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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.'"
I wonder if this will break all the Excel macros I've written too.
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The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new.
I'm crossing my fingers in the hope that they replaced the entire user interface with a giant version of Clippy.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
For those of you who are getting this pushed to your desktops and hate the ribbon...
CTRL-F1
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"
I've seen radical departure in Microsoft's IE7, couldn't completely figure it out.
I've seen a radical departure in Gaim's interface, still scratching my head.
I've seen an amazing myriad of Windows Media Player interfaces. I've completely given up even trying to use that.
I remember a heated discussion once during a design session on a major application we were writing for a "large telcom". The gist of the discussion was we "had to have" a file menu, and it had to be on the top left of the application even though there was no notion of "File" for this application. The rationale? Because that's the way Microsoft did all of their applications.
I give Microsoft credit for taking a chance on a radical departure from what I've always thought was a stilted and stupid "required" interface (menus)... I hold little hope they get (got) it right considering Microsoft carried the old standard into the 21st century.
I find it curious they offer no way to use the old menu system. I'd be inclined not to want the old way, but for the sake of familiarity, it'd seem the more sane thing to do to offer the old menu interface as an option.
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.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
For people who mostly control Office via keyboard commands, and rarely use menus and toolbars, all of the basic keyboard commands are the same.
Phew!
The menus, icons, and buttons are helpful, but keyboard commands are where Microsoft really shines. X (or rather, the Window Managers) still has a long way to go in that area. I'd actually think if MS changes the keyboard shortcuts it would be a real issue, but for the icons, people will learn them easily enough and move on.
Have you read my journal today?
Sweet! Radical change to the interface away from the comfortable and familiar to the regular user sounds like a sudden and abrupt shock to me. Open Office has served me well for several years now, replacing MSoffice, and costing about zip. Same style of interface, same functionality - and the open document format.
This is probably a good time for OSS advocates in the corporate enviroment to bring the alternative up. Radical changes mean retraining, and retraining means wasting money. You might also push the "free" as in beer angle, or the faster development cycle producing new versions faster. Open Office dosen't have as many (known) exploits. Any other good selling points I'm missing?
-GiH
People will be using older versions for a while, but i look forward to the coming days when i tell people about openoffice and i can say "you can learn open office or the new ms office- both are different, but only one is free" because right now- i have a hard time getting people to move to open office because they don't want to change at all.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
Can you imagine what this would be like for a business with thousands of employees in each building who will need to be retrained to used Word. First there would be the cost of upgrading, them the cost of training, particularly if they need to bring in someone external and then they've lost man hours from all the retraining they've had to give.
Doesn't sound great to me.
Summation 2
Wasn't having to learn a new interface one of their biggest arguements against open source software? I seem to remember report after report after report showing the "costs" to train employees to use non MS software.
"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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
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This is one of the few (actually, I can't remember any other one) instances where Microsoft has really innovated something. I guess they will have it all covered with patents.
If it happens to be an improvement, and if it is not patented, maybe some OSS applications will want to use the idea.
Does anyone know if it is patented?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
A few weeks ago, I watched someone install this program by mistake onto a new computer. It's what the university is now pushing, so they kept it.
It would be hard to describe their frustration, so I won't bother. It took them half an hour to find "save as". As usual, the OS itself hid the extension so you could not tell that it was saving everything in .DOCX, the 6000 page "open XML" successor to the previous M$ "open" format, RTF. I can only imagine the anger and sadness that awaits true Word users who have been using all the painful tools that M$ bloated into the program, drawing tools, flight simulator, whatever.
The upgrade train is roaring on and M$ is really pushing hard this time. It's going to piss a lot of people off and offers great opportunity for free software. You can now say that it's easier to make the move to Open Office for a new system than it is to move to Office 2007.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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.
This is the perfect opportunity for OpenOffice.org to grab lots of marketshare. Especially if bundled with a UI that maps absolutely exactly the familiar MSOffice menus/items/hotkeys.
MS file formats and GUI skills are 90% of the reason users upgrade to MS without even considering switching to something else/better. Let 'er rip!
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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.
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And over the next year, productivity of the employees will be enhanced. Each employee will save on average 20 hours of work. So it's a net gain.
That's why new software comes out. That's why we upgrade. Because new stuff takes time to learn, but in return does something cool, or new, or saves us time.
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.
Openoffice will not be not taken seriously until it has
a)A database program that doesnt suck
b)A presentation program with all the bells and whistles(the current one lacks it)
c)well thought out Desktop publishing
d)web page design tools
I use openoffice and I like it but I couldnt stop using publisher and frontpage
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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LOAD "SIG",8,1
Word DOS 5, had named paragraph styles. They've become progessively less useful ever since as MS has made their definitions so "intuitive" that almost every user just directly formats every paragraph without realising they're using stles. A great idea was bastardised to become a mockery of itself. When I get files to layout (my job is DTP) I spend a couple of hours rationalising the styles and headings. If the Word 5 styles hadn't been fucked with, every Word user would have to spend 20 minutes to get familiar with the idea, then he'd be 25% more efficient (figures made up, but my estimate).
