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Office 2010 Technical Preview Leaked
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft was planning on giving out the Office 2010 Technical Preview to select testers in July on an invite-only basis. Office 2010 will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and both flavors have been leaked to torrent sites and the like. Multiple screenshots of each application are available. '... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'"
No Thanks.
I have everything I need in OpenOffice, and it is better priced too...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Is this really a mistake or is it a clever marketing ploy to get this into the hands of everyone who is running the Windows 7 Release Candidate (which is the Ultimate version, btw). Get 'em hooked now, and then when the preview version expires hope that turns into sales ...
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
I've gotten used to the ribbon by force, but Im still not the biggest fan. I find the location of alot of commands to be counter intuitive. For example, no Page Setup in the print option from the Office Orb item. Office 2007 introduced alot of good features such as saving as a PDF but I wish they would give users the option of collapsing the ribbon back in to proper menu's for consistency with every other app not made by Microsoft. Its great they are trying something different but seem to have little buy in from software vendors, otherwise all apps would be ribbons instead of menus
was for developers to stop creating their own interfaces for things like printing or saving files. Our applications would be more usable if we just used the underlying platform's routines and conventions.
I wonder whether Office turning its back on Windows UI conventions isn't a long term hedge against the desktop OS monopoly collapsing. Without a monopoly, is Windows worth the effort and cost for Microsoft?
Imagine that Windows fails. Office remains an economically important platform. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a return to the days of dedicated word processing hardware, with devices that "run office".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I know Office extremely well... Or at least I used to. With these latest releases, it's like the developers have taken magic mushrooms and decided to visit Venus. Seriously, what's going on? Why has everything changed? Who are these changes designed to help? Why did they decide to abandon the system of menus that's been in service since 1984? Just because they've been in service since 1984? That's like Ford abandoning the idea of a steering wheel because it's been used in cars since 1900. When I look at things like this, I see how far from the straight and narrow Microsoft has strayed. They are really losing all track of what's important to users. They've just lost touch completely. I'll say one thing for Bill Gates, and one thing only, but the guy could keep his organization together and produce some half-decent software. Ballmer's just a nutjob who's steering the company into the ground.
"ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake."
Who cares if it's consistent; it still seriously overshadows all the other good things Microsoft has done to Office.
TFA should have read, "the ribbon still sucks, and now it's on every application."
FTFY.
And the Bit Shifter hid under the bed as ideas danced in little Robby's sleaping head. Feeding him the thoughts to do for the day that would put news on Slashdot's a better way. When out from the closet sprang the Evil Bit and chased the Bit Shifter out through the door, down the hall, and onto the floor where rang the nightly call of CowboyNeal houling through the Intercom wishing well another day of LINUX.COM and Slashdot's over-extended stay. Wouldn't you know it, out in the yard, a Gnome distracts into the two datagrams a Goatse of Peccard, with vissions of Priceline.com sending Shatner on a ogo-pogo stick, sent up the ass of ol' Kike Thomas the Spick. With a hearty goodbye, the Gnome gave a yodel, back into Kathleen Fent's cunt he climed, saying Merry Christmas and don't ask me why.
Good night Anonymous Coward (*kiss)
The End
PS: NOW GET YOUR ASS OFF SLASHDOT AND GET SOME SLEEP, because deprivation might kill you -- you, the asset of all of Slashdot's inspiration that keeps these forums going!
The whole Orb/Microsoft Office squiggle thing is silly and unintuitive. It took me a while to even realize it was a clickable menu.
And no doubt companies will be lined up to buy the new version of office that does nothing more than the last few versions except for the new backwards semi-compatible file formats that you must upgrade to or your company will die. yada yada yada..
And we'll have the new fud how openoffice is so out of date not having the "patented" ribbon interface and all these glossy features that probably less than 1% of the world will ever use..
rant over..
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot. It all seems to be centered on "but they changed it".
Slashdot is an technology community: we're the people who're either instigating change, or are always putting ourselves on the bleeding edge. We accept the fact that we often have to relearn things, because we then gain the advantages of progress.
Ribbon's a really good example. Once you're used to it, you'll find it so much easier to use than the old system that you'll never want to go back.
For example, take Excel 2007. One of the most common functions in Excel is creation of pretty reports using tables and charts. With Ribbon it's so much easier to create and use tables. The interface is fantastic. Far superiour to the old menuing system. The way that they've build the seperation of symantics and style, an made is easy to use is just fantastic. I mean, you've got an cell in an spreadsheet which contains faulty data.
Like most slashdotters I was suspicious at first. You can't help but be after hearing such bad press. However within a day of actually using it, the benefits were clear.
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
Probably the only thing that can be counted on is that some to many of the changes will change again by the time the official release comes out. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, just that it tends to happen with most large programs/suites. Release early preview, get feedback, make some changes, release preview 2, etc. Actually, I guess that would probably put it into the "good" category.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
As a power user of Word and Excel I find the inclusion of a native 64 bit version to be very welcomed indeed.
