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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.'"
And that dosen't seem to appealing to the corporate customers they're trying to sell this to. I think its an issue of an unnecessary GUI overhaul once again to make an incrimental product seem new.
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I do admit there is a learning curve, but even so, once you get the hang of it, its very fast. I know that in Powerpoint it is very easy to find where the tools you need are, and some are in multiple spots if they need to be. 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.
Word is also better, I like the UI stuff they've done when you highlight and the font menu automatically appears. E-mail editing is tied in well with outlook, which didn't get as much update to the UI as the others, but still looks and works great. Amazingly, even for a beta, I rarely run into stability issues. I crashed it once, but I don't remember what I did, and I really think it wasn't a crash, but something locked it running in the background that just was taking a real long while to run, so I got impatient and set it to the land of Ctrl-alt-del.
-Ed
So you see what had happened was....
The functional design behind the ribbon was to keep every task to 1-2 clicks only.
And they did a good job, the fact that I had to add the 'Save As' button was the only quirk that bothered me.
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For those like me that are keyboard jockeys, the lack of menus will take some time to get around. However (for better or for worse, considering how people abuse Outlook and PowerPoint functionality), the new strips allow users to see more of the functionality that is available in the various programs, with tab titles that usually make at least as much sense as the old menus did, and often make more sense.
People to whom I've shown the new interface have had a few complaints, but they've been more about how it's different, not how it's bad. The quick access to items that used to be buried in menus (unless you wanted to clutter your toolbar with more buttons) actually made a number of people much happier once they got a chance to play with it. These are not Office experts, either, and the learning curve did not seem to be all that great.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Is it the same interface you find on MS Office for Mac? If it is, then it's a clear improvement over the old GUI. IMHO, of course.
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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"
Why? It's like getting into a car and finding that the UI you have come to love to hate has changed to something completely different. Gone is the steering wheel as you know it, gone are the foot pedals, and gone are the buttons that operate the comfort controls. In its place you have a foreign interface that will take a few days to get used to for no good reason other than Bill and his head of Office development decided it would be a good idea.
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.
If my company decides to upgrade, I will have to stop what I'm doing and relearn something else. The ~7 day loss in productivity will *not* be recouped in enough time by the new UI to make the first work loss worthwhile. I guarantee it.
The problem with offering the older interface as an option is, if the new interface is a radical enough change, EVERYONE will use the old interface instead. This means you're still stuck having to work around and support the old interface forever. In Microsoft's case, though, they can leverage the fact that their Office product is so dominant in the market that they can make this kind of change without the risk of losing any significant chunk of their user base.
People will bitch and moan, and then start using the new interface. Schools will teach the new interface, and in just a couple of years no one will be talking about the old interface. This would not be possible if they kept the old interface as an option.
Now we will finally get to see if the oft-repeated argument that switching to free systems is too expensive, because users have to re-learn their skills holds any water. If so, we should see a flood migration from Office 2007 to OpenOffice.org et al, as they will be the closest in terms of user interface of all up to date software. My money is on "no, the argument doesn't hold water", though.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Don't you freakin' dare badmouthing the Ribbon without first trying it. This is one of those few things that Microsoft got right and spared no expense on implementation. As far as UI is concerned, I'd put it into the top 10 innovations of the last decade, and I do take the word "innovation" very seriously, particularly when it comes to Microsoft. Office 2007 is going to sell big, and OO will have to copy it. Again.
My wife did the same thing with her text documents. After lots of fighting with MS Word or OO.o write, she decided all she wanted was words on a page and switched to notepad.
The moral of the story is: It's still black ink on paper, so you don't need to upgrade.
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That's debatable. I don't think we've really reached a point where Microsoft Word is the only "viable" product for word processing tasks in a large corporate environment, have we?
IBM still sells SmartSuite with WordPro. WordPerfect is still available. There are even shareware and freeware solutions out there like OpenOffice.
