Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I've seen radical departure in Microsoft's IE7, couldn't completely figure it out.
I've seen a radical departure in Gaim's interface, still scratching my head.
I've seen an amazing myriad of Windows Media Player interfaces. I've completely given up even trying to use that.
I remember a heated discussion once during a design session on a major application we were writing for a "large telcom". The gist of the discussion was we "had to have" a file menu, and it had to be on the top left of the application even though there was no notion of "File" for this application. The rationale? Because that's the way Microsoft did all of their applications.
I give Microsoft credit for taking a chance on a radical departure from what I've always thought was a stilted and stupid "required" interface (menus)... I hold little hope they get (got) it right considering Microsoft carried the old standard into the 21st century.
I find it curious they offer no way to use the old menu system. I'd be inclined not to want the old way, but for the sake of familiarity, it'd seem the more sane thing to do to offer the old menu interface as an option.
Sweet! Radical change to the interface away from the comfortable and familiar to the regular user sounds like a sudden and abrupt shock to me. Open Office has served me well for several years now, replacing MSoffice, and costing about zip. Same style of interface, same functionality - and the open document format.
This is probably a good time for OSS advocates in the corporate enviroment to bring the alternative up. Radical changes mean retraining, and retraining means wasting money. You might also push the "free" as in beer angle, or the faster development cycle producing new versions faster. Open Office dosen't have as many (known) exploits. Any other good selling points I'm missing?
-GiH
People will be using older versions for a while, but i look forward to the coming days when i tell people about openoffice and i can say "you can learn open office or the new ms office- both are different, but only one is free" because right now- i have a hard time getting people to move to open office because they don't want to change at all.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Wasn't having to learn a new interface one of their biggest arguements against open source software? I seem to remember report after report after report showing the "costs" to train employees to use non MS software.
"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."
It's an office application. I don't need a redesign, I don't care if it's "fresher" - people just need to be able to sit down and type a letter, or put together a spreadsheet.
There shouldn't be a learning curve involved with what amounts to commodity software.
#DeleteChrome
All those people who say they won't try free software because "it means learning a new interface" or "we'd have to convert all our files" or "they teach Office XP in school" or "it would require retraining" or "the TCO of switching is too high" - we now know what they actually mean.
"We want microsoft software at any cost"
Otherwise, all those arguments mean that they cannot use the latest version of Word.
I see the same complaints every time the UI changes on any program that people use a lot: "They changed the UI and now I have to learn a different one!"
You might have a legitimate grievance if the new UI is worse than the old one, but complaining just because it's different is annoying and stupid. Did you think that you'd never have to learn another UI, ever? Get over it.
Driving a car is very different than driving a team of horses, but that doesn't mean I'm upset that we're not riding in horse-drawn carriages. Sometimes different is GOOD.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
This is one of the few (actually, I can't remember any other one) instances where Microsoft has really innovated something. I guess they will have it all covered with patents.
If it happens to be an improvement, and if it is not patented, maybe some OSS applications will want to use the idea.
Does anyone know if it is patented?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
The new interface does look nice, but the old menu makes it much easier for the help desks to provide support over the phone. It is easier to tell a user to "Click the File menu, then Save" than it is to say "Do you see the icon that looks like a floppy disk? It is on the first toolbar, third from the left. Yes, beside that yellow thing that looks like a file folder. Click that." Now imagine the help desk person on the phone is on another continent and English is not his/her first language. Getting rid of the menus will make the learning curve just that much steeper and make companies slower to adopt this new Office.
This is the perfect opportunity for OpenOffice.org to grab lots of marketshare. Especially if bundled with a UI that maps absolutely exactly the familiar MSOffice menus/items/hotkeys.
MS file formats and GUI skills are 90% of the reason users upgrade to MS without even considering switching to something else/better. Let 'er rip!
--
make install -not war
Because that's not a complicated problem that entire industries are built around or anything.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I have used everything from old Fredwriter on the Apple II, to Word Perfect to OpenOffice, to various versions of MS Office on both Mac and PC and no matter what I do....the letter STILL prints out with black ink on white paper. No matter the Gee Wiz golly gosh GUI, it still boils down to that.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
And over the next year, productivity of the employees will be enhanced. Each employee will save on average 20 hours of work. So it's a net gain.
That's why new software comes out. That's why we upgrade. Because new stuff takes time to learn, but in return does something cool, or new, or saves us time.
Openoffice will not be not taken seriously until it has
a)A database program that doesnt suck
b)A presentation program with all the bells and whistles(the current one lacks it)
c)well thought out Desktop publishing
d)web page design tools
I use openoffice and I like it but I couldnt stop using publisher and frontpage
...for no good reason other than Bill and his head of Office development decided it would be a good idea... 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? Because I remember, about two years ago, attending a users group where Microsoft presented the findings of their office UI research. They gathered statistics on which options were clicked most often and least often, whether people used the mouse or the keyboard, how many times they did each operation, etc. I was under the mistaken impression that Microsoft used this research in designing the ribbon. I also thought that it went through several stages of multi-million dollar usability testing. Good thing I have a Slashdot troll to make a crazy car analogy to prove my facts are incorrect! I must have never even gone to that conference or watched that presenter. Thanks!Bash office if you wish, I won't defend it. If you have real criticism of the ribbon, post it. But don't make-up stupid insults about a UI you've never seen or used.
Personally? I hate Office's UI but I'm used to it -- it had a steep learning curve and now that I'm ok with it, I have absolutely no desire to relearn something else so that I'm able to do my job effectively.
I don't know why I chose your post over the MANY others of you who are bitching and moaning, but here I am.
