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

Ugh.

[93 Escort Wagon]

"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.

So now we know

[legirons]

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.

Does being accustomed to a bad UI make it good?

[TheWoozle]

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.

Re:Does being accustomed to a bad UI make it good?

[DragonWriter]

Is anyone forcing you to upgrade?

At the moment, no. But criticizing a product that the vendor attempts to sell as an upgrade because of a weakness it has in that role is not out of line merely because you are not forced to upgrade to it. Then again, in the post you responded to, I didn't say a darned thing about the product at all, merely the basis used to attack a criticism of it, which was completely nonspecific to the product or its features.

Is there anything wrong with still using Office 2k3, or XP?

One would think that criticism of the upgrade implied that there was, indeed, nothing wrong with continuing to use existing software in preference to the new thing that the vendor is trying to sell.

Can you really honestly tell me you want microsoft to restrain its interface design to the lowest common denominator just for the sake of familiarity?

No, what I want is, assuming someone wants to sell me a new product for a role I already have essentially filled with something that is workable if not ideal, provide adequate improvements in the functionality I care about to outweigh whatever costs (dollar, transitional familiarity, document conversion, etc.) it imposes.

Things that break familiarity are, in that analysis, a negative strike for unfamiliarity. If they provide a benefit that outweighs that, they may be worthwhile. To address the particular product at issue, though that's tangential to my earlier point, I've seen no reason to believe that, for me, MS's UI redesign provides such benefits.

The interface makes sense damnit!

So did the interface on WordStar for DOS, and most major office products from now to then (and before, for that matter.)

It's a logical work flow, it's task oriented, you dont really even have to think to find the tools you are looking for if you understand the premise of the interface.

I'm not as excited as you obviously are by the new UI's buzzword compliance, or the fact that if you've internalized its structure you don't need to think about it much (which is true of any UI.)

Just vote with your wallet, instead of making impotent wailings about it.

If your idea is that people should not discuss the positive or negative qualities of a product in a forum like Slashdot, but instead simply vote with their wallets by buying or not buying it, then its odd that you should make such impassioned arguments about the qualities of the new UI.

Have you considered practicing what you preach?

But how to support it

[Relden]

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.

Re:Bye Bye Microsoft

[nacturation]

The company is going into the ground like a lawn dart. I'm glad I moved my office manager to OpenOffice last year. Don't worry... OpenOffice.org will clone this interface within 6 months.

Re:CTRL-F1 cuts the ribbon

[MobyDisk]

Why is it that relating computers to cars is considered insightful?

...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.

Re:CTRL-F1 cuts the ribbon

[michrech]

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...)

Re:Great.

[SEMW]

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.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/27/4 85597.aspx for a further explanation, or here for a screenshot (albeit from beta 1).

Re:This might be Microsoft's best gift to FOSS

[symbolic]

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?