OSNews

Not yet.

http://www.codeweavers.com/beta/cxmac/forum/?t=1;forumcurPos=50;msg...

Maybe. 2007 is the most innovative update of Office for a while. A good, well designed UI may not be a 'feature' to most, but it sure will make you more productive. Not having to live with Toolbar Hell is so refreshing.

What else?

You can read more about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_2007

IMHO, the new user interface looks damn cool

I'm fairly sure I read somewhere the ribbon can be turned off and the menus brought back, is this true?

probably, but to do so would prove you were a twat. I spent 15 minutes using the ribbons on a friends pc and found a ton of features i never even knew were in office. perhaps they were all new, but i very much doubt that. they are much more usable, and thats coming from an ex-pc user/ now mac convert. definately not an ms fanboy

I guess in your world, photoshop is stupid for providing usable tool palletes and simple colour selection. damn adobe, treating the users like they are too dumb to pick such things from a menu.

menus are fine and dandy but they arent ideal for EVERY situation.

"""probably, but to do so would prove you were a twat."""

Are you sure you didn't mean "twit" there?

No, fairly sure he meant "twat"; the female genitalia, or a contemptible person, in British slang.

"I'm fairly sure I read somewhere the ribbon can be turned off and the menus brought back, is this true?"

You read wrong.
The menus and toolbars are gone, period. And thank God, as menu/toolbar UI is not capable of dealing with all the features that Office offers. It would've been foolish for Microsoft to maintain it for troglodytes for two reasons:
a. The old UI was already overburdened, so when adding new features in the future, MS would either have to cram it into the already overburdened old UI or only offer it on the new UI.
b. Troglodytes would simply use the old UI, never giving the new UI a chance, even though the new one blows the old one away, putting MS into the position of having to maintain the old UI forever.

No, a clean break is best.

Maybe what you read is that the ribbon can be put into a minimized state so that it only expands when one of its tabs is invoked, resulting in menu-like behavior.

Office 2007 makes OpenOffice and the rest of the pretenders look downright primitive (and don't even mention Google's "office web applets").

"You read wrong.
The menus and toolbars are gone, period. And thank God, as menu/toolbar UI is not capable of dealing with all the features that Office offers. It would've been foolish for Microsoft to maintain it for troglodytes for two reasons:
a. The old UI was already overburdened, so when adding new features in the future, MS would either have to cram it into the already overburdened old UI or only offer it on the new UI.
b. Troglodytes would simply use the old UI, never giving the new UI a chance, even though the new one blows the old one away, putting MS into the position of having to maintain the old UI forever.

No, a clean break is best. "

So what you are saying is that the old menus, which works with this product:

http://www.nanopac.com/JAWS.htm

... will no longer work for Office 2007?

So that means that MA will not be able to use Office 2007 becasue its new UI will break disabled access, and hence MA will have to go existing Office + ODF plugin, or OpenOffice once disability access works properly?

Edited 2006-10-09 07:10

Your conclusion that Office 2007 lacks disability access is wishful thinking on your part.

"Office 2007 makes OpenOffice and the rest of the pretenders look downright primitive (and don't even mention Google's "office web applets")."

Well, Google's office web applets do explicitly NOT aim for completely replacing MS Office. They are better in regard of networked working, but worse at everything else. So if you absolutely need networked working, go Google, if not, go somewhere else.

OpenOffice has been specifically designed to replicate the looks of MS Office as good as possible, to break some of the lock-in that keeps organisations from switching. Technically it is not a pretender, but far ahead at some areas (like styles and large documents), and far behind at other areas (like WordArt).
Again, I suggest one looks at both applications and chooses the one which offers the best overall perfomance/cost ratio.

I guess future OpenOffice versions will include also an Interface which is close to Microsofts ribbon layout. But I think they will also include the traditional interface.

Does it attempt to predict what features you want to use, like the "collapsible menus" or whatever they're called in older versions of Office? More to the point, does it actually ****ing WORK this time?

This seems unlikely:

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_2007#The_Ribbon

Some tabs, called Contextual Tabs, appear only when certain objects are selected. Contextual Tabs expose functionality specific only to the object with focus. For example, selecting a picture brings up the Pictures tab, which presents options for dealing with the picture. Similarly, focusing on a table exposes table-related options in a specific tab. Contextual tabs remain hidden when the object it works on are not selected.

When will Microsoft learn that computers are dumber than users, and some users are apparently more intelligent than their interface designers?

OK, that was grouchy, I think I need to go do something else ;-)

Actually, contextual tabs work just fine. You have to click on the object you want to edit for the correct tab to appear, but it works in a predictable way so it's not bad at all like collapsable menu.

I've been using Office 2007 since the public beta was released, and I have to say it's great. It took me about a week to get myself reoriented and I don't think I'd want to go back at this point.

They don't do that any more. I'm trying to find a post on Jensen Harris's blog I read once detailing why it looked right at the time, why this was actually wrong, a promise never to do it again and how to turn it off. This includes the menus you had to scan twice (once half-full, once full) and the "toolbar-on-one-line" idea (ugh!)

"You don't have a choice! I'm already receiving the new Office's file format and it can't be opened with any other version. Forced upgrades will be the reason for most people to upgrade. They want to be able to open other people's files. "

If the new format you're referring to is OpenXML, Microsoft is providing free plugins for Office 2000, XP, and 2003 that allows those apps to open OpenXML files.

Your "slave" rhetoric is FUD.

Novell's Gnumeric spreadsheet app is already getting support for SpreadsheetML (the spreadsheet portion of OpenXML).

Apple is one of the sponsors of OpenXML, and future versions of iWork will support it.

