The newer Office 2007 User Interface
Since Beta 1, the Office team has been hard at work refining the new UI. Yesterday they revealed the latest work, and for those of you on Beta 1, you'll notice that things are much more crisp. If you haven't seen any of the screenshots yet, you should check out Jensen's post: https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/03/09/547281.aspx
Jensen has a bunch of screenshots and if you haven't been to his site yet, I highly recommend it. He puts me to shame with the amount of content he posts (he posts a new article every day). Here's one of the screenshots from the new Excel UI (notice that a different skin is applied too):
If you're interested in finding out more information about Office 2007, as well as signing up for the upcoming Beta 2, you should visit the office preview site: https://www.microsoft.com/office/preview
-Brian
Comments
- Anonymous
March 10, 2006
Its confusing after 10 years of the old school office.
I uninstalled Office 12 because of this confusion AND because its a bloat hog. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
I don't know, I disagree that it's confusing. It's just different. I actually like 99.9% of the ribbon approach. What I don't like is the entire removal of the File menu, and it's arbitrary replacement with an Office icon... I think that's a step in a very undiscoverable direction. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
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March 10, 2006
one word..
OpenOffice.
Its free, it works, its free. Granny doesn't care about VBS. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
"think that's a step in a very undiscoverable direction."
Its a step in ****. [edited by Brian: Sorry, but I had to remove the word. Don't want to offend anyone] - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
OpenOffice is 10 years behind but so are the rest of us so it's all fine and dandy :) - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
SO, how much cheaper is the TCO of this than FREE? (openoffice) - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
New look? Huh... Cute, but looks a little dark and heavy.
Wanna know truth? No one need new designs if it works slow and takes a lot of space on HDD & RAM. And I know bugs that wasn't fixed over few last versions - so I expect them be there again.
Resume - I'm not optimistic about value of new Office12. I was much more impressed by realtime behavior of Pages from Apple and only one good thing for Word is that Apple do not run their products on Windows. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
Apple = Pleasurable and enjoyable
Microsoft = Frustration.
NUff said. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
Thanks for all the great comments to help lead me into the weekend on a positive note. :-)
Meh, I'm not sure if you are saying that the performance is the problem for you or the interface itself. Both have obviously improved significantly since we shipped Beta 1 last year, and we'll continue improving. You should really give Beta 2 a try when it comes out.
Wes, it really is a huge improvement. Whenever I go back to the old UI at this point, I realize how big of an improvement it really has been. I too was a little skeptical of the Office icon button, but it actually works out pretty good. I'll be curious to see what folks think after they've had a chance to work with it for a couple weeks.
TehOMG, I don't think Granny is the only one who doesn't care about VBS. Not sure if we've made it clear, but VBS isn't the feature we consider makes Office standout above all the competition. You should read some of the Office blogs to get a better handle of everything that's there (I have a bunch of links off to the right).
LOLERSKATES, sorry, but I had to replace your original word with a more "Granny" appropriate term. Was that mainly just trying to be funny, or do you really feel that way? It would be nice if you could provide some more info on what makes the new version seem so bad for you.
OO, I'm sorry to hear that. It's pretty sweet up here in the 21st century (although I have to admit there are a number of things I really enjoyed back there in 1996).
WAHAHAHA, a paper and pencil would also be pretty cheap. It's up to you if you want to pay for something better. I hope you don't feel like I'm trying to force you to though, it's your choice. Some of the folks who read this blog have said they just like using notepad. :-)
Sergey, the screenshot I linked to was with the dark skin applied to the app (that's why it looks so dark). If you go to Jensen's post you'll see a bunch of other screenshots with the blue skin. Have you used Beta 1? You should give it a try.
MOo, I've been working with some of the Apple guys on the Ecma standardization of the Open XML formats. I like a lot of their stuff, so I won't argue with your first point. Sorry that Microsoft has been so frustrating for you though. Are there particular products you're having trouble with?
Well, after all that I could use a beer... have a great weekend everyone! :-)
-Brian - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
PingBack from http://www.innovationwings.ch/weblog/wordpress/?p=777 - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
Hey, is there any chance that Word 12 won't hang for over a minute every time I open a file if I wake up my laptop away from the office, and Word can't find the printer?
Any chance of that, guys?
Any chance of you guys doing very, very time-consuming things asynchronously instead of hanging the UI for a very, very long f*****g time while it waits for something on which the UI is not dependent? Does the word "thread" ring a bell?
Didn't think so. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
POSTPONED, BY DESIGN, WONT FIX.
Says it all really :) You know what Im talking about :) - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
Well for all the products I am frustrated with I dont think this text control has a large enough buffer.. Unhandled Exception.. Access Violation at 0x000303043 reading memory 0x0000000. - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
I'm a little surprised to see such a slew of negativity here, and no positive comments. Brian, hopefully you're not reading your comments at this point, and are enjoying your weekend instead.
But if not, just want to let you know that I think you guys have done a lot of really great work on the new Office, and I'm REALLY looking forward to using it. It's got a lot of promise. To be sure, I've got a few minor quibbles, but as I haven't yet actually used it I'm not really qualified to comment.
I think the most difficult thing (after looking at your screenshot) may be that I'll still be trying to "look under rocks" for more functions. That you guys managed to expose all that previously hidden functionality is really a testament to some wonderful design, and in a perverse way so are the comments above. :P Pity people don't get it, huh? - Anonymous
March 10, 2006
The word part of the Office Suite is OUTLOOK, it totally ownzerz the machine while it talks to the Exchange server.