Excel 2007 added some much needed features that has truely turned it into a portable database program, whereby increasing the amount of rows from 64k to over 1 million, and from 256 columns to over 10k among other notable changes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx#Office2007excelPerf_BigGridIncreasedLimitsExcel
Like most people, I was apprehensive of the ribbon UI however after about 2 weeks of solid use I fell in love with it. Microsoft really nailed it, something had to be done given the shear amount of features available in a modern editor.
I hope to see some innovation from the OOo team to give their program a fresh face although I was impressed to see some improvements in their 3.1 release.
Why do I hate the Ribbon.
It took me about 2 months to get used to the UI differences between Windows 2003 and OpenOffice.
At 9 months and counting- I still havn't regained my productivity in Office. There are some things which I just haven't figured out a quick way to do again.
AND- ever since it was installed my laptop went from being a speedster to being a dog.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Nerds don't like change for the sake of change. We're not that simplistic. We instigate change when change is necessary--when we see that yes, there truly is a better way of doing things and that the old ways are broken or otherwise insufficient.
The ribbon interface, at least for me, is change for the sake of change.
Cedric: Why don't you want to wear the ribbon?
Kramer: Why should I?
Cedric: You have to, everyone is.
Kramer: That's why I don't want to.
'... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'
Meh. What we really want to know is: How's the ODF compatibility?
Looks like they can't generate enough commercial interest and have had to upload it as a torrent as with Windows 7, Windows ME 2 (Vista) BIOS hack etc.
"If I need to read the manual before I can use the new version of X, the interface is crap". That's what I have against the ribbon. Thankfully, I rarely have to deal with MS Office.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
In my experience, the Ribbon is a vast improvement over the 'old' UI. Sure, the 'old' UI wasn't broken, but neither were steam engines.
I was really hoping to lambast MS for getting it wrong again with change for the sake of change, but I really think they got it right this time.
The preview site http://www.office2010themovie.com/index-hd.html requires Silverlight. I refuse to install yet another plug-in. Hope Microsoft doesn't require Silverlight to use Office 2010.
More of that awful Ribbon. Gratuitously modal interfaces are just SO helpful. I mean, I appreciate that Microsoft is actually trying to innovate, but they're really no good at it.
The old way is broken, menubars and static toolbars do not scale well to all the fancy functionality wanted in a modern office suite!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I've been "using" Office 2007 since February of last year. And did I finally start "loving" it? Nope. Looks like the next office suite upgrade for me will be to OpenOffice, which thankfully still uses a sane UI.
Why do we hate the ribbon? Because it's dynamic.
Microsoft sees that as a plus: customize the UI based on what Office thinks the user is trying to do. Nice, in theory. But it depends on a level of application telepathy that doens't exist. (Yet?)
Users see it as a minus: the commands they want aren't always where they expect to find them, so they end up wasting productive time trying to find them. More than a little frustrating when you have a deadline bearing down on you.
If Office did a better job of reading the user's mind, the Ribbon would rock. But since that's not likely to happen, Microsoft should go back to UI Design 101: a good UI is a consistent UI.
Don't suprise users by capriciously moving tools, or they'll hate you forever. Which is pretty much where 90% of Office '07 are right now.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
I liked the Ribbon.
But if what Ars says is true, that clicking on the office button will result in this needlessly modal screen, that means that to do a simple operation like "save as", you'll need to go to that huge screen.
For the lack of a better word (sorry for the pun), that's pretty screwed up.
Plus Office 2010 just looks like Office 2007 with a facelift.
Considering I'm not really a heavy Excel user, but I do occasionally create tables and charts.
In my experience, it could not be 'much easier' with the Ribbon as it wasn't hard before the ribbon.
Having used both I can confirm that it really isn't 'Much Easier' to do it via the ribbon because it really wasn't hard and only took one more click in the old version. (2003)
If you think this new interface is 'far superiour' you have become a fanboy. Its not really a lot different, they mostly just jumbled up the toolbar by craming the menu and the toolbar together.
The reason most of slashdot's problem with it is 'because they changed it' is because thats really all they did. To anyone who knew how to use the products before hand its an annoying change that costs people time. For people who think they've made things easier, all thats happened is that you bothered to take the time to look around for a change and find features.
I've spent a couple years using 2007 now, I still hate it. From reading your post, I can say that your problem is that you never really knew how to use Office in the first place, so now that you've been hit in the face with a 2x4 of change you finally bothered to look into it more. This is not good if it happens to everyone.
People who go crazy with Office 'Features' make documents that are fucking shit to work with.
People who use many features in Word and Excel as a general rule are doing it wrong. Playing with all your fonts, sizes and such in Word is generally a sign you're doing it wrong. You use standard styles so the document can be restyled later as needed or converted to another format. Instead people like you who have suddenly found the ribbon start setting fonts, colors, sizes and other formatting options on the text itself trying to make it look like YOU think it should look, even though most of you couldn't pass highschool english if you're life depended on it.
And I'm really happy that people are finding Excel's features, thats all I needed. Documents that are basically CSV's being turned into something akin to a powerpoint with a bunch of retarded charts and effects that matter not to the data nor do they present it in a better way, they just detract from it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Need to insert a column or row in Excel? Go to the tab labeled Insert and...