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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There are a lot of people who have extreme difficulty with change. This is especially true of people who live outside of California and a handful of other tech-oriented communities, because people who love change tend to gravitate towards people like them who live in those places.
I moved to Pittsburgh from Caifornia for work reasons and although the work reasons have worked out well, observing a culture so resistant to change and new ideas has been a huge shock. So much so that I've been trying to figure out a good way to get out while saving my business interests since practically the day I got here.
I share this with you because I think almost everyone on Slashdot deeply underestimates the negative impact of change on real people. I think these people deserve more sympathy than they are getting here.
That being said, I never really liked menu interfaces, preferring something more like the ribbon/toolbar concept. However, I can see one interesting downside.
One of the advantages of the old menu interface was that the menu options have keyboard shortcuts next to them, making them relatively easy to learn.
Is there an equivaent to this on the ribbon? It seems almost entirely mouse dependent based on the pictures.
(As a Mac user I couldn't simply get the demo and try it out).
D
Frontpage has been dropped as of Office 2007. It has been replaced by two apps - SharePoint Designer and Expression Web - but I have yet to see them, and I'm just a little worried.
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She better be careful with sharing that ribbon, the BSA might be hiding behind that one tree.
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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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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?
Here's one of my pet peeves in full operation. A learning curve has two axes: the x axis is time, and the y axis is amount learned. A steep learning curve is one where the amount of learning goes up quickly in a short amount of time; that is, it represents ease of learning. Conversely, a shallow learning curve means the rate of increase is less over the same amount of time--learning is more difficult. The OP/FA gets this exactly backward.
I guess the correct usage of this phrase has a shallow learning curve. {Prof. Jonathan}
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
A "context-sensitive dashboard"? What a horrible idea! Another poster very insightfully responded with a comparison to iDrive on BMWs and a few other high-end cars. General consensus is that it is total garbage--annoying at best and dangerous at worst. Why is that? Well, in a car the driver is the primary user of the dashboard and the driver is generally looking at the road ahead. The dashboard should NOT be "context-sensitive" or otherwise dynamic in nature. IT SHOULD BE STATIC. The important functions of a dashboard should ALL be visible, in the same place, ALL THE TIME (even better there should be a tactile element as well--buttons, knobs and such should be raised).
Drivers need to be able to use such an interface using quick glances and/or by feel. iDrive's ever-changing, and largely non-tactile user interface is much too distracting to the driver...it was so poorly conceived that Microsoft had to simplify the interface navigation and make the little knob have better tactile feedback in the next revision because as it was in its introduction it was almost totally unusable unless the driver was able to pull over, and users wanted many iDrive functions to be safely accessible while driving. Add to that the software bugs that caused such things as radio to go on and off at whim, trunks to open spontaneously and so on and iDrive has been a disaster.
I haven't yet tried out these "ribbon" things, though I've on a couple of occasions seen live demonstrations of the user interface. While almost anything could be better than the horrid menu system Office has traditionally had such a drastic change is pretty risky--they didn't even leave the wheel and pedals (to carry on the analogy)--it is more like they replaced the wheel with a joystick and the pedals with thumb-and-trigger buttons. Everything is in different places and WORKS differently--it doesn't matter if some study deems that technical advantages exceed disadvantages or that it is easier to learn--the fact is there are a billion people out there who know the old way of driving.
It is true that a desktop isn't a car and that the analogy isn't TOTALLY valid, however there are some universal principals of designing for usability that MS repeatedly insists on violating. The biggest of these is making things too "automatically dynamic". They've been doing this since sometime not long after NT4 came out: First they hide rarely-used start menu items...AUTOMATICALLY...WITHOUT user's input on how or when to do it. THEN they release XP and hide the old menu items under an added layer...and put FREQUENTLY used items out front...again without much control given to the user. I guess at least they threw us a *little* bone and let us "pin" icons and clear them out totally at will, but they re-appear (or don't) on what seems like a total whim.
Now they have this new MS Office with its "ribbons" and context-sensitivity and reorganisation and my first impression is that they KEEP ON HIDING AND MOVING STUFF for us. Much of the new interface is clever and makes navigation much less cumbersome. However, then they go and mess with your head again with these "dynamic" elements (galleries) and obscurity (putting what are basically file management functions in "another start menu" indicated only by a goofy little "office system" logo). I would've preferred a somewhat different approach--one that allowed a bit more user configure-ability. In any case I'll have a more informed opinion once I actually have to use it rather than sitting and watching a demo of it.
Perhaps someone can confirm to me whether or not my concerns is valid--has MS learned anything or are they still pushing the user around by doing too may user-interface alterations automatically?
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