Office 2007 — Better But a Tough Switch

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Office 2007, coming out Jan. 30, is a 'radical revision,' writes the Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg. 'The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone — every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.' He adds, 'It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher. But there is a big downside to this gutsy redesign: It requires a steep learning curve that many people might rather avoid.'"

Comments

CTRL-F1 cuts the ribbon

[binaryspiral]

For those of you who are getting this pushed to your desktops and hate the ribbon...

CTRL-F1

But when you have a week when you're not under intense deadlines, give it a chance. I've really learned to like it, and think it does add some clarification to UI that was the definition and punchline of "Bloatware"

Re:CTRL-F1 cuts the ribbon

[barzok]

Can you please send the link to an article that indicates that decisions on office UI are made solely by Bill Gates and the head of Office development?

The program manager had to convince Gates that doing so was a good idea. Yes, surveys and tests were done, but ultimately Gates had to approve. There was an article in Newsweek about it in November.

Re:Great.

[MeanMF]

No, macros still work fine.

Retraining

[Rik Sweeney]

Can you imagine what this would be like for a business with thousands of employees in each building who will need to be retrained to used Word. First there would be the cost of upgrading, them the cost of training, particularly if they need to bring in someone external and then they've lost man hours from all the retraining they've had to give.

Doesn't sound great to me.

Re:I've bee using Beta 2 since sometime in the sum

[Daemonstar]

There are a couple different presentation modes, but when you have dual screen set up with extended desktop, your second screen becomes the actual slides, while the first screen displays your notes, along with a bar of upcoming slides. If older versions could do this, I never encountered it.

In Office2k3 (I'm unsure of earlier versions) you can do this. Under "Slide Show" and "Set Up Show", you can select which monitor to show the slides on. You can also check "Show Presenter View" which gives you a slide show interface. This is how we do it for morning worship services at church. :)

Re:Yeah, you know what they replaced it with

[Phat_Tony]

Better yet, maybe it comes with a real life Clippy.

Re:Been Using 2007 for about 2 weeks

[ditoa]

I have been using Office 2007 since Beta 2 and rolled the RTM out after a 2 weeks testing to just under 100 staff. Each week (in the past 4 that they have had it) we have asked for feedback. To begin with it was about 30% liking it and 70 hating it. A few people dropped out of the testing because they hated it so much and were replaced. Over those 4 weeks the feedback has changed and now the numbers are 90% liking it, 5-6% still not too sure and 4-5% still hating it. What this shows me is that it takes a while to adjust. Most people don't like change and Office 2007 is a big change. Give it some time and I am sure you will find it much nicer to use. Personally I really like it now however I started using it without reading all of the negative comments and so I took a very relaxed approach to its new UI. It took me about 2-3 weeks of daily use but now I wouldn't want to go back.

Re:Yeah, you know what they replaced it with

[Rude Turnip]

Spare us the righeous indignation:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Re:Keyboard shortcuts?

[michrech]

For most of your message, I only have one comment. Those that are so resistant to change will eventually be filtered out of the gene pool, having been replaced by those who can look at alternatives to what they are doing, do some research, and make a choice as to which is better. That is what Evolution does. I know the creationists don't like to hear that, but, they too will soon be gone.

Is there an equivaent to this on the ribbon? It seems almost entirely mouse dependent based on the pictures.

This was what I most wanted to touch on. From what few keyboard shortcuts I did know (cut, paste, Italics, Bold, etc), they all have the same shortcut. If, however, you wish to know what shortcut a particular option has, all one has to do is hover the mouse over the "button" that activates the option and some help text will pop up, including the keyboard shortcut (if that option has one).

Thank you for at least asking, instead of bashing it blindly. ;)

Re:"save as" one of the hardest to find items.

[mobby_6kl]

If the save as dialog is needed after saving the document once, you click the huge blinking Office button I already mentioned (it's right next to the floppy icon), there's large menu item "Save As". I'm not aware of any shortcuts for feature (like Ctrl+Shift+S in Photoshop) in Office 2007 or 2003.

"Steep learning curve" means easy, not difficult!

[jezor]

Here's one of my pet peeves in full operation. A learning curve has two axes: the x axis is time, and the y axis is amount learned. A steep learning curve is one where the amount of learning goes up quickly in a short amount of time; that is, it represents ease of learning. Conversely, a shallow learning curve means the rate of increase is less over the same amount of time--learning is more difficult. The OP/FA gets this exactly backward.

I guess the correct usage of this phrase has a shallow learning curve. {Prof. Jonathan}