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Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org
recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."
Yeah, you beat me to it.
Let's face it, most companies out there use MS Office. And most users of MS Office got used to the setup that hadn't changed in quite a while. When Office 2k7 came out, my CEO wanted it on his computer so he could test it out. As CEO, he reads/edits/writes a lot of documents.
Because of the god-awful changes, it took him quite a while to get up-to-speed. So much time, in fact, that he requested we A) not upgrade anyone else and B) remove it from his machine and put Office 2k3 back on it.
Now, he's not the most technically proficient person out there, but he's better than most (compared to average users I mean) and for him to say it was pretty eye-opening.
I can't comprehend why OOo did this. Not a good idea.
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I think the program was called GeoWorks. It used a layout of icons very similar to what I saw in the screenshots. We've come full circle. The old is new again.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
They want to take what's probably the single most reviled "feature" of MS Office 2007 and put it into OpenOffice?
Do you have any evidence that the ribbon is actually reviled in mass among the majority of users or are you just wrongly extrapolating to all users based on what people on sites like Slashdot say? Plenty of people where I work absolutely love the new ribbon interface and mention how they don't want to have to go back to any previous version once they get really used to it.
I know there will be a lot of "haters" regarding this. However, if the hopes of smoothly transitioning users from MS Office to OpenOffice it will need to give an option to have a similar look and feel.
To transition non-tech employees to Linux, I used an XP theme on Ubuntu. http://ubuntu.online02.com/node/14
The transition was flawless.
Besides, I wonder how much money was spent by Microsoft on usability studies to come up with this interface. How much money has been spent on usability studies for OpenOffice? Might turn out to be a better way to work in the long run. Just because it is MS does not necessarily mean it is sh*t. That just seems to be the default.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I resisted my organization's upgrade to Office 2007 tooth and nail... I complained several times...
The IT department installed Office 2007 anyway.
And I hated the ribbon, with passion... for about two weeks, until I grudgingly admitted that, once you get used to it, it is quite easy to use and it puts the similar functions together in a intelligent way.
So yeah, I like it now
No sig for the moment.
Blasphemy you say!! Well I'm an Office 2007 user so I know what the damn ribbon looks like. From what I can see is that they took the idea behind the ribbon of grouping commonly used features into clusters and unlike MS they went with large enough Icons with decent contrast to be easily visable on a high rez monitor (1280x1024+) like what I use.
So before everyone goes apeshit about this proposed change, take the damn time and actually compare the stinking ribbon with this and you'll see that the change doesn't resemble the ribbon. What I'd like to see is this being offered as an optional customization for those who appreciate its usefulness.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Damn, you are old.
It wasn't that hard to get used to. More than five minutes, but now I can get to a ton of features a lot faster than I used to. The first week was a pain in the butt for sure. After that, I have a hard time going back to Office 03 menus.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
When I finally upgraded my work computer to have Office 2007, I was having a hard time at first, but soon I came to like the new PowerPoint a lot. At this time I was doing a lot of work in PowerPoint, so it's where I got the most exposure. The main reasons I liked it were the improvements in functionality of the tools themselves and some of the new tools. Smart Art is convenient, positioning objects is much smoother, auto-formatting of slides is smarter. I can whip up a very nice looking presentation without a lot of thought about formatting. Things are pleasing to the eye without having to study color theory first, because MS did the color theory part for you with their pre-defined color schemes that have consistent values, densities and complimentary colors. Word and Excel improved on their "intelligence" too. For instance, bullets and numbering just happens instead of it being an explicit instruction. However, when it comes to ribbon, I am torn.
In PowerPoint, the ribbon works. The reason for this is that the tools you use are very task specific. If I am inserting a picture, there is a certain set of tools that I always will use with a picture, but will rarely ever use with any other task. That way, the tools I need are right in front of me, and the tools I don't are hidden. However, in Word and Excel, the tools are not as task specific and the definition of what task I'm working on is very unclear. Furthermore, the tools used are not always perfectly described by an icon, which means it becomes very hard to find what you're looking for. This is especially the case in Excel, where ther are just so many tools available to you that turning everything into an icon on a ribbon just makes it impossible to find what you're looking for.
But the more I think about it, every time I switch back to older versions of Office, I don't miss the ribbon, I miss the other improvements. I can find may way around just as fast, if not faster in the old style than with the ribbon, and I've gotten pretty used to the ribbon now. While the new UI is completely bad, it really does not improve things overall the way it claims. Like I said, PowerPoint seems to be a good fit, but even still, I get by just fine with the old style.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
and meetings, holy hell does he go to a metric shit-ton of meetings. Amazing fact, more than half are meetings he didn't actually set up. Weird, that. Only CEO I've ever worked for who goes to most meetings as a participant rather than the chair.
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Ehh, double-click it like always...
Ok, done with my asshole moment. Took me about the same amount of time to realize the circle was a menu, not just a stupid logo/marketing thing.
Microsoft's goal with the ribbon was to make an interface that better encompassed the large amount of bloat (*cough*) features that have been added to MS Office over the years. I've never used the ribbon, as I'm on Office 2003 at work and OOo at home, but I have to admit to admiring its appearance. It definitely looks like it was designed by someone who cares about user interfaces, rather than by someone from Microsoft.
Still, I really don't see the point of duplicating it in OOo. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that in the wake of the ribbon, having a classic Office interface might be a feature of OOo, rather than a flaw. As in, OOo might pick up users specifically because it doesn't have the ribbon. And I haven't even brought up the fact that it gobbles up screen real estate that would be better used on your sci-fi novel. (Oh look, I mentioned it.) I hope this gets scuttled, and fast.
When I first used the ribbon interface in O2K7, I despised it. It made me angry, frustrated, and thoroughly unproductive at my job.
Then I came to work one morning, no coffee, databases were down, and I was on 2.5 hours of sleep. Opened Word to work on a requirements/solution document... and it made sense. Not just sense, but blinded-by-science-this-is-stupidly-simple kind of sense.
Once I got the fact that everything I was used to was still there, albeit not in the same format, but actually grouped logically and intuitively, my productivity went up about 70% over when I was using O2K3.
The Ribbon actually makes sense, and perhaps the smartest thing MS every did to the Office suite. MY two cents, YMMV
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