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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.'"
I actually agree with them on the Page Setup thing. You're changing how the document looks and it affects the layout - it should belong near the canvas like everything else that has to do with formatting.
The Ribbon is a good fit for document-based, layout-heavy applications with many commands. It's barely a good fit for all Office applications. It should have stayed in Office, or at least never leaked to applications with much smaller footprints. I'd also like for them to upgrade it with a command search that highlights where to go so that you may learn, not one (like the add-in from Office Live) that just brings you matching commands.
somehow, unlike everyone else, I find the ribbon quite useful compared to the original menu system, have discovered many options in word/excel/ppt that i never knew were there making pivot tables had also been made much easier in 2007 also, the formatting dialog that opens when you select some text is incredibly useful wonder what more innovations we will get in 2010
This is a good point, but I think Office has these special UI elements for psychological, not technical reasons - they differentiate Office from the rest of the OS (and horizontal competitors like OO.org) in your mind & make you think Office is somehow special/unique/valuable. The earliest example I can think of is Office 2000 (iirc), which had gradients in the title bars before the rest of the OS supported it.
If they keep the look stable and just add refinements it becomes only a matter of time before Open Office and the like completely replicate not only functionality but also the look making them truly interchangeable.
We've got the functionality of office suites pretty much figured out, the only place they can differentiate themselves is in the GUI interface and the shark can't stop moving.
While I agree with you about Excel (I use Excel at work, Calc at home), the difference doesn't tend to be significant. I find life a little smoother with Excel, but there's nothing I fundamentally can't do in Calc relatively easily. Excel has handy features which make day to day jobs easier, but they're all features that exist in a lesser form in Calc. I could live with Calc no problem.
I've never used Vizio, and I prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word. Powerpoint and Impress are near as dammit for what I need, and I rarely have call to use the rest.
Bearing in mind that OpenOffice is free (beer, speech, etc.), I find the comparison very favourable.
Right-click on the ribbon|Minimize the Ribbon
That doesn't give you the old menus back. It gives you the ribbon tabs which expand back to the full ribbon when you click on them.
My theory is that MS implemented the ribbon because they seem to have a mistaken belief that their UI should be consistent across platforms (desktop PC/server, table, tablet, handheld). In the end, they have a UI that doesn't work well for any of them. The Start Menu is a terrible paradigm for a handheld device, and the ribbon is a terrible one for desktop PCs.
This is even infecting their design of server-side applications. All of the MMCs for e.g. IIS 7 are more like navigating through Windows Explorer in icon mode than previous versions.
Different device types should have different interfaces that take advantage of the strengths of that platform. Keeping them consistent is less important than making them as user-friendly as possible.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Need to insert a column or row in Excel? Go to the tab labeled Insert and...
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.
The point isn't that we (people writing long documents) *need* it, the point is that having it saves *by far* enough time and effort to make up for the purchase of Microsoft Office.
The entire "it's not there but you don't *need* it" argument completely misses the point. There are a hundred things in my house I don't *need* (plumbing, wall sockets, lighting, cable TV hookup, phone hookup, insulation), but I'd never move into a house that didn't have them. Would you?
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Yes, now you can be halfway efficient by only having one hand on the keyboard!
I mean, sheesh, for those of us who don't use the mouse all the time and can actually (*gasp*) touch-type, the menus are not optional, they are required.
When my employer wastes the money on whatever the latest office offering will be and foists it on me, I'll be requesting one of those add-on softwares to restore the menus. If necessary, I'll get the ergonomics department to write me the note.
Grown up. Sure you shouldn't use Excel to store data that is supposed to be mission critical, highly available, maintain strong integrity etc but to perform quick and dirty dataset analysis its a very effective tool. And no, I don't believe even MS Access fits the category to trust important information - it shares the same mechanism as Excel to I use it mainly for doing onsite analysis, and to share this information with my customers without the need for them to install anything else. Its portable in the sense that anyone with Office can look at my data, charts and reports easily. It IS the right tool for the right job, for what I use it for.
It bothers me when the open source community benefits so much from Apple and Microsoft's UI research. I mean OpenOffice's interface *is* Office 97-- the amount of work saved by the OpenOffice team because they had a model to work from is tremendous. Nobody's going to fault you for using other people's good ideas in your own products, but you could at least appreciate it, instead of just slamming Microsoft for it.
Microsoft may be no good at it, but who's better? Adobe's recent UI "innovations" have been criminally-bad. Apple's made some good progress with their iWork suite, but the unfortunate fact is that Pages has a simple UI because it's a simple product without a lot of features.
(And this next new idea you're slamming will undoubtedly make its way into open source products any day now, at which point it will become "innovative" and "brilliant." to the Slashdot hordes.)
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I would use OOCalc if it weren't for the fact that most of our spreadsheets at work are now talking to third party programs via VBA and dlls that the programs ship. There are other things that you just have to use VBA for. Importing a txt file(not a csv but actual text with, like a performance data printout) without having to run it through a separate program to make it a csv, even then, try convincing excel to put the values into merged cells. Anyways, let me know when OOCalc can use a scripting language where the script is embedded in the file, and written in the OOcal and can use libraries from the host system. until then don't expect OOCalc to replace excel in business anytime soon.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
You need to think about people who would perform 80% of a command with keystrokes, and then look to see which menu item they needed to select. Auditing in Excel drove this home for me. Tools|Audit used to get me to the list of things I could do. In 2007 it doesn't work at all, you need to complete the command to have the keystrokes work. It may not be an issue for you, it is for me.