Desperately trying to make it seem like anyone still cares..
I bet it's not even going to get pirated. Pirates only make duplicates where it makes money, and I'm not sure anyone will care. Which is a good thing IMHO.
Insert
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them.
Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
It was squirted.
C|N>K
In Greece its use is negligible, as in "OpenOffice: Is this the new name of MS office? really?"... on the other hand we always are at least a couple of years behind the real world. :)
Fortune Rota Volvitur
*blink*
I can see somebody used to the old software being temporarily slowed down finding functions in new software.
But I just don't believe you when you claim you have to read the manual to use the new version.
Find someone who is a fast typist and who uses keyboard shortcuts. Find someone else who is good with computers, but uses the mouse whenever possible. Time the two of them doing similar tasks.
Its not even close. The fact that Microsoft (and many other software vendors) focus much more on the mouse users and force the keyboard shortcut users to cut their speeds by more than 50% is *extremely* annoying.
If someone isn't familiar with the terminology for these things it's a pain in the ass. Click the big multi colored button thing. Click the icon that looks like..., no the other one..., no to the left of that.
Menus were a lot easier to describe to people.
In typical Slashdot fashion, as seen here the first comment is...
"I have everything I need in OpenOffice, and it is better priced too..."
I respectfully disagree, many trivial tasks done easily by a 9 year old Office XP still can't be done through the latest Open Office 3.0 writer.
I'll give one specific example, make a deeply nested numbered list, ie ...etc
1.0 Head topic
1.1 Sub Topic 1
1.1.1 Sub Sub Topic 1
and try linking that to a autogenerated TOC with that numbering *preserved*. OOO Write has failed miserably for me in this aspect so much that I had to wrestle with it to no avail and limp back to Office XP.
I know this is only one example from one user but this is the sort of thing that needs to be ironed out before making the claims as above.
I'm not trying to troll anyone here, please fix this before telling Jon Doe to use OOO.
Cheers.
The Nazis had ribbons that they made the Jews use instead of standard menus
Ha ha ha.
Keep waiting for the retail version sucker. As Ballmer's toilet slave you got nothing much to do anyway.
I have several customers whose CEO/CFO know spreadsheets. They don't have the budget to have database (even Access) people on staff to adjust the interface when they want some numbers.
It's totally the wrong way to go, but telling the guy who signs the checks that *he* has to change is not the best way to keep your job. All the recommendations, presentations and examples don't change the fact that the owner is comfortable with it.
C'est la vie.
no open office's database program is not where near (although a step in the right direction) there and mysql is overkill (not to mention not a form / report engine)... import from access is approximative (no forms, no queries, no reports)... let alone writing in the format. You'll say why... because it makes it impossible to interact with legacy databases... so impossible to transition... and a lot of people will say... well if it ain't broke, dont fix it.
Of course you can use OLEDB with mysql as a datasource within access to migrate... but it's a one way conversion... you can't export to access (well easily at least)
I agree also that dia is a good start... but needs lots of work, particularely in usability
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
If you have to read the manual to get the Ribbon, you're beyond help. You'd be just as confused by any other computer UI, and probably most household appliances.
Comment of the year
People just don't do it. The application should take human behavior into account.
I handle support calls for a large office. Things like this happen all the time. A user will work on a new document for hours and not save it at all. They close the application they are working in and when the application asks them if they want to save the document they inadvertently hit No. The user screwed up. However, it would be nice if their error were recoverable in some way. It would be great to grab the unsaved file from some temporary location C:\usererror\backup.
First off, I haven't played with it for days, I've been swearing at it for the last 6 months.
If you're a beginner user of don't write long docs or have spreadsheets that have not too much special in them, or have Powerpoint with not too much thinking, fine.
However, when you have been using the Office suite for some serious doc work where you use a lot of functionality, doc variables and on top of that you're using keyboard shortcuts because a mouse slows you down - well, forget the ribbon. Add to that the help "enhancements" which means it now suffers the Google effect if you're trying to find something (search for one thing and find 1000 irrelevant entries to wade through) and you can see why I lack your enthusiasm.
Where it gets interesting is that I'm not the only one, and if MS didn't make it impossible to buy the "old" version we would have switched back - the whole office apart from some people that mainly live in Powerpoint.
I would LOVE to go back the old way. The net loss of productivity this new version has caused with this rubbish has quadrupled the total cost of the product. So we're heading towards OpenOffice..
Insert
Then you must not have used the ribbon with the keyboard. Hit the ALT key and EVERYTHING is available through the keyboard. direct to the function you're looking for.
Want to search a library for a citations to insert? SCL. 4 keys in total. who uses that function? I don't know. I'm sure someone does. it's a big button, which you DO NOT HAVE TO USE THE MOUSE FOR.
The only thing you have to take your hands on the mouse for now, is to play solitaire.
