“eWEEK Labs’ evaluation of Microsoft’s Office 2007 Beta 2 unearthed compelling features and tools, and reminded us why enterprises continue to rely on the productivity suite. During tests of the second beta of Office 2007, we were impressed with the suite’s collaboration features. In fact, we believe they will be the impetus for dedicated Windows shops to upgrade when Office 2007 ships later in 2006. The suitewide attention to collaboration will enable users and enterprises as a whole to work with information in new and more creative ways.” My take: I’ve been testing Office 2007 for a while now, and all I can say is this: the new interface is excellent. Try it before judging it, please.
Thom, you actually want to have people use the interface before making overreaching judgements?!
Ask for world peace, it would be easier
Don’t worry, the ABM front will sooner or later find this thread and point out how MS is the suxxor and cannot produce anything innovative…
MS is teh suxx0r and can’t produce anything innovative.
The problem is – I guess – not Microsoft as a whole comapany but it’s OS division – I wish the OS was as good as Office.
The Office lot seems to be a completly different lot to the OS lot .
The comapany is just B I G .
Indeed Crazy Talk – youre saying the devil has charme
Actually Office 2007 might – were I to have enough money – even be something Id pay for .. well I’ll see .. – but certainly exciting .
Office 2007 will proably be the bigger reason to upgrade to Vista than Vista itself 8) – maybe .
BTW 2007 also has something about it – that number melikes .
So far the new UI is pretty impressive, if a bit too colorful for my tastes. Everything seems to be working smoothly… except for the activation process.
try using the vista theme, i find it much nicer then the default blue xp one
That was server load. Activation should work now.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/
This has got to be one of the, if not the best user interface Microsoft has ever produced. The feel of the programs is so much better. Kudos to the Office team.
EDIT: It actually reminds me of a very polished version of the Blender interface
Edited 2006-05-24 20:08
I agree. It makes you wonder where all the “MS can’t innovate” naysayers are now! I still think is a lot of room for refinement. In some ways, the new UI tries too hard to present functionality access. The result is some convolution in the UI. It appears awkward but it works very well. I have only been using it for two days and I am immediately at home, despite the departure from the old interface. Suddenly, it is clear why the menu bar in IE7 went away. I guess MS is trying to be consistent with its new UI techniques.
Edited 2006-05-24 21:42
I have a serious vision handicap, and need to try avoiding a mouse as much as possible. On menuing interfaces, I can almost always escape by pressing the “alt” button along with a key, or by pressing and then releasing the “alt” button so I can traverse the menus with the keyboard.
What will be the equivalent in this “new, inproved interface?”
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/12/574930.aspx
Read this post about controlling the office ui with keyboard (in O2k7 push Alt and you’ll see keytips on the ribbon interface). It’s excellent, the best UI Microsoft has ever made. It’s fast, good-looking and easy to use.
I couldn’t activate as well yesterday but today morning it worked immediately.
Edited 2006-05-25 07:47
I really like the new interface Im even thinking of using it in my owns programs, of course, for us, the Delphi programmers it is at our reach thanx to:
http://www.tmssoftware.com/
and for .NET programmers there is also an option at:
http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/
Edited 2006-05-24 21:01
Hey ccchips
The Alt button is still there however when you press it a small icon with the appropriate letter appears just under the menu it activates. If you press the letter the new menu appears with the Alt lettering shortcuts already there. Also, the items on the ribbon can be navigated with the Tab button or arrow keys.
To me it works better than Office 2003 though I don’t use Alt extensively. So far I’m finding the whole thing to be one of the better interfaces I’ve ever used for anything. Huzzah! to the Office folks for not backing down when (as I’m sure they did) people carped that it didn’t look exactly like what they already know.
They have a different opinion on the interface and point out some often overlooked training issues.
I’ve tried it but it seems too restrictive to me. But I almost never use toolbars anyway. My motto is: if it can be done from the keyboard it is done from the keyboard.
The new ribon UI is useless and clutered. I prefer KDE’s way of customizing everything to the way I like. I also would like KDE to have profiles for toolbars and menus. That would be really useful, not putting all options in your face.