Your comment above sounds *exactly* like someone who has never seen the interface. I've been using it for months now and would *hate* to go back to the "old" office setup. Everything I've ever looked for (page formatting options, etc) are *exactly* where one would expect them to be.
This is one of the things I hate about the direction the Human Race. "I got used to it this way and, even though the new way is probably FAR more intuitive, I'm going to sit here and complain about how much productivity is going to go down, belly-aching the entire time."
Do some research. Spend TWO MINUTES looking over the NUMEROUS web pages that have lots of screen shots. I know that many of you don't like "software by focus group", but I think MS got it right this time (if they used a focus group for the UI, that is. They probably did...)
bork bork bork!
All your old macros will work fine; new top-level menus, toolbars, etc. created will be routed to a tab in the ribbon called 'add-ins' automatically. As you'd know if you'd done even the slightest research into the issue.
4 85597.aspx for a further explanation, or here for a screenshot (albeit from beta 1).
See http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/27/
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Word DOS 5, had named paragraph styles. They've become progessively less useful ever since as MS has made their definitions so "intuitive" that almost every user just directly formats every paragraph without realising they're using stles. A great idea was bastardised to become a mockery of itself. When I get files to layout (my job is DTP) I spend a couple of hours rationalising the styles and headings. If the Word 5 styles hadn't been fucked with, every Word user would have to spend 20 minutes to get familiar with the idea, then he'd be 25% more efficient (figures made up, but my estimate).
There are a lot of people who have extreme difficulty with change. This is especially true of people who live outside of California and a handful of other tech-oriented communities, because people who love change tend to gravitate towards people like them who live in those places.
I moved to Pittsburgh from Caifornia for work reasons and although the work reasons have worked out well, observing a culture so resistant to change and new ideas has been a huge shock. So much so that I've been trying to figure out a good way to get out while saving my business interests since practically the day I got here.
I share this with you because I think almost everyone on Slashdot deeply underestimates the negative impact of change on real people. I think these people deserve more sympathy than they are getting here.
That being said, I never really liked menu interfaces, preferring something more like the ribbon/toolbar concept. However, I can see one interesting downside.
One of the advantages of the old menu interface was that the menu options have keyboard shortcuts next to them, making them relatively easy to learn.
Is there an equivaent to this on the ribbon? It seems almost entirely mouse dependent based on the pictures.
(As a Mac user I couldn't simply get the demo and try it out).
D
Frontpage has been dropped as of Office 2007. It has been replaced by two apps - SharePoint Designer and Expression Web - but I have yet to see them, and I'm just a little worried.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
Everyone is always moaning about the training costs involved in moving people from Windows to Linux. Both Office 2007 and OpenOffice will require training, but which way will be cheaper?
and in its place is a steering wheel and foot pedals and a streamlined context-sensitive dash-board control with only a few buttons, but only the buttons that you happen to need at the time
A "context-sensitive dashboard"? What a horrible idea! Another poster very insightfully responded with a comparison to iDrive on BMWs and a few other high-end cars. General consensus is that it is total garbage--annoying at best and dangerous at worst. Why is that? Well, in a car the driver is the primary user of the dashboard and the driver is generally looking at the road ahead. The dashboard should NOT be "context-sensitive" or otherwise dynamic in nature. IT SHOULD BE STATIC. The important functions of a dashboard should ALL be visible, in the same place, ALL THE TIME (even better there should be a tactile element as well--buttons, knobs and such should be raised).
Drivers need to be able to use such an interface using quick glances and/or by feel. iDrive's ever-changing, and largely non-tactile user interface is much too distracting to the driver...it was so poorly conceived that Microsoft had to simplify the interface navigation and make the little knob have better tactile feedback in the next revision because as it was in its introduction it was almost totally unusable unless the driver was able to pull over, and users wanted many iDrive functions to be safely accessible while driving. Add to that the software bugs that caused such things as radio to go on and off at whim, trunks to open spontaneously and so on and iDrive has been a disaster.
I haven't yet tried out these "ribbon" things, though I've on a couple of occasions seen live demonstrations of the user interface. While almost anything could be better than the horrid menu system Office has traditionally had such a drastic change is pretty risky--they didn't even leave the wheel and pedals (to carry on the analogy)--it is more like they replaced the wheel with a joystick and the pedals with thumb-and-trigger buttons. Everything is in different places and WORKS differently--it doesn't matter if some study deems that technical advantages exceed disadvantages or that it is easier to learn--the fact is there are a billion people out there who know the old way of driving.
It is true that a desktop isn't a car and that the analogy isn't TOTALLY valid, however there are some universal principals of designing for usability that MS repeatedly insists on violating. The biggest of these is making things too "automatically dynamic". They've been doing this since sometime not long after NT4 came out: First they hide rarely-used start menu items...AUTOMATICALLY...WITHOUT user's input on how or when to do it. THEN they release XP and hide the old menu items under an added layer...and put FREQUENTLY used items out front...again without much control given to the user. I guess at least they threw us a *little* bone and let us "pin" icons and clear them out totally at will, but they re-appear (or don't) on what seems like a total whim.
Now they have this new MS Office with its "ribbons" and context-sensitivity and reorganisation and my first impression is that they KEEP ON HIDING AND MOVING STUFF for us. Much of the new interface is clever and makes navigation much less cumbersome. However, then they go and mess with your head again with these "dynamic" elements (galleries) and obscurity (putting what are basically file management functions in "another start menu" indicated only by a goofy little "office system" logo). I would've preferred a somewhat different approach--one that allowed a bit more user configure-ability. In any case I'll have a more informed opinion once I actually have to use it rather than sitting and watching a demo of it.
Perhaps someone can confirm to me whether or not my concerns is valid--has MS learned anything or are they still pushing the user around by doing too may user-interface alterations automatically?