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."
Office Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Office Vista? (Score:2)
Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, Access and Frontpage.
Re:Office Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Office Vista? (Score:3, Insightful)
1.Free d/l ISO
2.Free d/l multiple
3.Free d/l multiple
4.$2 dvd in singapore
5.$1.85 dvd in hong kong
6.$1.72 dvd in thailand
7.$1.25 dvd in china with telltale removed
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
"I see you are trying to write a joke. I'm sorry, you do not appear to have the humor component installed."
Re:Office Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
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:Office Vista? (Score:3, Informative)
French Clippy: "You look like you're trying to fight a war of independence. Would you like our help in exchange for having final say on your trade, diplomatic relations and a voice in Congress?"
Re:Office Vista? (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of you Microsoft apologists will disagree with the above, but you can easily verify this. Try to do a print preview in Word before you set up a printer on the machine. It won't let you! Why? Because they need to know the hardware to know what the hardcopy will look like. True WYSIWYG is device independent, i.e. they print it to match the on-screen look not the other way around as Microsoft does.
Why is this important? Amongst many other reasons, we need to know when we email someone a document that it will print out on the other guy's printer (most probably a different model than ours) exactly as it was meant to. Anything less is pathetic at this point.
AC
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:Hole With No Bottom (Score:3, Informative)
and it even does THAT poorly! have a look at Pages [apple.com] and see what word processing should be like. Your (well... my) content actually does look good, rather than some ho-hum word document. (personal experience)
the same thing goes for Keynote [apple.com] vs PowerPoint, and I'm hoping for an Excel killer... at that point i'd delete office if i didn't ha
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 peopl
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hole With No Bottom (Score:3, Informative)
Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. Though it does provide page layout features, it's not Word's primary focus.
It always bugs me when people confuse the basic purpose of programs. If you want page layout, use Publisher, or PageMaker, or InDesign.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer. Honestly, that's what Microsoft makes Publisher for, because Word isn't designed to do that.
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: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:Hole With No Bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
The NY Times can substitue the politically correct euphemism "Feminine mammilian secondary sexual characteristics superimposed onto a coleoidean companion," or "Fmsscsoacc" for a snappy and easily pronouncable acronym.
It's not really a replacement for "jump the shark" though. It means something a bit different from a differenct point of view.
It refers to adding a powerful attractor to something that isn't otherwise very attractive; and may even be innately repulsive, but whose actual value and usfulness is, ummmm, "questionable."
And to a certain extent it'll work too, especially as displayed on the sales floor the squid is all dressed up in a Wonderbra(tm) and a tight blouse unbuttoned just so. The instinctual response to reach out and fondle will be very strong.
Of course, sooner or later, after you get it home and out of the shrink wrap, you'll start to realize you're getting all hot and bothered by feeling up a squid, at least if you've reached the primate level of evolution. That still leaves the problem with management.
"Jump the shark" is the "consumer" point of view phrase for an attractor having lost its attractiveness.
B.F. Skinner already coined the phrase for this from the marketers point of view. He noted that you could train a pigeon to do extrordinary things, so long as you never broke the task/reward cycle. If you did that the pigeon in question would simply ignore all further attempts to train it to do anything at all.
He called this "losing your pigeon."
How apropos.
KFG
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: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:Hole With No Bottom (Score:3, Funny)
WYSIWYP -What you see is why you're Pissed!
ewww (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ewww (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ewww (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the look that really matters - we've gone through endless cycles of what looks "neat", skinnable apps, and now 3D spinning apps (though I find it hilarious that the brushed aluminum look is being attributed to Apple. I used brushed aluminum on my first website about 15 years ago. It's hardly a unique appearance).
What is really interesting, however, is that they fundamentally changed the usability of the application - the manner in which toolbars look and layout has changed, as have many of the other user-interaction elements. This is something that Microsoft has been very hesitant to do, as one of the reasons people stick with Office through the versions is consistency - Drop Office XP in front of someone who used Office 95 a decade ago, and they'll largely find it the same (just with more/better features).
With Microsoft significantly changing things, they have the risk of it being such a schism that people seriously evaluate the option of going to Open Office or other alternatives. If your users are going to need training, and are going to bitch and complain about their cheese moving, then you might as well re-evaluate the whole thing.
Re:ewww (Score:4, Interesting)
Anm
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 re
Re:ewww (Score:3, Insightful)
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 themse
I'm not an expert... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for Coral to load the images, but at risk of being proven completely wrong, is it possible that the throwing out of "standardisation" is because of new standards for Vista?