I don’t think I’m following you here. The ribbon seems the opposite of cluttered. It has all the basic stuff in little tabs I guess so they stay out of your way, unlike the old system where if you needed many of these functions you had to make a customized toolbar or fill the screen with a million buttons, at which point you start getting confused which button does which. I also don’t feel it’s throwing a bunch of options in my face, since if you have the standard home ribbon open, it just shows you the basic stuff: clipboard, font, paragraph, styles, and editing. I can’t think of any word processor which doesn’t have all of the same functions in a toolbar for you on startup, this is just a different way of presenting them. This is nice and easy to understand, with all the basic functions grouped together in an intelligent manner, without cluttering up the screen. I haven’t used KOffice in a year or so, so I don’t want to make baseless comparisons, but I can honestly say that from my experience, no other major word processor has tried to change the standard gui in decades. I’ve been playing with it all day, and while it did take a little getting used to just because of the way it looks, after about 20 minutes I found myself really enjoying it. I don’t do much word processing in Windows anymore, I do most of that on my mac with Nisus Writer Express, but this is the first MS Office product I’ve liked since Office 97, and having played with the beta I fully intend to buy it. With the new pricing model the price is even reasonable, $149 for Home edtion which includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote.
I believe that Office 2007 is not compliant with ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300.
Shame about that, I can’t use it then. A decent office suite SHOULD after all support interoperability standards if it is to be at all useable.
I believe that Office 2007 is not compliant with ISO standard ISO/IEC 26300.
Shame about that, I can’t use it then. A decent office suite SHOULD after all support interoperability standards if it is to be at all useable.
Well, considering that ISO standard was just approved less than a month ago, I had to look it up. Another ODF post. Can you give an honest reason why Microsoft should use the OASIS OpenDocument standard? Looking at market share, I don’t see any reason it would be important to them, and technologically speaking I’m not aware of any way that format is supperior to their own open XML format. I can only think of 3 or 4 office suites that do support this format, and with their combined market shares they honestly don’t make a dent in the market place for Microsoft to waste any time or money on the issue. I can almost guarentee that 0% if the people that don’t buy MS Office 2007 and choose one of the alternative suites will have that reason. I may be alone on this, but with Microsoft’s command of the Office market, that ISO standard means very little as far as interoperability standards go. Any review you read of any office suite is going to make comments not based on how well it can read/write ODF files, but how well it can import/export DOC files. At best, ODF will present a united front to possibly, some day, erode at the office base. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with the standard, I use Star Office 8 which defaults to it, but from a user functionality perspective all that really matters in relation to my document needs for interoperability is whether I can open up the same document at work without having to waste a lot of time reformatting it in MS Word format.
The fact is there will be an ODF add-in for Office 2007 so i wouldn’t worry about it.
The fact is there will be an ODF add-in for Office 2007 so i wouldn’t worry about it.
Good point, which I forgot to mention.
//Can you give an honest reason why Microsoft should use the OASIS OpenDocument standard?//
It matters because Microsoft has a very dominant market position, a virtual monopoly. Microsoft therefore feels it is in a position to formulate proprietary and/or trade secret formats and protocols for areas of interoperability. Microsoft wants to “own the formats”. If Microsoft can do that, then via prohibitive licensing and/or simple refusal to reveal the formats and/or protocols, Microsoft is in a position to be able to eliminate any and all alternative platform/competitior.
Further to just inventing its own proprietary and encumbered protocols and formats, we see Microsoft refusing to support formats that are open and unencumbered. There are multiple examples of this: HTML & CSS for web pages (remeber the pre-firefox era where a multitude of web sites were “IE only”), Ogg Vorbis, PNG (proper support for transparency), Microsoft-only programming languages (eg. visual basic, instead of perl, python, ruby, PHP, java etc), PDF (until recently), SVG, Postcript (eg: you can get a generic Postscript printer driver from Adobe that lets a Windows machine use a networked CUPs printer, but you can’t get such a driver from Microsoft), LDAP, CIFS (sp? I think thats it anyway), etc, etc. ODF is just the latest and most important in a litany of these formats/protocols that Microsoft refuses to support.
There is nothing wrong with these unencumbered, open standards other than that if Microsoft were to support them then Microsoft users wouldn’t have to use Microsoft formats – nor even would they have to use Microsoft products if they didn’t want to. There is no real reason why Office 2007 couldn’t support ODF (as well as Open XML) … except that there would then be no lock-in. That is bad … for Microsoft. It would be actually very good for everyone else on the planet.
If, on the other hand, Microsoft succeed, and only Microsoft formats and protocols are used, then that is very very bad for everyone else other than Microsoft. Microsoft would have no competition, and prices would soar. Everyone’s electronic data would be forever held ransom to Microsoft.
A failure of ODF (and other open formats) and a success of Microsoft’s vision of a Microsoft monoculture in computing is virtually a doomsday scenario. It has almost as much horror as a 1984 / Big Brother dystopia. Such a scenario is entirely against almost everyone’s best interest … everyone other than Microsoft.
