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Ballmer Hints At 'Metro-ization' of Office
CWmike writes "Microsoft's CEO strongly hinted this week that the company will craft a Metro-style version of the next Office suite. 'You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style,' Ballmer told a Wall Street analyst. Metro, a tile- and touch-based interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7, would be a massive change for Office, one that would dwarf the 'ribbonization' that set off a firestorm of complaints about Office 2007's new look. The criticism died down, and Microsoft later extended the ribbon in Office 2010 and Windows 7. It will ribbonize other components of Windows 8, notably the OS's file manager. One analyst believes Metro Office is a done deal. 'I think they need something in Metro to enable people to work on documents on tablets,' said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. 'They need something on ARM.'"
Luckily, there is a patch and you can download it here. (It's not really a library, btw.)
No, it's Queer Eye for the Straight GUI.
After Ribbons, it has become extremely difficult to think up ways to make MS Office worse. Continuing to do so shows an unbelievable level of commitment and effort.
Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.
Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.
My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.
And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.