Office 12 Exposed 594
damieng writes "The Programmers Developer Conference (PDC) has unveiled
the user interface for Microsoft Office 12. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X the menus now appear to operate more like a tab popping-out the right toolbar instead of a sub-menu."
slashdotted already (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it really too much to ask that the editors use caching services as default?
I'm not an expert... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm seeing a pattern here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't mess with something that works (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Insightful)
Specially int the Office programs (Word, Excel, etc etc) which have a hundred different options hidden inside the submenus. I think it is time to think on a new approach like the Search-dont-sort google approach but for menus... that way instead of going deep into the sub menu mess you would only need to select a specific command with one click acording to what you are selecting.
As an example, how about right click/configure on a word document page bringing of the Page Configure option, or something like that?
Re:ewww (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Crowded (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do they have to break their own standards? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I like having applications be consistant. Even Linux with GTK and QT differences are quite consistant. It seems for Microsoft autohiding the menu or turning it a bright shade of blue wasn't enough. Now Microsoft are throwing out the perfectly good menu system for something that takes literally and it seems constantly a fifth of the screen space. For someone who refuses to use any browser other than Firefox simply because with Firefox I can squish every single button and bar and menu onto one small line, that's deeply offensive for me.
Besides this you need to move the mouse from one end of the screen to the other on the larger dimension every single time in this stupid tabbed interface.
Ah well it's Microsoft, the company responsible for some of the worst interfeces known to man.
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
Not with Word we haven't. I still can't print the exact same Word file on two different printers and get the same pagination. Thank God we're switching to PDF-based prepress systems to sort of eliminate this problem. If I'm in a rush and this problem occurs, I tell the support staff to just fudge the layout (insert carriage returns, screw with margins, whatever) to make it work so I can get something out the door.
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grasping at straws (Score:3, Insightful)
Retraining? (Score:4, Insightful)
Which means that you can choose to upgrade to Office 12 and retrain or your users.
Or you can sidegrade to OpenOffice which has a much more familiar layout to Office users.
Wonder which one will be cheaper to do?
Looking at the screenshots I see bling being put before usability. Whilst the concept is nice - having a single wide toolbar is like the old Wordstar help pages - how usable will it be? I can see even more mousing will be required...
In many ways it will be better than having multiple toolbars, but I can see instances where you'll be switching between 'Writing' and 'Tables' or whatever all the time, which will be annoying.
Compare to, e.g., Pages' inspector and side panels - whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word, the interface is pretty good for the most part. The tabs at the top of the inspector are kinda the same as the tabs in Office 12 I suppose, it just comes down to implementation. Certainly with a single floating inspector that isn't too wide, it is much easier to mouse around it than if it was the width of the screen!
Knowing Microsoft
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do remember that their office suite competes in a market that sees little innovation, because little is needed. This means that in order to maintain dominance they must either provide a technically superior product, provide a better user interface, or lock down file formats. Technical superiority is debatable, they may or may not do that already. Locking down file formats is what we DON'T want them to do. That leaves UI for competition. If they don't change it up enough then products like WordPerfect or OpenOffice.org will catch up with them in the UI and make it so that they have to compete via the other methods. Since technical superiority will probably always be debatable, it leads them back to locking down file formats... and we still don't want that.
Anyhow, if anyone can rewrite the rules of UI and get away with it, it's the people with most of the market share. They happen to be it.
Brushed Metal? (Score:1, Insightful)
-Julius
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the reason not to change to OpenOffice is to avoid retraining.
. .
They're starting to run out of chrome and tailfins. Now they're starting to put tits on the squid.
KFG
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that it was Apple who sat on their high horse and said that every app look, feel and behave consistently. It made sense too. But then for reasons best known only to theirselves, decided that consistency was boring and have been changing UIs from one release to the next ever since. And each time there is more and more of that wretched "brushed metal".
