and they'll tell you that "computers are hard to use". The problem isn't the user interface, however, but the fact that it keeps changing. A huge number of people out there learn how to use computers by rote: they click this, select that, and double-click such-and-such to get something done. But nearly every major revision of MS Windows (and to a lesser extent MS Office) has changed these things. Win3x's Program Manager was replaced by Win9x's Start Menu. Win98's Network Neighborhood got renamed to WinME's My Network Places. Win9x's My Computer was moved from the desktop onto a WinXP Start menu that changes from one session to the next. Somewhere along the way, the menus started hiding options from people, making them harder to find. Now Microsoft's taking one of the few things that has remained fairly dependable over the years (predictable pull-down menus along the top of the window), and is now renaming them, hiding them, etc. Is is any wonder that people find this stuff baffling?

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    2. Re:Call me old fashion... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      call me more old fashoned...

      I dont care about the interface, I am worried about the new slew of "helpers" they put in there that will do what you dont want them to do, change your formatting, start a bulleted list when you dont want to, "help you" because you are not doing it the microsoft way, etc...

      Personally, a word processor that has NO features is perfect. put on the screen EXACTLY what I type, dont screw with my margins, dont adjust my tabstops, etc... Fun part is they make it intentionally hard to disable all that useless crap.

      I guarentee that Office 2007 will come with twice the amount of that garbage in it.

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    3. Re:Call me old fashion... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.
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      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  2. Hmm... by tttonyyy · · Score: 5, Funny
    "Microsoft claims that file sizes for the new Office 2007 XML-based formats are up to 75 percent less than existing Office formats."

    Presumably to make up for the >33% increase in the size of their new software? :)

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  3. XML FTW (WTF) by dsandler · · Score: 5, Funny
    Microsoft claims that file sizes for the new Office 2007 XML-based formats are up to 75 percent less than existing Office formats.
    ...thus marking the first time that using XML ever made any data representation more compact.