Office 12 is all about taking it to a whole new level in terms of interaction with the core Office applications and new ways of managing Office documents. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook Composer 12 all feature an innovative “new” user interface. This new user interface promises to deliver on that dream of making access to the tools you use the most in your Office applications not just easier, but with more relevance to the entire user experience and task at hand, writes ActiveWin.
MS Office 12 Beta 1 Preview
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What does this have to do with Apple?
“What does this have to do with Apple?”
Nothing at all. The story is about MS Office 12….as it’s title suggests. No where is Apple mentioned….
Today, more and more information is handled electronically. Yet people are very focused on making applications for the purpose of storing it on paper.
I really don’t understand it.
Office work should be about the dynamics within the workgroup, and how to refine and share and work with information, not about selecting nice fonts and print document on a printer to put in a binder on a shelf.
The needs of most people, are allready more than filled with current versions of MS-Office, or even OpenOffice.
I can’t see that many people will bother learning a new interface, for doing the things they allready do today,
and in many cases probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
By the way, Microsoft and their hired researchers usually point out how much training is needed to switch from current MS-Office to OpenOffice, two applications that are extremely similar, how expensive will it then not be to switch to something completely different like this new MS-Office 12
A couple of months ago, I read an interview with some MS Office developer, he clamed that it took him a few months to feel comfortable with and like the new interface, how long time will it take for the average office worker. Add to that a new file format, that likely will make it harder to communicate with people who havn’t upgraded yet.
To turn this into a success, Microsoft will probably have to give it away for free. That way, they could at least sell support contracts.
>Office work should be about the dynamics within the workgroup, and how to refine and share and work with information, not about selecting nice fonts and print document on a printer to put in a binder on a shelf.
There you go, shouldin’ on the application.
You seem disconnected from the 8.5X11 world in which business people live, and the need to drive sales through evolutionary spoon-feeding of the user, not revolutionary emancipation.
<removes dupe>
Edited 2006-01-11 22:30
Office work should be about the dynamics within the workgroup, and how to refine and share and work with information, not about selecting nice fonts and print document on a printer to put in a binder on a shelf.
They are and have been for a long time now. The collaboration features in MSOffice are unmatched. Why do people act like Microsoft doesn’t have developers working on different aspects of products? They don’t just concentrate on ONE thing.
A couple of months ago, I read an interview with some MS Office developer, he clamed that it took him a few months to feel comfortable with and like the new interface, how long time will it take for the average office worker.
Where did you hear this? A source would be nice. There have been interviews with a lot of people at MS involved with Office, and all I have been have said they got used to the interface very quickly and it was more intuitive and efficient. They also said focus groups were done and people got used to the interface in a matter of minutes/hours.
They are and have been for a long time now. The collaboration features in MSOffice are unmatched.
Yes, they develop collaboration features, the problem is that they do so on a far too technical level.
In business we talk about employees, customers, suppliers, projects, sales letters,… In their softare, Microsoft talks about C:, Servers, Programs, Networks,…
What’s needed are simple to use tools to map computer related terms to business related terms that sysadmins can use to build desktops that actually assists the business process. Folders named “My Documents” is not nearly enough.
… Have you even used the latest version of Office?
“The release of Office 2000 in 1999 introduced tighter integration with the Web, giving users the ability to flawlessly save documents in HTML format…”
I think the author is overstating Office’s capabilities here. It’s hardly “flawless”. I think the author means that Office makes it easy to click Save As Web Page. The results, in my experience vary greatly, and don’t even get me started on the actual HTML code it produces – yuk! I like how Dreamweaver comes with a tool specifically designed to remove all the garbage laden in a Word HTML page.
Actually you are under the same misconception I was. There are two ways to save to HTML in Office. The way that you explained creates a horrible HTML document. There is anoter “Save as…” that does a much better job of just creating a HTML+CSS document.
There’s one method of saving as HTML that adds a bunch of proprietary tags and CSS properties — this is so that when you open the same document in Word again, it looks identical to the .DOC file, down to the formatting, style names, borders, etc.
The second method saves a more or less standard HTML + CSS document.
I hope there is a tool specifically designed to remove all the garbage in an HTML page created by dreamweaver. Not that Word is better, because it most certainly is not. I think they all produce crap.
I hope there is a tool specifically designed to remove all the garbage in an HTML page created by dreamweaver. Not that Word is better, because it most certainly is not. I think they all produce crap.
What do you expect? These applications need to store a certain amount of cruft in order to round-trip documents more than once. There is no free lunch.
My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
http://www.activewin.com/reviews/previews/office12/Detailed%20S…
I was sort of looking forward to the new tabbed functionality groups in Office 12, but what i’ve seen seems to me a hodgepodge of interface ideas and themes, with little heed taken for usage and complexity issues.
I don’t know what they are doing with Outlook. First they said they weren’t using the new ribbon interface, and now it’s like they’re changing random stuff.
The rest of Office is quite nice though, I think.
Well I am not a cheerleader of Microsoft Office products, nor an OSS zealot. But as long Microsoft do not produce it’s software to a system with *nix flavour(except MacOS X, that is supported) I stick with openoffice.
The problem isn’t that Microsoft Word is a bad product, it’s good. But it doesn’t support the platform I uses.
And it’s not so cheap for me, and probarly not for other users also.
Btw I am looking forward to what koffice team will produce.
I see that Office 12 do have some advantages in ther ui – and some of those have an association of what kde4 plasma can bring joy too also.
Koffice, it might be worth an eyeball in the future.
It says it’ll work with Vista and XP, but no mention of Windows 2000, I wonder if that means anything.
Looking at some of the Screen pics makes my brain explode, too much information!
When I really get deep into it, and watch the ui over and over again – I see of course that there is some good ideas. But this could be a big mistake just like Microsoft Bob.
Edited 2006-01-12 14:54
I look forward to the changes in the gui. I don’t know if the whole thing with tabs and “ribbons” is a good idea or not, but anything to break out of the rut we’ve been in for at least 10 years is welcome in my eyes. Of course it will be years before I get to use it, we are just now transitioning to Office 03 from a mixed 97/2000 environment.