Microsoft has occupied a peculiar middle ground. You can always bet for example that MS Office will dump whatever look and feel was used previously and then there will be a few years where every app tries to emulate the new look before the cycle repeats. For a while, apps could pick up the new look by using the common controls but even the common controls look antiquated these days and are full of horrible hacks for backwards compatibility.
The worst offender of them all is Unix (including Linux) where there are multiple competing widget sets and multiple competing themes. It's a wonder the platform survived before GNOME & KDE considering the combined might of IBM et al had come up with the shittiest widget set ever - Motif. Even these days with UI guidelines, and just two (!) predominant widget sets - QT & GTK apps do not look or behave closely enough to one another.
The one light at the end of the tunnel is most platforms now offer a theme engine so apps can look consistent even if they have their own notion of widgets (e.g. Java or Mozilla). It's just too bad that Apple and Microsoft see fit to keep the theme engine proprietary and even ignore it themselves when it suits them. I also wish that QT & GTK would share a common theme engine so that with a flick of a switch all apps, regardless of what C / C++ API is on top would render in the same way.
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, we know that there are problems with the way things work now. There are limitations. Apple are constantly being given praise for their "innovations" when their newer OSs have actually done very little more than System 9 in usability terms — they're actually introduced some new issues, while simply prettifying what was there (and putting it on a far more solid base).
This, however, appears to be an actual attempt at something new as a desktop standard. MS cannot afford to do this sort of thing between OS releases, so when they do release, they need to make significant alterations or they'll never get their usability changes in there.
As I said somewhere else though, we'll never know if these are easier or harder until we use them. If it turns out to be easy to transition to the new style, that's a win for usability (learnability) in itself.
Only new feature I care about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm seeing a pattern here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Never underestimate the importance of a beautiful-looking user interface. I'm especially talking to you, GIMP devs!
Office XTREME Edition! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Yo! I'm Excel! Yo I'm soooo down with you! I take calculations...TO THE EXTREME!!!!"
I don't think I've ever seen a more in-your-face interface *ever*. Interfaces are supposed to get out of the way and let you get the job done with minimal fuss...this takes it to the complete opposite.
It seems clear to me that Microsoft is really honestly losing it...their two cash cows, which drive the *entire* freaking company, are being pimped. They're being given cheezy makeovers and being pushed in your face in some desperate attempt to stay in the forefront of your mind, because what you're *doing* is not important, it's that you're using WINDOWS and OFFICE that's important.
TO THE XTREEEEEMMMME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What do you call it when Linux apps do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
--grendel drago
Re:ewww (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft continues the tradition... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is NOT an example of everything-MS-does-is-bad-but-if-Apple-does-it-it
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 95/NT was marketed on the premise that it eliminated all the confusion of having different UI's for every text based application.
Windows XP was marketed on the premise that the user could customize the desktop to their suiting, and developers could provide custom skins for their applications.
Now we have completed a whole cycle, and now every developer provides their own GUI style for their application.
Re:I'm seeing a pattern here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
WYSIWYG is a terrible way to do documents anyway. You shouldn't be spending time making it look right, you should spend it writing the silly thing. I encourage people to look into things like LaTeX whenever I have the chance. It just works so much better for anything more than a quick note or memo. You get consistent and proper layout every time on better software than Word.
Word processor requirements haven't really changed since WordStar. All most people need to do is write something up quickly, and print it. If you're doing layout in a word processor, you've already screwed up. That is not what they are good at, and that's why publishers use things like PDF, TeX, etc.
Re:ewww (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you actually done this? This is totally false. First and most obviously, personalized menus (still on by default, thanks to whatever brain dead inept cretin at MS thought this up). The menu and toolbar layouts are totally different between Office 95 and XP, even if you turn the personalized crap off so they don't re-arrange themselves. The formatting dialogs are laid out differently. Formatting in general has different semantics. Someone moving off of Office 95 won't be any better with Office XP than they would with any other word processor.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't! (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Look, if they don't change the user interface and just keep on adding more and more high level features (those not used by the average user) to the product open source advocates will say that there is no point in upgrading, the UI is the same as it's always been and most of the new features aren't of value to the average user so switch to Open Office.
