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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.'"
With more bugs each having more power to disrupt yor office work.
This will pair with Vista and IE 7.
Intelligence has limits. Stupidity doesn't.
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?
It was an article I read and it inferred that the head of Office was scared that she might lose her job if the ribbon scheme in Office didn't take off. Bill Gates personally approved of the change (as he should) after being presented with it by the head of Office. Now, I'm 100% positive that you can find the exact sources that quote this material that I read recently (within the month IIRC), I'm not going to bother.
Why was it rated Insightful? I don't know, people agreed that changing a common UI (adopted by most other programs to date) to something completely different might actually be a bad thing for the majority of users?
I've seen the interface, I've used it, I've had a hand in localizing it.
Why does the negative tone in your comment make me doubt everything you just said?
It still sucks.
I think I found an answer for this:
And you're entitled to your preference, as others are to theirs.
Yup. That's the one. Of course, one shouldn't start a thought with "and", but that is another debate.
This is incidentally one of the major problems with the Ribbon: things jump around constantly. First, this behavior makes it harder to focus on editing the document, since colorful icons are constantly shifting in your peripheral vision whenever you click somewhere, scroll, type, etc. It's terribly distracting. Second, because of the shifting, you never know where to find the function you need. First you have to scan the currently displayed commands, which Office thinks you are likely to use, then you go hunting. The problem is that instead of learning the position of commands afetr using each once or twice, you now have to hunt for them every time.
You must have had the "Mexican Jumping Bean" version of Office 2007. I say this because I have not experienced ANY of what you described above. More and more it's sounding like you are trolling...
Some commands have labels, others don't, and the labels disappear as you resize the window. What's worse, the buttons themselves disappear (are folded into drop-downs) as the window size changes. As a result, things are almost never where one expects them. A button you saw right there a minute ago is no longer there because you made the windows smaller. Except for outright crashing, this is the most annoying thing a program can do to a user.
Now I know you are. That, or you are on some sort of drug. And you aren't sharing.
PS:
Yes, I started a sentence with "and". It was to poke fun at you.
You bore me. I'm done with you now.
bork bork bork!