Recently, I've become a heavy user of Autodesk products, mainly Inventor and AutoCAD Mechanical - and in the 2010 version, which came out a month ago (yeah, someone must have made a prank with the wall calendar at the Autodesk offices and they didn't notice until it was too late), they switched to ribbons. So, Inventor 2010 looks just like Microsoft Office, with the big icon in the corner and so on - thus the look is there, but the feel, it's different. They dropped most of the context-driven dynamic ribbon failure and just add a new tab when applicable, but the core set of tabs stays the same in a much wider context. Moreover, the tools are actually in right places and properly grouped. Oh, and for anyone used to the old ways, there was an option to switch to the old-style interface, I think. But I didn't, after trying out the ribbons - they are really well-done and speed things up a lot.
So, the ribbons themselves are quite a good idea, if implemented properly, it's just the MS Office that doesn't use them to their full potential.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
When my workplace "upgraded" to Office 2007, performance became abysmal. Powerpoint is now awful, and Excel is slow, too. Navigating slides is now an exercise in patience. (The performance of Vista, now available on XP!) Any word on whether Office 2010 can bring back reasonable performance?
A business coach friend said he can spend 3 hours plodding through MS Office 2007, or he can switch to his Mac and do the same thing in 1 hour. I also found that the ribbons are a total waste of time, so I switched to OpenOffice and it felt like bliss, because the fscking things are where they fscking are so you can fscking find them again the next fscking time...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What he means is "if I have to use Help to use the ribbon", and at that point *HE* is no longer beyond help, "Help" is. Now it is "online", your simple quest for that elusive facility turns into ANOTHER complete time waster: trying to figure out which of the gazillion answers the one is you're looking for. Try finding "document variables" (I keep using this as an example because it's about the most stupid thing I've come across).
You will eventually find that it's no longer a 2 step jump - not until you've waded through about 4 levels of menu to switch doc properties on. And in that you will find (click + pulldown) eventually that old menu. Which doesn't work as good as it should either.
I like the format preview in Powerpoint, but that's about it. To me, 2007 sucks seven ways to Sunday and beyond. And don't get me started about foreign and multiple language support.
Having said that, OOo isn't devoid of stupid things either, but at least they stay consistent per release. Try doing conditional format in Calc - somehow you need to magically plan ahead and define the format you're going to apply, because you can't do it in the conditional format box. Makes for consistency, but also a huge amount of irritation the first few times you come across this. For the rest it's quite OK to work with, and word prediction in Writer is a lifesaver if you have complex words or foreign names.
Insert
It's not all bad news, though, at least they have left the ONE facility in that OO still lacks - track back cursor. Using shift-F5 you track back the cursor moves so if you just scrolled up to find something it'll take you straight back where you came from.
It's still there, but I guess now I've mentioned it as useful the UI team will probably remove it..
Insert
Easier to use: Maybe, but I find the ribbon a lot slower. My experience is that to some serious job in Excel, you find yourself switching back and forth between tabs all the time. In Word it is not as bad, but I still find it annoying.
The big problem with the Ribbon is that it is insufficiently customizable. In older versions of Office, you could pull frequently used functionality into toolbars, and impose your own ordering and grouping. In comparison the Ribbon only offers the same one-size-fits-nobody solution for everyone. Perhaps it works for the average Office user, but it doesn't work for me.
However, the Ribbon, if an issue at all, is certainly not the biggest problem with the user interface of Office 2007. For example, the biggest downgrade in Excel 2007 functionality is in the pop-up menus for charts. Here you are really slowed down, with functionality scattered around over different pages, and default settings that are inane. And PowerPoint 2007 has a maddingly annoying grid positioning system, which doesn't allow you to put drawn objects where you want them.
i really hate thes crap plugins. flash was bad enough. now i have to install quicktime and silverlight too. i have promised myself that i won't ever install quicktime and silverlight crap on my system. try as i might i can't expect decent browsing without flash. its become viral. people use it just because they don't know enough javascript.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of the Ribbon after all it's been through!
... Please.
IT'S ALMOST HUMAN! (ah! ooh!) What you don't realize is that the Ribbon is making someone all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it.
LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even performed for you BASTARDS! LEAVE THE RIBBON ALONE!
Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
LEAVE IT ALONE!
64-bit office application! Something is going wrong in the software industry?
MS has always been a student of the other school of thought, the school that says users do no memorize locations, but read through all the menus every time they use them. Therefore, the primary issue is minimizing the movement of the mouse so that the time saved can be used in comprehending and choosing menu commands. This philosophy was the basis of using dynamic menus in applications, that is hiding commands that have not been active in a while so the user, when reading through the commands, will not waste time reading the relatively unused options. This works for some people, either because they do very limited work on the PC and therefore only need a few commands, or do not in fact memorize menus and indeed to hunt for each command, just like some users hunt for each key on a keyboard.
Ribbons are an extension and re-visioning of this philosophy. Some of this is an improvement for some users.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
But I hate OpenOffice, and I love MS Office 2k7.
Now you might think that I was some MS fanboy (I chose my nickname before I got into Linux). But I think most MS products suck compared to their Linux/FOSS counterparts. But until they release Office for *NIX (Hey they did it with IE) I will be content with running a VM for the sole reason of running Office.
Now I will admit that it did take a little getting used to the new Interface but once I did I found it better, and they added some cool features. The Equation editing is vastly improved, as is the list generator.