So why would you possibly argue that it is a good thing that Microsoft refuses to support anything that is a true open standard for interoperability? It’s a no-brainer … it is better (for users) to have support for open standard formats and protocols than not have it. So either you are thoughroughly stupid, or you are a Microsoft shill (Team99?) or a Microsoftie. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, and putting you down as one of either of the last two and not the first.
Admittedly, all of this is not strictly a reason per se for Microsoft to support ODF. How about giving up on the incessant attempts to lock people in? How about giving value to their customers? How about good PR? Is that a reason?
//technologically speaking I’m not aware of any way that format is supperior to their own open XML format//
Open XML format specification, for example, mentions the keyword “ActiveX” about 30 times. (This means that Open XML may allow at best a limited functionality competing product to be written to run on Windows platforms only). “technologically speaking”, Open XML is just another very fancy cover for a further lock-in format. It is the exact opposite of an open standard for unencumbered interoperability. ODF is therefore immensely superior in terms of cross-platform interoperability. Open XML is a non-starter against ODF in terms of being an open standard for interoperability.
//I can only think of 3 or 4 office suites that do support this format//
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_applications_supporting_OpenDo…
Edited 2006-05-26 04:14
So why would you possibly argue that it is a good thing that Microsoft refuses to support anything that is a true open standard for interoperability? It’s a no-brainer … it is better (for users) to have support for open standard formats and protocols than not have it. So either you are thoughroughly stupid, or you are a Microsoft shill (Team99?) or a Microsoftie. I’m giving
Whoa whoa whoa. What’s with all the personal attacks there? First, I never said it was a good thing for Microsoft not to support it, I said from a business standpoint I can understand their reasoning. Why spend the money on a feature less than 5% of their users have any use for, especially when all the alternatives suppor their format natively? People seem to forget that Microsoft is a business, not a charity organization here to support open formats. They aren’t forcing you to buy or use MS Office. There have always been other choices. Hell, WordPerfect is still around and has a great product. They didn’t even lose their control over the word processing market because of proprietary anything, they lost it through poor business practices. Microsoft is a business. They aren’t trying to lock any one in with Office 2007, or they wouldn’t have an SDK available to allow you to make your own plugins. This is about getting their value for their money. If they were so insistent on driving up prices and such, then why are the packaging prices lower for personal use in Office 2007 ($149 is less than half what 2003 cost when it came out if I remember correctly). Second, obviously it would be better for users to have support for the open formats, but how many are actually looking for this? Why spend money on something virtually no one will use when by spending $0 someone else can add the functionality? And again, if there is demand for it, they will add it. For those that really want it, as someone pointed out, a plugin will come out. Understanding their point of view doesn’t make me stupid or a “Microsoftie”. I barely even use Windows anymore, I mostly use OS X, OpenSolaris, and SourceMage GNU/Linux. I like to play around and try new things, which is why I’ve been playing with Word 2007. I haven’t even had MS Office installed at home since XP came out, and I haven’t liked MS Office since 97. I primarily use StarOffice on Windows and Linux, and Nisus Writer Express on my iMac. Again, just because I understand Microsoft is a business does not mean I work for them. I don’t hear anyone screaming about them not supporting WordStar documents, and I noticed none of the alternative office suites offer support either. Yet, no ones attacking them for it, and a strangely large number of people still use it.
//They aren’t trying to lock any one in with Office 2007//
Pfft.
You were doing really well until you tried to slip that bit in.
If this contention of yours were really the case, and Microsoft had no interest in lock-in, then why is Office “Open” XML platform-dependant? Why is it that Open XML is written to depend on being run on a Windows platform?
But to your main point: did you know that there are many, many voices calling for Microsoft to suport ODF? It is after all an approved internaional standard. It does after all promise the ONLY viable way to have electronic data created in a vendor-neutral format. There are after all groups (other than Microsoft) who have written a plug-in convertor, so it would hardly cost anything at all for Microsoft to support it officially.
I understand that Microsoft are a buisness venture. Here are some buisness reasons for Microsoft to do the right thing: (1) offer value to customers, (2) engender customer trust, (3) give customers assurances that their data will still be viable to access and manipulate in 10+ years time even if Microsoft are not around, (4) Public relations. Just off the top of my head.
//And again, if there is demand for it, they will add it. //
There is demand for it, and they haven’t added it yet.
Edited 2006-05-26 05:32
“Whoa whoa whoa. What’s with all the personal attacks there?”