My laptop becomes a slobbering idiot when it polls Exchange.
What makes office laggy and sluggy is the themed controls, its great that a new UI is being done its a great thing but its not LEAN enough. - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
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March 11, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
I'm really suprised that all of the *nix and OO trolls are reading this blog. Come-on guys if your stuff is so great, what are you doing on the MSDN website? Like Brian said above -- YOU don't have to use their product! And for those of us that use Microsoft products, your comments aren't changing many minds ;) - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
I DO love Office (Office 2000, that is), so no *nix neither OOO troll here. Besides that, I've just tried OpenOffice and surprise: it features the horrible and distracting Office XP-2003 gradient toolbar. It has, of course, been inmediately deleted from my computer. I'll keep Office 2000, which thankfully fullfills all my word processing needs.
Wish you to enjoy all the "innovations". - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
I love the new UI
I do criticize Microsoft a lot about their products performance or quality, but I can’t criticize them about the new UI, well, that dark one is Vista style, and I don’t like the dark interface, but the new blue UI is amazing.
Finally a step in the right direction, I have not installed it yet, waiting for the beta 1 refresh, and I hope that the performance is better.
But the UI looks good, relaxed, just what I am looking for, will comment more after I try it, for now is just screenshots only
About the people who love the Mac, it is not written by gods, just by developers, don’t believe me? here is something for you
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5687841345102464662&q=mac - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
SO LET ME GET THIS RIGHT. IF I SUGGEST AN ALTERNATIVE PRODUCT IM A TROLL.
LOL, LONG LIVE MY 80 COLUMN DEC VT-100 TERMINAL! - Anonymous
March 11, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 13, 2006
Нет? Ничего, сейчас покажется :-) - Anonymous
March 13, 2006
Вам не кажется, что интерфейс Office 2007 слишком уж футуристичен?
Monday, March 13, 2006 11:39 AM by Олег Михайлик
Нет? Ничего, сейчас покажется :-)
WTF Is that gibberish?
- Anonymous
March 13, 2006
Hmmm.
Without actually getting my mitts on the apps (I'm a Mac user), I really can't say how the interface changes would work in real life... but I hope (as others have mentioned) that users can choose the new or traditional interface. Being able to rearrange menus and toolbars at will, as in older versions, would be good too. I have to give you some credit for at least trying to improve the UI, even if I have reservations about the direction y'all are taking.
I'm not a fan of heavy toolbars — I hope there will be options to use smaller icons, icon/text only, etc., as well. Truth be told, I'd prefer a <i>vertical</i> toolbar option; let the content fill the vertical space.
Laptop users still have limited real estate on the screen, so anything that will make our life easier (like vertical toolbars) will help there. As much as I like having OpenOffice around, its tendency to sprawl chafes me a <i>lot</i> — I keep wishing for a Normal mode like Word has (or even a draft mode like Word used to have). :-P
That's all I can think of for now. - Anonymous
March 14, 2006
Brian, can you post more Office 12 screen shots?
Bye - Anonymous
March 14, 2006
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March 15, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 17, 2006
Thanx for the reviews......I'm looking forward to install it soon. http://www.bloodpressureservice.info - Anonymous
March 17, 2006
The UI is improved over 2003, but it still is trying to be too helpful, the same mistake was made with Windows XP. Getting rid of the File, edit and all the other buttons was not the best move, a lot of the people who use office are familiar with File, edit and the rest of the buttons. a changable UI or the abillity to customise it more world be nice - Anonymous
March 20, 2006
Hey everyone, sorry I've been AWOL since making this post. I've read all of your comments and I really appreciate the feedback. There are a number of folks who've been on the Beta and have actually had a chance to play around with the new interface.
If you are one of the folks who've been limited to screenshots though, I highly recommend checking out Julie's video on Channel 9; or sign up for Beta 2. It's really hard to do the interface justice with just a couple screenshots.
-Brian - Anonymous
March 23, 2006
Brian, after just a few hours I already found myself using features I never knew were in Office. Actually I went back to 2003 and checked. Sure enough they were, just buried. The new UI works for me! - Anonymous
March 27, 2006
So many negative comments, I just had to pop in and say a word. I'm blessed to be running on a brand-new and extraordinarily fast laptop, so I can't comment on the bloatware angle - anything I do in Office 12 is pretty much instantaneous. But as a longtime user of Office, I have to say I'm quickly falling in love with ribbons. My chief complaint at this point is lack of some sort of user conversion utility. After all these years of having help for WordPerfect users, where's the help for previous users of Office? I'm having a helluva time finding all my old favorite features - in fact, I still can't find Spellcheck for the life of me. And the Help system for the beta isn't quite there (try doing a search on Spellcheck, for instance).
But that complaint aside, I love the new UI. And the most recent updates look even better. Great XL screenshot, btw. I think that once they get over the initial transition, consumers will love the new UI. - Anonymous
June 12, 2006
I have played with BETA2. I have been a fan of the office interface until now. It is way to confusing. Why not stick with a classic interface instead of trying to make it look like a crapintosh?
I will stick with 2003. - Anonymous
July 20, 2006
PingBack from http://blog.e-saiz.net/2006/03/12/imagenes-del-nuevo-office/ - Anonymous
June 06, 2008
Since Beta 1, the Office team has been hard at work refining the new UI. Yesterday they revealed the latest work, and for those of you on Beta 1, you'll notice that things are much more crisp. If you haven't seen any of the screenshots yet, you shoul