Also OO spell check sucks, and it lacks a grammer checker(at least in the one I use 2.1). Don't tell me its my job to check a 9 page paper, to find places were it put "The the car" (The way I write my paper tends to make this happen alot, I write a bunch of sub sections then paste them together).
For people who think they've made things easier, all thats happened is that you bothered to take the time to look around for a change and find features.
This is an interesting point; something I've noticed for own software (at my ISV) is that a significant proportion of our users just never, ever 'peruse' the menus (or even if they do, they forget what was there, or where they found something). By adding toolbar shortcuts for various commonly used things, we found they literally seem to think they're 'finding new functionality' because they suddenly easily spot things that were actually there years ago already.
From a software design perspective, there is some redundancy between menus and toolbars - two different ways to access many of the same functions. So I suppose the ribbon was an attempt to combine the two, and I can follow the logic of that idea, sure - see if there's a smart way to remove that redundancy, just like Mac's Doc cleverly removes the redundancy between shortcuts for launching apps and buttons for currently open apps. But with the ribbon, they goofed I'm afraid.
And it would have been absolutely *trivial* for Microsoft to also include a "Use classic menus" option, I really don't understand why they didn't --- they could've just had both "as an option" for a few years transitional period. This must have been a huge management mistake (given the technical ease of doing it, and the ribbon fallout they've had), so the only reason they don't do it now is probably to save face - that would be like admitting it's a failure. Yet there's so much demand for the old menus that some company now makes a living selling a plugin that brings the old menus back, which really tells you just how big the demand for this is (and thus just how bad the ribbons are) - people are willing to pay *extra* money to bring them back.
I've spent a couple years using 2007 now, I still hate it.
Likewise, I spent well over a year using 2007, and still hated it and found it slower. It was really badly done.
I suspect that most people who like it probably just actually like how pretty it looks, and don't realise that aesthetics is not linked to practicality. And you also get a class of users that is naturally kind of 'slow' and patient - these users actually aren't that bothered if some functionality takes slightly longer to access. Thus you get a small minority of people who like the ribbon. The mistake is when they think that because they like it, everybody who disses it has no point whatsoever. It really *is* a worse experience for most people.
Either you're a Microsoft shill, or you never took the couple minutes of effort to use the Customize... feature of many office versions to add your own commonly used feature to a toolbar. The first things I add to any pre-2007 Word tool bar, for example, are Style button, Word Count, Thesaurus, and Paste Special. Those fit my unique needs. To go through 4 sub menus for years to find an often used command rather than implement the provided solution renders anything you say questionable.
Overall I'm betting on shill.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Does anyone know whether, in Outlook, when you reply to an e-mail, you can selectively get rid of the blue 'quote' line to the left?
Yes, I know it seems nitpicky, but it'sr eally not. In Outlook 2007, they changed things from the previous version. Previously you could un-indent when you wanted to reply to a part of a quite and the blue quote-line would disappear. In 2007, best I can tell it's absolutely impossible to remove that quote line. Unindenting just makes your text appear behind the quote line. Incredibly fucking annoying and I have no idea why MS did it. It basically forces you to put your entire reply above the entire quote now. Dumb dumb dumb.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I haven't used Vista, so I can't tell: Is this really the normal icon size for Vista?
http://static.arstechnica.com/2010tp_icons.jpg
I mean, W.T.F.??
Why not require one display per icon? ^^
Why not just put a preview of the file or thing itself an that place?
I just don't get it. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I see you arguing that UI should be consistent so you can remember where options are without reading them. Well, I would say that UI is really only needed for people looking for something (in which case dynamic is fine). For people who already know what they want, they would be using keyboard shortcuts anyways which beats the mouse every time.
You will probably not need silverlight for basic programs as word, excel, etc if you do anything that is web based, SharePoint, convert word, excel etc is web pages then yes you will need silverlight.
It amazes me that people are still complaining about the ribbon, especially with arguments such as these. Tough I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise here on slashdot.
The ribbon is not dynamic. At least, not in the way you suggest it is. It doesn't attempt to guess what the user is trying to do, the key tabs stay exactly the same no matter what you do and only the individual groupings or buttons are expanded if there is sufficient screen space.
If your main complaint is regarding the additional tabs which appear when the user selects a certain element, again Office is hardly guessing the user's intent. Simply, when the user clicks on an embedded image, a tab with image manipulation options which would otherwise be hidden in menus or a modal dialog somewhere appears to the right of the default ones. This happens every time the user selects an image, so it's not inconsistent. So if you still have a problem with that, you also probably have an issue with context menus, after all, they also change depending on the type of object the user right-clicks on!
This is not to say that the UI in Office 2007 is perfect, but it's a great improvement over the terrible mess of menus and toolbars which we had in the previous versions. It's hard to say if anything else has been changed in the tech preview release based just on the screenshots, but thankfully they didn't dump the ribbon.
So many people haven't even bothered moving to 2007 due to the lack of *useful* new features, why do we care 2010 is coming?
Same story with Vista, there was no real compelling reason to deal with it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them. Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
First of all, I'll concede that 80% figure. If it were any lower no one would ever use the damn thing.