It constantly amazes me how where I work, everyone goes into "panic mode" as soon as they receive an email attachment that can't be opened by MS Office with a double-click. Typically, they end up being WordPerfect documents or something, where actually, Word *can* open it, but just isn't associated as the default app to open files with that extension on them. It's this same fear that leads people to upgrade their Office suites, because otherwise, they might receive a document created with MS Office that they can't easily open up.
I'd argue that with either an older version of Word, or a competing product, you could be completely productive and functional in almost any business setting. You'd simply need to ask some people to resend files in alternate formats for you, and/or learn to use some conversion utilities here and there.
I find it curious they offer no way to use the old menu system.
It's not that mysterious really... just another tactic to increase lock-in:
1) Add new, idiosyncratic interface to commoditised application
2) Use monopoly to compel market to 'upgrade' to new version
3) Wait for users to accept the new interface as the default
4) Use IP laws to prevent FOSS competitors from cloning interface
5) Switching to FOSS suddenly becomes much more difficult
It's all about increasing switching costs.
I downloaded a beta and my university has had the final version available for download for a couple weeks. I like that you can set the ribbon to autohide. I also like that instead of putting stupid addins in another toolbar which reduces the room to work in they exile it to "addins."
The placement of the commands seem fairly arbitrary to me, however. It was like they filled out 75% of the ribbons and said, "ok, let's just throw the rest of this stuff on there." They seemed to make the little windows button at the top the default for all the functions that they couldn't fit in anywhere else.
They say that they completely redesigned it, but as soon as you get into any of the options that aren't in the ribbon the box it pops up looks exactly like the older versions of Office which really shows that they just put a skin on the old application.
The instant preview of the fonts and formatting is really nice and the little formatting menu that pops up when you highlight a section is nice, although I wish it would pop up instantly instead of fading in. I forget it is there and move the mouse half way up to the ribbon before I remember that the formatting thing will fade in and by that time it is too late to use it.
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Radical changes mean retraining, and retraining means wasting money.
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations in September '05 for some work at the time about this and came up with $3500 per user for an Office 2007 upgrade and about $750 per user for an Open Office side-grade.
Those numbers might look a bit different today but they're probably similar. And no doubt I'll get responses from the "you can't measure anything by acquisition costs" cabal - I'll just ignore those preemptively here with the "you can do a fuzzy measurement" reasoning quantum physicists have been on the avant garde of for so long. Our renormalization groups aren't quite so well-defined or worked-out, unfortunately.
Some people here have mentioned how people get frustrated with Open Office's similar-but-different features. I've found, studying non-power users, that they don't really know the Office interface well at all, and are basically re-discovering it all the time. For that group of users, the OOOfice interface isn't a drag. For people in the Office Suite all day, either path is going to add some air resistance.
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Why do Web design tools, desktop publishing tools, and the like have to be part of an office suite? Just because Microsoft put them there?
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> Why is it that relating computers to cars is considered insightful?
;-)
There's actually one in the original article: "It's as if Toyota decided to switch the position of choices on the automobile shift lever, or Motorola decided to rearrange the buttons on the cellphone key pad."
Cars aside, imagine a world where keypads went 789, 456, 123, 0. Man, that would SUCK.
Oh, no, wait... it would FUCKING RULE if the keypads on my phones, computer, ATM, etc. were all the same. Ever use a computer's keypad to enter a phone number you dial often?
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Yeah, it took me a few minutes to figure out how to print in Office'07. Basically (unless you use a shortcut), you have to navigate through 2 tiers of menus from the "Office Shield" in the upper left just to get a printout. What was wrong with the print button right out in the open? Instead there's 1 sq.in. of real estate used by a clipboard and some scissors. (Does anybody NOT use keyboard shortcuts for that stuff?) Even worse, there's 3 sq.in. used by three cryptic boxes on the right, which might possibly be font selections, but there's also a straightforward font selection combo box on the left, so who knows. And then there's the "Editing" button on the far right. I thought cut/copy/paste was editing, but what do I know. Would it really be that hard to slip in the Print/Open/Close buttons somewhere in there? I mean, I can see myself using the New Paragraph, Sort, and Paint Fill buttons A LOT, but even so, I think I would prefer to have easy access to the aforementioned other "features."
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