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 b
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: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
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Interesting)
Theoretically, yes, so long as those 16- or 32-bit displays were still used with a plain terminal interface. Obviously if you're doing image work, it's a feature upgrade. Neither of these are usability improvements though. The new displays could be used by other systems to improve usability – for example by providing more advanced colour hinting or whatever – but they do not, in themselves, aid
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,
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Interesting)
Really for most documents I only use a few tools, and I use them a lot. But these change over time (drafting, editing, proofing, etc) but I'm WAY too lazy to only configure the bar with JUST those few
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:3, Insightful)
And after all that gui development, we're back at vim.
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:2)
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.
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:Mixed messages (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm not an expert... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is how improvements to user interfaces can be brought about. In theory, Microsoft had a good GUI with Word. In practice, it was a complicated, bloated piece of shit that was a nightmare to try to use, especially if there were more then one user using it.
It appears that Microsoft has taken the complaints of users (well, complaints I've had for quite some time anyway) and worked on a new GUI that addresses these concerns. There's no reason the GUI should look the same it did back in Word95. [rinet.ru]
One of my big problems is that the toolbar is too complex. There are too many submenu's, trying to customize it so it displays relevant things (and keeping it's settings which was always buggy) was always a chore. The whole "let's hide most of the menu in the drop-down menu" thing was annoying. Now with it being in the toolbar represented via graphics, with a very small amount of parent menus, I'll be able to find what I want much more easily. This is a good thing(TM).
Is it different? Sure. Will some people be confused? Definitely. Is the difference a great enough improvement to deal with the confusion? IMO, most definitely.
Now if only they'd do something about those damn Virus-writer (sorry, "Macros") and make it less bloated and buggy.
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:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/20001203002400/http://w ww.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm [archive.org]
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.
RTFA? (Score:5, Funny)
But this is an interesting trend: Apple has monopolized the headlines recently. ArsTechnica is all about Apple, Slashdot can't seem to get enough of them, and now Microsoft is emulating its Apple product?
What's next, Intel Processors branded with "Apple Outside" stickers on them?
Re:RTFA? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RTFA? (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC Windows 1.0 [wikipedia.org] was a balant ripoff of Apple Macintosh graphical OS. back in 1985...
What do you call it when Linux apps do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
--grendel drago
This is important (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I'm seeing a pattern here. (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!
Re:I'm seeing a pattern here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Another page out of Apple's book... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't mess with something that works (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:even worse are misleading options (Score:5, Funny)
If they can't figure out what goes where while they are rearranging the save dialog, what hope do the end users have of finding things.
Toast (Score:3, Funny)
Another site (Score:5, Informative)
http://bink.nu/photos/news_article_images/categor
Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft continues the tradition... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft continues the tradition... (Score:3, Funny)
When will the Linux community learn that it has to be consistent to be accepted at large? They must be consistent and use a
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
Oh Snap! Ol'brushed metal is back (Score:3, Funny)
Disclaimer: I don't know how to put that link in as some text atm, but whatever.
I don't like it (Score:5, Interesting)
Its hard to put my finger on it, but its inconsistent (button size, text placement, icon usage, drop-shadows, etc.) and asymetrical.
Just IMHO.
Re:I don't like it (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to say I quite like it. There's something there that's at least acknoledging that "the way we do things" is not the be-all and end-all of usability. By reducing things to contexts, they might be able to expose everything you need without increasing complexity.
I think we're never going to know how well this works until we actually get to use it though — it's too different from other interfaces around to draw quick conclusions, I feel.
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Interesting)
What would be really cool is if the menu sizing thing is adaptive to your usage habits. I guess it is just so hard to do it right. I say this because look at programs like PhotoShop and Visual Studio. They are both relatively complex with a completely customizable UI. Only YOU have to do the customizing. What if some sort of automated customization based on usage patterns was possible on some limites scale. Better than the hide the menu game.
I liked another posters idea of the "Google" search for menu items instead of static menu structures. The problem is you want to navigate menus with mousing only. Maybe some sort of spcial grid where you mouse through a box and as you move to certain areas it will zoom into that cluster of menu items and a standard area to mouse over that zooms you back out. I can imagine a fluid series of movements taking you down the equivalent of three or four menu levels rather quickly through a kind of set of 3D nodes. Only its more like a 3D chess board so that the structure is easy to follow and less fluid than a true 3D menu system with floating clusters of nodes that are only loosely connected.