If Microsoft does change the UI to try and improve usability and give things a bit of a makeover you say that moving to the new version will require retraining so why not move to Open Office.
Microsoft will be damned by the open source crowd either way. I, for one, am glad that they are trying something new. As others have noted, Office has been mostly stagnant for the average Office user for several versions now (with the exception of Outlook). It's nice to see the UI get an overhaul and perhaps it will end up working better than it did in previous versions.
I fail to believe the current UI for Office types of programs (and let's face it, they are all mostly the same) is the be all, end all of interfaces for these kinds of programs. There is always room for improvement and now that Apple has some serious momentum and open source is continuing to slowly eat away at Microsoft's user base, they would be crazy not to make some changes.
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to give you credit [slashdot.org] for this expression, which I like better than "jump the shark." Since it's got the word "tits" in it, it's not going to go TV or NY Times mainstream any time soon.
Re:This is important (Score:5, Insightful)
It seemed for a while that the "common controls" would allow apps to pick the new look and feel of any changes introduced by Microsoft, but the common controls are so antiquated that this is no longer the case. Apps don't even look native in XP using the common controls unless they ship with a special XP manifest file.
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:2, Insightful)
Tech support hates them already (Score:4, Insightful)
I guaran-frickin'-tee our IT guy will get at least one call from a peeved user that can't 1) get Windows to recognize their inked signature or 2) get Sharpie off their LCD monitor.
I hereby propose "Strauser's Rule of UI Design":
Mixed messages (Score:5, Insightful)
So should they keep changing the UI? Maybe. But they frustrate users when every app on the same system acts differently. Generally the desktop should determine the UI characteristics and the apps should share them. Upgrade the desktop and the UI for all apps gets updated. The hodge-podge of user interfaces presented by Windows confuses and frustrates users.
The first rule of good user interface design is to be consistant.
Re:I'm seeing a pattern here. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Grasping at straws (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you for proving my point. If there was significant value coming in Office 12, don't you think they would be trumpeting it upon the housetops?
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on. I agree that OS X is less consistent than the Classic UI was, but you cannot say that they have been standing still with interface innovations. Off the top of my head:
- hardware-accelerated compositing and rendering (Quartz/Core Image)
- Expose/Dashboard
- previews of vector-based files (PDFs, AIs, etc)
- system-wide PDF support and printing
- universal spell-check
- Finder column view
- Spotlight searching
A lot of these are inherited from NeXTStep, but does it matter?... I can point to concrete improvements that affect me every day, and that's important. Photoshop without Expose is unthinkable for me now. I miss my spatial finder, and I hate that they keep fucking around with various 'themes'... but I definitely do not miss having 100+ extensions, 50+ control panel 'applets', a calculator that hadn't been updated since 1988 and a UI that would come to a screeching halt if I clicked a menu. There is progress being made and they deserve credit for things done right.
About the new Office 12 interface: its stupid that they just borrow elements (i.e.. glossy buttons, brushed metal with middle-lit gradient) because they think Apple made them cool. Microsoft is big and rich enough to come up with something really compelling and new. They just don't. They go with what they think is 'good enough'. Which is pretty bad to you and me.
Re:ewww (Score:3, Insightful)
What I am noticing with both these screen shots and my experience with Vista is how much of the UI is now being taken up by things like toolbars and additional window panes. I think 1280x1024 is going to be a little on the small side. This is the optimal res. on a 19" flat panel, IMHO. My laptop already does 1920x1200 on smaller screen, but I find that completely unusable. So I guess we're going to see an increase in popularity of larger screens in the next few years.
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're printing an 8.5x11 document on a 48" plotter you should expect that either it prints in 8.5x11 and looks identical to a printed page on a standard HP printer (leaving alot of un-used paper around it) or you tinker with the printer's scaling settings and stretch the document out to fit on your 48" plotter.