But, it's not "an extra click" the other 20% of the time. In my experience, and that of my cow-orkers, it's more like "roll the cursor over every icon in the current ribbon thet you don't immediately recognize and read the Tool Tip, in case the command you want is cleverly hidden in plain sight, and if you don't find it there, click through ALL the tabs at random and repeat the Tool Tip thing until you stumble upon the command wherever Microsoft decided to hide it, and when that doesn't provide joy, open Help and click on a half dozen different topics until you find the treasure." That's the part that gets really, really old, really, really fast.
Listen, on a certain level, I give Microsoft a lot of credit for trying to simplify their UI, and take it to another level. But as it always is with MS products, the problem is in the implementation. It is NO exageration to say that 90%+ of the people I now and work with who've had the misfortune to be forced to use Office 2007, hate it with a white-hot passion generally reserved for child molesters or GWB. If it works for you, then vaya con dios, muchacho. You're one of the blessed.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
For people who already know what they want, they would be using keyboard shortcuts anyways which beats the mouse every time.
Thank GOD for that. That's been the only saving grace for '07 for me: the keyboard shortcuts for the tools I use most don't seem to have changed much, which is good because that's often the ONLY way I've been able to find commonly-used commands. I just don't have the time to play the usual hide 'n' seek game that Microsoft seems to think makes using Office '07 "fun".
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Because this is Slashdot, where it's fashionable to hate Microsoft.
It's something new, hence something new to bitch about. It really has nothing to do with whether it's any good or not.
Expression Design isn't really meant as a general purpose consumer drawing program. It's more focused on high-touch authoring of XAML objects for WPF/Silverlight use.
That said, XAML is just XML, so there are a variety of exporters from other tools. Like this one for Illustrator (Mac/Win)
http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/
Or Kaxaml:
http://www.kaxaml.com/
My video compression blog
>UI is really only needed for people looking for
>something (in which case dynamic is fine).
I disagree in the dynamic part, I tried the unknown for me OpenSUSE 11.1 with KDE4 yesterday I disliked very much the experience of not seing a plain list of whats beyond the current icon when searching for something. You are correct in that I would definitely start each and every application in the terminal - if I only could start it.
I am inclined to think that the ribbon GUI interface is similar the command line - and for exactly the same purpose (efficiency) - but for people allergic to command line. I do not think that ribbons are for beginners - their main attraction for beginners is their game like features I think.
"...even though most of you couldn't pass HIGHSCHOOL english if YOU'RE life depended on it." ...well done sir.
I don't know about useless, but Outline mode certainly has made me be a better writer. I wasn't able to use Pages at all because it didn't have a "Normal" (non page preview) mode the first couple of versions. I don't CARE where my page breaks are going to be when I'm doing a 1st draft, because that's not where the page breaks are going to be.
I want to write an outline, then write my words with styles applied, and THEN see how it actually lays out on the page. And then be able to go back to just text without layout, and even back to the outline to rearrange. Being able to switch between those is key to my word processing workflow for longer documents (I've written a couple of books, plenty of whitepapers, and dozens of trade magazine articles).
My video compression blog
Don't suprise users by capriciously moving tools, or they'll hate you forever. Which is pretty much where 90% of Office '07 are right now.
92% of statistics are made up, don't you know.
(AKA, quit making up crap)
You do know you can do the exact same thing in Office 2007, right? They have the quickbar, which you can assign virtually any function to and it's always available, no matter what tab you're on.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
How long before Open Office copy the ribbon interface?
>>even though most of you couldn't pass highschool >>english if you're life depended on it.
Oh come on.
Gee, Silverlight takes all of five-ten seconds to install (seriously, I was shocked at how quickly, easily, and automatically it downloaded and installed itself).
You're just cutting off your nose to spite your face. It's harmless, stable, and opens up additional sites for you to view, at literally no cost to you. Why would you be so adamant about avoiding something you obviously have so little understanding or experience with?
Keyboard commands (and muscle memory) are still available... most old keyboard short-cuts still work. Want to learn the keyboard short cuts? Easy, just press Alt, and the ribbon lights up with all the keypresses that will gain you access to various ribbon tabs and commands.
Additionally you can easily customize keyboard shortcuts and commands to serve your whims.
No, you cannot customize (as in re-arrange) the ribbon itself; however you CAN add frequently used functions to the "quick access toolbar" at the top.
The ribbon works for a great many users, in particular, in making much functionality much more easily dicoverable than before. As for switching menus, I share your perception that this is somehow slower, but I'm beginning to think it's mostly "perception", as really, switching menus and going after items and options in sub-menus, then clicking through dialogs, to other dialogs burried within behind even more buttons was never really that quick either. I think on average it evens out, but it seems slower on the ribbon for some reason. I'd be interested in a study about why that is.
The rest is just an issue of learning curve. Yeah, it was frustrating at first trying to figure out where the hell the options went, or how to convert text into a table, or to work with headers and footers and field codes. But once learned, the ribbon is actually a breeze, and between it and several of the other new UI enhancements, I find working with Word 2007 (my main office app) actually less frustrating than 2003. This is, of course, after getting over that initial learning curve, but that really only took a couple of weeks. There are still a few frustrations I have, but the new ones are essentially balanced out by the lack of some of the older ones I had with 2003 and before.