OpenXMLDeveloper.org already has Java source code showing how to manipulate OpenXML documents without any MS software required.

But but but teh Microsoft made it!1!one! It has to be bad d00d!

Personally, I have two problems with OpenXML.

The first is that Microsoft has a history for creating standards for everyone else, then deviating from those standards, so that the only "official version" of the standard is Microsoft's. C# has this issue too, but at least with C#, you can code around it or pass your code against a validator to make sure that it's limitted to the ECMA spec. You can't do that with OpenXML because Microsoft generates the OpenXML code for you, and so if you use OpenXML, MS Office is the only safe bet.

The second complaint has to do with the format itself. Compare ODF with OpenXML (see Example XML comparisons):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_and_Microso...

ODF is basically an extention of XHTML and other W3 standards so it's easy to read and easy to convert via XSLT stylesheets to XHTML and other formats. ODF seems to be based off of the XML equivalent of OLE and doesn't seem to be meant to be human readable or XSLT convertable at all and seems to try to reinvent the wheel on several standards.

//Personally, I have two problems with OpenXML.

The first is that Microsoft has a history for creating standards for everyone else, then deviating from those standards, so that the only "official version" of the standard is Microsoft's. C# has this issue too, but at least with C#, you can code around it or pass your code against a validator to make sure that it's limitted to the ECMA spec. You can't do that with OpenXML because Microsoft generates the OpenXML code for you, and so if you use OpenXML, MS Office is the only safe bet.

The second complaint has to do with the format itself. Compare ODF with OpenXML (see Example XML comparisons):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_and_Microso.....

ODF is basically an extention of XHTML and other W3 standards so it's easy to read and easy to convert via XSLT stylesheets to XHTML and other formats. ODF seems to be based off of the XML equivalent of OLE and doesn't seem to be meant to be human readable or XSLT convertable at all and seems to try to reinvent the wheel on several standards.//

Agree with your first point.

Your second point, the last sentence surely should start with "OpenXML" not ODF.

You don't mention a third point which is, I think, the most important of all - OpenXML contains multiple references to other components of Windows. Those other components of Windows are closed and proprietary. Therefore, any application that fully implements OpenXML standard must be a Windows-only application. On any other platform, parts of the OpenXML format are necessarily absent. Therefore, not only are you locked in to using only Windows platforms if you save your documents in OpenXML, but also you make yourself not fully interoperable with the only international standard for digital office documents, but you are also at risk that your own digital documents will not be accessible even to you in the future.

Finally, the other (and least significant) objection to OpenXML is that it is a format specifically designed by Microsoft to suit Microsoft's Office suite. This means it is not vendor neutral, as it gives a significant head start to Microsoft for writing Office applications.

Edited 2006-10-09 23:45

//Your "slave" rhetoric is FUD.

Novell's Gnumeric spreadsheet app is already getting support for SpreadsheetML (the spreadsheet portion of OpenXML).

Apple is one of the sponsors of OpenXML, and future versions of iWork will support it.//

No-one is debating that OpenXML is not open at all. Unarguably, OpenXML is partly an open standard, no-one disputes that. It is possible to write applications - even for platforms other than Windows - which partly implement the OpenXML standard.

However, just as much as the fact that OpenXML is partly open is not debatable, neither is the fact that it is partly closed as well, in that it requires in places other closed, proprietary parts of the Windows platform.

Therefore, any competing format which does not require any closed, proprietary components to be present to support it is far and away the more preferable standard. Fortunately, we have just such an alternative standard format available to us, one which is open, vendor neutral and platform neutral, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions on its use. Guaranteed no lock-in, guaranteed not to hold you ransom to a single vendor supplier, easily interchangeable between applications and platforms by design, and it stands a very good chance of being future proof. It is an ISO/IEC International standard to boot.

Form an end-user perspective, any use of OpenXML is absolute crazy madness compared to using ODF instead.

PS: BTW, Gnumeric does not belong to Novell.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

Gnumeric is part of GNOME, and is from the GNU project.

Edited 2006-10-09 23:52

The fact is most people will not know that, and also that there is no plugin for AbiWord, my first choice for a word processor, and OpenOffice, my second choice. There are also patents on the format to try to make sure you are forced to use Office 2007. I hope for a slow adoption and that the OpenDocument plugin takes off... unfortunately because of the incompatibilities, its going to accelerate people being forced to buy it

"This would be a great time for OpenOffice to come in and gain some serious ground, but it really is the weakest link in the open source world. Its too slow, bloated, and unorganized... I really wish it was in a much better shape right now as its a good time for it to gain some serious ground."

Fixed, reportedly.

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/71233/index.html

"Enough blathering, Don. Just tell us how fast it loads already! Well, all I can say is, don't blink. That's right. If you're of the opinion that OpenOffice.org is slow-as-molasses bloatware, let me just say it's about the fastest molasses I've ever seen. Point. Click. Boom! Even without the preloader, it's still pretty darned fast. It seems to load in less than 2 seconds on a WinXP box with a 3Ghz Pentium chip and 512MB RAM.

If OpenOffice.org is any slower than Microsoft Office, it's only by half a blip. In fact, I loaded both at once, first clicking on MS Word, then on OOWriter, in my task tray. OOWriter came up first. Trying it the other way, Word still loses out to Writer. I suspect your mileage will vary some, but OpenOffice.org is still quick as a whip."

Enjoy!

Edited 2006-10-09 07:07

When you next get one (and assuming you're running Windows), choose "Ask Microsoft about this file format" (but wow, I am sick of that option appearing EVERY TIME, and AS DEFAULT). It should link you to the plugin a sibling poster mentioned.