I perhaps got a bit carried away, but there was no personal attack, other than my deducing that you were a Microsoftie. If that is an attack, then so be it. I can think of no other reason why you would pretend that there is no demand for an open standard interoperability format (ODF) when that is clearly NOT the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODF_Alliance
http://www.odfalliance.org/
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/34035?a=rss&i=0
[Translation: “By no later than the 1st of September, all publications and other written documents on the homepage of the Ministry of Science will be available in the OpenDocument format (ODF).”]
There IS much demand for ODF support. Only Microsoft are against it.
Edited 2006-05-26 06:02
MS can get their act together, but usually only when they are really hard pressed to.
Well, i don’t think they were pressed to improve it in the case of Office… There are no real competitors to MS Office. I think it should be just a very nice surprise for all of us who thinks “Microsoft has no taste”.
The context sensitiveness was probably pushed by their MacBU. The OSX version of Office was special and different from the Windows version in that the context sensitive floating palletes were central in the way OfficeX was used, the toolbars being less important.
The pallete innovation probably evolved into the “Ribbon”.
I haven’t tried it but from the screenshots the new look and feel seems like Linux to me.
Definitely has a UIish look to it which is good for ease of use and nice colorful icons to click. I like that direction but also appreciate when you can go back to a more standard feel in some areas.
The new KDE is going for this feel too although it looks maybe too much with everything rounded.
Still with Linux, Blender everything seems obscure or too hidden. Blender doesn’t even have standard manipulation modes but focuses mainly on the ergonomic part. There are some idiosyncrasies like this with GIMP as well.
Linux has these high ideals but never seems to be able to implement all of them at once although does a better job in allot of other areas.
I still duel boot because my love for freedom software so I am making informed comparisons.
When you make a UI like this it has to have all the functionality of old, not just super easy ways to do things but an easier way to do old things.
I have though worked with allot of .Net modules and this seems taken directly from that or even Visual Studio.NET 2002 with the props menu and rollback windows. As a matter of fact that properties menu and some of the pure OO features were started with the Unreal Game Engine. So really if you want to know where all this is coming from it’s coming from the consumer entertainment side. I do entertainment stuff too so I’m proud of the fact hat entertainers can initiate very functional tech because of their instinct. No wonder MS has the XBOX team doing their media player.
Very shiny and functional although i can’t afford it.
Seems like linux in what aspect? I don’t get it.
It just looks Linuxy. The rounded lower bar. The glitzy KDEish colors, Icons. Focus on Ergonomics like Blender etc. But this is a product that’s been around a long time so allot of the funcitonality is there as well.
Id like to check it out but I use Open Office and I couln’t really afford it, plus some virus issues I’ve been hearing about with it.
I agree it looks like KDE on Linspire. Personally I am more looking forward to trying out the IBM Productivity Editors on the Notes Hannover client in fact I hope we never upgrade to 2007 at work and instead move to the OOo based editors in Hannover when we upgrade our Notes system in 2007.
As a matter of interest you look at the screenshoot of the Word interface in the article, you will notice that all the files being edited are about Linux – ones on SUSE 10.1 and on Fedora.
Edited 2006-05-25 16:05
The latest version of Novelle SLED and probably SUSE 10.1, not sure, supports Lotus Notes natively.
Do you have some sort of screenshots? I don’t think you’re trying to say they are ripping off Linux/KDE (at least I hope not), but I just don’t see the similarities (beyond some basic ones that just tends to happen sometimes).
“It just looks Linuxy. The rounded lower bar. The glitzy KDEish colors, Icons. Focus on Ergonomics like Blender etc.”
Yes but as KDE is a copy of the Windows GUI, it doesn’t matter.
KDE is at this point because, frankly, I don’t really think it’s that advanced yet like Gnome. Gnome seems to be a little more ahead. I only think that KDE does have more then Windows like widgets, multiple desktops, universal customization. So it wins there, although Windows has better properties menus which are extremely important to me as I need that freedom, but with KDE 4 we are going pretty deep into ergonomic territory in January.
Also this new MSOffice look is stolen from Blender. Flat out. 🙂
The rounded lower bar I meant for Vista’s lower taskbar.
It remains to be seen if users will like it or not. I find the ribbon useless, it takes too much screen real estate. And most people really don’t use all that functionality. And the clutter is there, in your eyes. It’s confusing to me.
If you think the ribbon is too tall, you can always collapse it by clicking the tab a second time. The collapsed ribbon takes up less space than the old Command Bar UI. You can also customize the icons in the space next to the Office button to be any command from the ribbon.
Also if I can’t afford it I will hunt for a free express verion and download it to try. I don’t I want to put inthe beta.