On the whole, taking all users as a group (new users, casual users, basic users, as well as advanced users and power users), I think the ribbon update is a definite win. Individual users might have issues, but on the whole, it's a better system than the one it replaces.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Old dirty bastard is my data source too. He taught me all I got to know to live on the streets, nigga!
Maybe you're doing it wrong.
Ha ha ha.
As Ballmer's toilet slave you got nothing much to do anyway.
No kidding. It's the only sitting implement that Ballmer can't throw.
The only thing that requires Silverlight will be the Expression Studio, whose purpose is to compose stuff for Silverlight. Besides, everything I've read indicates that Silverlight is more extensible, has better performance, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) has had fewer security problems than Flash has. I'm generally a platform agnostic, but Silverlight seems to be the better plug-in. I think it's going to be stuck with the same problem as Windows itself as Flash is simply too entrenched and near-universally compatible.
Ribbon's a really good example. Once you're used to it, you'll find it so much easier to use than the old system that you'll never want to go back.
Same could be said about proper apostrophe use.
I think it's amazing that you can call me a shill without looking through my posting history.
SRSLY.
But I just don't believe you when you claim you have to read the manual to use the new version.
You're right, I just gave up. Seriously, I've often switched to new versions of the software without being totally confused by the new interface. That was the first time I had a spend time just to find how to open a document.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
It is not change that i hate,it is useless change. I hate anything or person that presumes to know what I am doing and supposedely does it" their way"better. I like fixed menus,that take little space, and hence logically related drop down menus, that I can w=easily customize. There seems to be a convoluted logic to the new menus system,which also take too much space, and whose customization is a nightmare. Why did they change the fonts for example, i like the old fonts!. Instead of making office faster it is now bloated, and they have yet to fix compatibility between the MAC and Windows versions. Power point on a PC does not know how to display most MAC generated power point files.
I will keep using previous versions as long as I can, they do everything i need perfectly fine. Open office is fine but limited, however if i am a business person I would not choose the latest microsoft office at my business, too much time is spent on choosing fonts and formatting and , it is just too expensive
A day playing with it?
Um... no. If I buy a copy, I cannot return it. And I will not "pirate" it. So, it's not happening. If it doesn't run on Solaris and Linux, I can't use it. So, it's not happening.
Which means I use OpenOffice.org. With menus. If I have to use MS Office(tm) I, of course, go nuts. Never had the "training" or familiarity.
So, I say, "stuff it". If it isn't OpenOffice.org compatible, take a hike.
Just sayin' We're not all Microsoft users, ok?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Why oh why can't a company the size of Microsoft develop Office for Mac so it works like the Windows version?
At the very least, Outlook and Entourage feature parity would be nice.
-ted
The problem is that most of us really don't want to waste time relearning how to use software that worked perfectly well before. And that's especially true if it's Microsoft (who we generally don't like) forcing us to do it.
Hard to take you seriously. You attack another slashdotter for liking the new interface, insult the parent poster's intelligence, explain that people should not really be using the features offered by the software in the first place, and that's not enough so you switch to profanity to show you REALLY mean it, and close with more insults about the parent's intelligence.
How does this support your opinion again?
You just go right ahead and start working with a mature Access 2003 app in Access 2007. Take the nice database window with its left pane / right pane motif that lets you pick major categories on the left and then gives you an explorer-type window on the right with the Navigation Pane (pain) Let's put 1000's of objects in a flat listing. That's good. The devs created them. They can just type in the first few character each time they want an object, just like Vista search. Sorting options by date created or modified? Why would anyone want that?
Let's put Find... way over on the right, yeah right near the close button. But let's only put it on the Home tab, so they have to constantly mouse up there and switch tabs all the time.
And let's give them a Quick Access toolbar to customize--but not give them large enough icons so they'll be able to visually distiguish the things they put up there...and God, NO! no text labels. They might build a useful toolbar and not use the Ribbon. We can't have that, no sir.
I gave it 4 months. And then I was sick enough of making changes in Access 2007, saving, opening it in a VM in Access 2003, fixing all the references, compiling, saving again and then deploying. That I just cut out the Access 2007 part.
Not to mention that the new split-form functionality make it GPF anytime you try to shrink a subform or subreport down to 0"
we blame them for listening to stupid people.
Why would I want to waste weeks of precious time trying to figure out how to use yet another Microsoft program? lol. I wouldn't!
Ive spent nearly 3 years working with the ribbon and i still hate it and for one major reason, not because its different not because it doesnt pop down but because it is compleatly uncustomizable, i find many if not most of the layout compleatly unproductive for me, if they allowed us to customize it as they have in previous bar type interfaces i would have no real problem with it, but instead we have this peice of arse that is frozen in the configuration that some random m$ flunky says this is how i should be using my software. On a side note this is the problem with all major m$ releases of recent times, w7 included, they remove function for the sake of removing it reguardless of how useful it was or how it wasnt hurting anyone being there even to those that didnt use the feature.