If you're printing a document on a 3x5 photo printer, then either it should scale down to the size of the printer, or be severely cut-off (3x5 out of 8.5x11).
Printers aren't intended to work like web-browsers, with fluid layouts forcing the font and features of the page to flow around one another without changing sizes. A document is suppost to be constistant in layout and should simply resize or crop to suit the printer.
More to the point, why would anyone by trying to print out a legal contract on either a 48" plotter or a 3x5 photo printer. Please disengage your head from your ass.
Re:I'm seeing a pattern here. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll probably be market redundant for saying this so many times, but WORD IS NOT A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM.
It's designed to make your content look as good as it can on the device you're printing to, not to make the content layout as designed on the printer you're printing to.
A simple example is the difference between legal paper and 8x11. Please don't tell me you expect Word to print on Legal paper the same way Acrobat would for a document designed on 8x11.
That would be stupid.
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Insightful)
hardware-accelerated compositing and rendering (Quartz/Core Image)
Not a usability benefit, just prettification.
Disagree. Anything that improves the speed and consistency of user feedback is a win across the spectrum. Also, anything that takes load off the CPU is also a big win. Quartz is so much more than eye candy - you are not seeing past the glitz here. :) Go check out the developer page for Core Image. [apple.com] This stuff is not just for swoopy Dock effects.
Dashboard is not much of an innovation, similar systems have been available for other systems for a while. It's prettier than most of those, though. Exposé is an attractive replacement for a "show desktop" button and a taskbar. It works fairly well, but is far from revolutionary (its only real innovation is allowing you to see the content of the Windows you're switching between).
Disagree vehemently. Every single day, I have 20-40 hi-res images open in Photoshop that I am juggling. With one keypress I have an instant contact sheet. Nothing comes even remotely close to this functionality that I have ever seen. Each preview is scaled bicubic and the windows remember their stacked positions when they snap back. It is not the same as Tile All Windows. Dashboard I would agree is less amazing but it is an outgrowth of Expose.
previews of vector-based files (PDFs, AIs, etc)
Previews aren't a huge thing, but this is nice "feature".
They are a huge thing if you do any work with print, vector animation, or PDFs. In Classic, I had to launch Illustrator just to see what a logo looks like.
- system-wide PDF support and printing
Functionality, not usability, again.
I'll give you that. I maintain that the vector previews are a usability plus.
- universal spell-check
If it's consistently implemented, then this could be a usability help, yes.
The interface for the spell check is the same in every application, be it Safari (this form I am typing into now), Mail, some shareware app, etc. In fact the holdout is ... Office. It of course uses its own system.
We agree on Finder Column View and Spotlight.
You're not seeing past the glitz. Look at the layout of the windows and interface. This is not the same as how current Windows/Macintosh interfaces operate, it's a different metaphor for the layout of an application window.
I see your point - it does look like they made some big changes to the toolbar and how it is arranged, and at first blush it looks like an improvement to me. Hard to say without using it. I do think MS sort of tries to have its cake and eat it too, by not diverging too much from the old Toolbar From Hell. But I give them points for trying. I still hate that they mix tabs and menu items in the same space (WMP 10 is a bad offender for this.) I do not think this is a different metaphor as you mentioned; just a new layout. We're still talking menus, icons, and all the rest.
Believe me, I see no glitz. I was just referring to the specific use of that horizon-gradient gloss that is all the rage with buttons styles today, popularized by Aqua. And I've never thought that Aqua and Brushed Metal have co-existed peacefully, especially inside the same application. (Anecdotally I have disabled all the Brushed Metal on my Mac workstation.)
I think you kinda missed my point though. I didn't say they were "standing still" with features, only with real usability enhancements. Spotlight is a big step forward, but previous to that most of their "innovations" were prettier versions
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? And there was I thinking Apple wrote some extremely comprehensive human interface guidelines [apple.com] which covered virtually every aspect of application design - where to place buttons, what background colour to use for windows and so on.
