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

Basic document processing

[msobkow]

I used to do document processing with nroff/troff, so named paragraph styles and such just come naturally. What I don't understand is why no one seems to have just used CSS configurations to control display formatting of documents instead of just web pages.

Why not have more standardized tags so a web user's interface preferences can be easily rendered by browsers anywhere they go? i.e. Fill in the CSS attributes with your preferences and save them to your web profile. Anywhere you log in, you point the web profile to your "home" CSS sheet, and from thereon you get your display configs instead of CSS being abused to force tiny unreadable fonts onto big monitors, or inch-high text on older monitors.