Well, here's my Ribbon complaint unrelated to change: it requires two clicks, rather than one, to access something on a tab you aren't on. The way it worked before, the menus contained everything (two clicks, if you know where things are and you turned that horrible autocollapse off), the toolbars contained the things you mostly used (one click). So most of the time, you can do what you need in a single click without the Ribbon there. With the Ribbon, it takes one click if you're doing something on the same tab as you were using before, and two otherwise; for me, that averages to more clicks on average. So someone who knew where things were under the old UI, especially if they set up their toolbars correctly, could be more productive than someone using the new UI who also knows where everything is. I'm not sure how much easier (or harder) the Ribbon makes things to find in the first place; you'd need a large community of people who had never used either version of Office before to test. But for people who already know where things are, it's a disadvantage. (For all I know, the Ribbon's better for people who never bothered to learn; if that's the majority of Office users, the Ribbon may be an improvement overall. But it isn't better for me!)
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot.
For 25 YEARS we knew where things were in the menu system that was in use since 1984. The standard toolbars were nearly identical for a couple of decades also, and they didn't move around so we always knew where the toolbar icons were without thinking about it.
In contrast, the ribbon only shows a small subset of icons at any one time, and we have to keep jumping around between ribbons in order to reach the icons that we need to use, which is a big waste of time compared to the old workflow with toolbars and menus. Worse is the fact that many of the new locations of things don't make any logical sense based on our 25 YEARS of experience with previous versions of Office, so we have to waste a huge amount of time learning the new setup.
Bottom line, the ribbons don't work well unless you happen to think exactly like the designers of the ribbons. Even so, the ribbons would be fine except for the fact that we are not allowed to fallback to the familiar toolbars and menus since the menus have been hidden and reorganized and the old toolbars have been completely stripped out. They took away the tools that made sense to us and gave us new tools that don't make sense to us, without giving any of us a choice.
They took a quarter CENTURY of user experience and threw it out the window. And you blame us for hating the ribbon? Wouldn't you be frustrated if you bought a new car and it had a trackpad instead of a steering wheel, and there was no option to install a traditional steering wheel to use while you learn the new interface?
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
A day? I've spent a YEAR, and so have many other people I know, and we still hate it. You just happen to like it because you can see some sort of logic behind it. Many of us cannot see any usefulness to the way it is set up. We hate the way that it constantly hides things from us. We hate the fact that each set of buttons is different and quite often the set that we need is not the one that is visible. It's really quite annoying.
This is NOT one of those cases where the new way is really significantly better than the old way. It's not nearly better enough to justify forcing EVERYONE to conform to the new interface immediately while completely removing the old interface. A massive and forced interface change is a perfectly good reason to hate a new interface after you've spent as much as two thirds of your life doing things the old way. Doesn't really matter if the new interface is better or not, it will always be frustrating to be FORCED to use it without the appropriate time and training necessary to use it efficiently.
If they had just allowed us to continue using the "classic" interface for at least one version, I don't think anyone would have had any problem with the ribbon at all.
Actually no.
The ribbon is contextually aware. If you're on a image, for example, it displays the tools that allow you to modify that image.
More broadly, the design process that led to the ribbon was incredibly rigorous. The Customer Experience Improvement Program monitors anonymous usage of the application - in order to come up with the ribbon, Microsoft analyzed 6600 individual data points across 1.3 billion sessions.
Finally, point of fact, Office 2007 was the best reviewed, highest rated, and best selling version of Office in the company's history. It's a lot more accurate to say that 95% of Office users are really happy with it, not the other way around.
Microsoft developer Jensen Harris wrote a great series of posts in 2006 on the thinking behind the ribbon.
It wasn't a management-requested "make everything new again", nor was it a fit-and-finish trick to make Office look different from Windows. According to Harris, it was done because:
1. The top 10 requested features in Office were already in Office - but nobody could find them.
2. Office usage doesn't follow the 80/20 rule. You and I use only a tiny portion of Office - but it's a different tiny portion.
Expanding on #2: In Word 2003, the most-used command (Paste) is only 11% of the total command usage. Second place (Save) gets only 5%. And it goes down from there; the top 5 commands together get 32%. The usage difference between #100 (Accept Change) and #400 (Reset Picture) is about the same as the difference between #1 and #11 (Change Font Size).
Essentially, Office was now big enough - and needed to be big enough - that menus and toolbars didn't scale. That's why they've kept trying new UI metaphors: task panes, adaptive menus, etc. But they all made it feel more bloated and confusing, and took up too much real estate.
So the ribbon is their hail-Mary pass; they're trying to reinvent the basic UI to make it more discoverable. I think it works. I'm no Microsoft fan, and I've used every version of Office that ever was, but I've grown to like the ribbon enough that I use Office 2007 via Fusion when I could have OOo for free. The real test: when I haven't used a feature for months, I can usually find it in the ribbon without Googling for it.
WORKSFORME.
One of the best programs in Office is OneNote, that one alone makes Office worth for me (over OO). And more if you have a tablet pc to use it.