I did search but I couldn't find the section that said "Quicktime designers are exempt from these rules". And it was QT 4.0 that started this bizarre fetish for brushed chrome. Of course OS X has rewritten the rules to support it natively and to declare that "application windows" should use it. So now every app and its uncle uses the effect, turning OS X into a sea of brushed metal and non-standard buttons.
And Apple have seen fit to let their revamped HIG apply to XP too. The new iTunes 5.0 has chosen to throw out all sorts of MS Windows conventions, such as a title frame, and it even uses Aqua style scroll bars in some places. I could understand it from Microsoft since WMP is a bloody disaster, but Apple (and its users) have traditionally been fanatical about apps following the HIG.
I wonder what happened to that zeal and why some see fit to make excuses for them now.
Re:Office Vista? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me fix that up for ya:
French Clippy: "You look like you're trying to fight a war of independence. Would you like some help with that?"
Re:Office Vista? (Score:3, Insightful)
French Clippy: "You look like you're trying to fight a war of independence. Would you like some help with that?""
How about:
French Clippy: "You look like you're trying to fight a war of independence against the British. Would you like some help with that?"
Puts it in context a little better. The French were a lot more helpful when they were listening to enlightenment philosphers instead of Marx.
Re:ewww (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows is just as bad, if not worse, since every other software vendor decides to write their own toolkit, just for the sake of it. Hardly two different programs look the same. I'd say desktop Linux is absolutely consistent when compared to any given Windows desktop.
The most interesting thing about this is precisely Office. I find it amazing that even Microsoft themselves design different toolkits for different programs. Can't they even keep consistent within the same company?
Of course, Apple isn't much better. They even designed two different themes directly into the operating system. Why couldn't they just keep with either Aqua or Brushed Metal (or, alternatively, keep it selectable, but consistent for all applications, as can be done with GTK)?
What is Word meant to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, I'm not sure that's true. Word's presentation of the written word is nowhere near the level of a decent DTP program, or something like TeX: things like paragraph justification, kerning and ligatures are naive or missing altogether, and this sort of thing sets quality typography apart from its amateur cousin. Most people wouldn't know that quality if you showed it to them with red rings round the changes, but they would still be affected by it as they read.
As others have noted around here, Word isn't really a page layout program, either. Again, its facilities are far surpassed by even fairly basic DTP packages. Try doing a two-page spread in Word with an image split across the seam.
You'd think a world-class word processor would be good for dealing with long documents, at least, but I was once told in an official Microsoft reply that this wasn't what Word was meant to do. (This was after submitting a bug report about Word repeatedly taking out the whole PC while dealing with a 300 page technical manual with fairly extensive but unexceptional use of numbered lists, section headings, and the like.) Even if it can handle larger documents these days, the cross-referencing, indexing and such are nowhere near the power of a system like TeX, and again I can't think of anything it can do that a decent DTP package couldn't.
Word can produce basic web pages, but without the quality of HTML and site design/structure facilities routinely offered by more specialised web editors.
So it goes on. Word processors today are very much a jack of all trades, yet master of few. About the only thing they have going for them is relative ease of use and customisability. Even for ease of use, similar "hybrid" packages like Apple's Pages are overtaking the more overweight beasts, and I know few places that really use the kind of customisability today that Word is theoretically capable of offering.
Faced with this sort of position, it's hard to see how Microsoft can hold off the challenges against its flagship application from all sides for long based on pretty colours alone. Revamp the layout engine to produce decent typography (particularly the neat touches that require no user intervention), sort out the styles, templates and programming facilities so people can actually make good use of them, fix up the support for formal, structured documents to provide the best indexing, cross-referencing and numbering facilities available, and then we'll be getting somewhere.
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Insightful)
And after all that gui development, we're back at vim.