Oh well. Thats all UI research, not something you can just spring on people. Or maybe.. if it were perfectly intuitive?
Jeremy
Grasping at straws (Score:5, Interesting)
What they are doing is taking an already extremely complex piece of software, and suddenly changing how to do everything. Suddenly, switching to OpenOffice seems like less of a change than upgrading to the next version of MS Office.
Re:Grasping at straws (Score:3, 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?
Other site with screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
just what I always wanted from a word proccessor! (Score:4, Funny)
The most important new "feature" of the UI (Score:4, Interesting)
And everyone knows this is the most important part of the new UI *roll-eyes*
Unfortunately I can't comment on anything else because it's been slashdotted. However these tabbed pop-up things sound like they're a change for the sake of a change. That is bad. Making changes to the UI can be good when they improve functionality and ease of use. Making changes to the UI so they can sell yet another copy of your favourite bloatware office program is not good.
Word has a lot of elements of a UI that are good in theory. Now if only they could work on their implementation of these elements.
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.
the flattery (Score:2, Funny)
This looks more like a parody of aqua though
Its.....butt ugly (Score:5, Interesting)
This is like someone mixed Mac OS X Aqua with LSD!
My bet? This is an optional interface. This is not the standard interface. There are people in my office who *refuse* to use OpenOffice.org. Not because it isn't an MS product, but because it doesn't work *exactly* like Office 2000.
There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that they'll use *that* nastiness.
Doesn't MS realize that the majority of business users will be using the same old Windows 2000 interface? Doesn't MS realize that if they cut that out, the *natural* upgrade path will be something linux XFce w/OpenOffice.org?
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
Server In Flames (Score:4, Informative)
You just take the existing url www.test.com/stuff.htm and add ".nyud.net:8090"
www.test.com.nyud.net:8090/stuff.htm
Or for this site:
http://pdc.xbetas.com.nyud.net:8090/?page=o12prev
That's it! It's easy and would let sooo many more people see the article.[/rant]
Signatures (Score:4, Interesting)
Only new feature I care about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Only new feature I care about (Score:4, Informative)
You can change the shortcut keys so that Ctrl-V points to Paste Special... instead of Paste. Go to Tools|Customize..., then select the Keyboard... button to display the Customize Keyboard dialog. Select Edit from the Categories list on the left side of the dialog, then select EditPasteSpecial in the Commands list on the right hand side. Switch focus to the Press new shortcut key textbox, and press Ctrl+V. Note that the dialog shows that this key sequence is currently assigned to EditPaste. Choose Assign, then close both the Customize Keyboard and the Customize dialogs.
You'll still get the Paste Special dialog, but focus is set to the format options list, and if you press U, then return, you will select Unformatted Text (or, in the worst case, Unformatted Unicode Text) and have the text pasted.
It's not as good as a simple Ctrl-V, but Ctrl-V, U, <CR> is a bit easier than switching to the mouse. Of course, you could skip this whole thing and do Alt-E, S, U, <CR>; but you already knew that.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Can I still hack at it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside from providing income to folks such as myself, it permits many of the limitations of the systems to be exceeded.
So, will these new "chunky toolbars" and property panes, and so on, be addressable using the current methods, in other words, does my current VBA/VS.Net code work... and can I leverage the new features?
With Office 2002 (aka 10 or XP), Microsoft introduced "Task Panes". These things include the XML interface, a substitute for WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" and a number of other useful things. But it is barely accessible to the automation/document model, and not extensible at all (except for the XML stuff, but that's another show). I would love to be able to add custom items to those "Property Screens" and add my own menu-like toolbars, to give my customers features that are (a) more usable (assuming that this stuff is indeed more usable, I'm not sure yet), and (b) looks like the out-of-the-box features (but work better).
what about re-training costs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me this interface is different enough it would almost require re-training for many users (I'm guessing the syllabuses are being cranked out by the one-week training class industry right now)? And, considering the retraining, what about the costs? Isn't this exactly the argument MS used against MA's decision to move to Open Documents? Really, looking at this interface, I wouldn't even consider unleashing it on my parents, who are already confused enough by the current Office Suite interface (chevrons in the pulldown menus, etc.)
Microsoft Take on the Changes (Score:3, Informative)
Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office "12" Core Applications:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/
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":
Re:slashdotted already (Score:5, Informative)
Re:slashdotted already (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PDC? (Score:2)
Re:Office 12 and Windows Stability (Score:5, Funny)