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

I've bee using Beta 2 since sometime in the summer

[edflyerssn007]

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

Re:CTRL-F1 cuts the ribbon

[garcia]

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.

Re:Bye Bye Microsoft

[Anonymous Monkey]

Insightful. I had a similar issue with accounting software two years ago (and I am an accountant). Way back I used Quicken and MS Money, to take care of my checkbook at home. Back when this started it was an electronic checkbook, and a cool one at that. As accounting software got 'better' and had more features it became more and more useless to me. Then two years ago at work I had trouble with the accounting software and my boss (with a PhD in accounting) said, "Skip the computer and use a 'green sheet,'" (Green sheets are the term used for old ledger pages, in either five or nine columns) And a light went on. I have all the accounting software I need, OO.o calc. No mater what the accounting software dose, all it boils down to is a spreadsheet! So, for the past two years I have been using a checkbook spreadsheet and I have never looked back.

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.

Re:CTRL-F1 cuts the ribbon

[Randolpho]

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.

A more appropriate metaphor would have been "gone is the steering wheel and foot pedals and 15 bajillion buttons and dongles (dongles being equivalent to pull-down menus, to clarify the metaphor) on your dashboard that you only rarely used, 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"

Re:Change is only good if it is the RIGHT change

[StikyPad]

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."