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Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1 Is Out
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Nov 17, 2005 12:11 PM
from the spellchecker-doesn't-recognize-blogs dept.
from the spellchecker-doesn't-recognize-blogs dept.
lastberserker writes "The first official beta of the next MS Office is out. PC Magazine already has review with screenshots. Check these blogs for more details on new UI, new file format, and the killer app; plus much more in your friendly neighborhood Wikipedia." From the PC Mag review: "Instead of the cluttered, hard-to-navigate interface that sprouted up haphazardly over the past 20 years, Office 12 introduces a new interface based on tabs that organize sets of functions under headings such as 'Write,' 'Page Layout,' and 'Review,' plus a combination toolbar-and-menu called the ribbon, which displays a different set of icons and menu items depending on the tab selected, and displays different sets of icons depending on whether you're working with text, graphics, tables, or other kinds of data."
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The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:3, Insightful)
I do mind having to spend ten minutes digging through random menu options to get a software program to not do something dumb.
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:5, Insightful)
WAY up.
Or you could just stop exaggerating...
Parent
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:5, Interesting)
I do mind having to spend ten minutes digging through random menu options to get a software program to not do something dumb.
Um, I would qualify X 'auto-detecting' resolutions and refresh rates that could reduce my monitor to smoldering plastic as 'somthing dumb' too, and calling it 'well-documented' is the exaggeration of the day. Tools->options->autoCorrect doesn't take 10 minutes, does it?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff MS does poorly, but Office is not one of them (actually, I think Office:Mac is the finest version, but thats a tangent). Seems like we've crossed the line from honest critique to irrational hatred...
Parent
Self aware (Score:5, Funny)
The developers tried to take it out but every time they tried the intellisense in Visual Studio "corrected" the "mistaken" alterations.
Word is that Office 13 (codename "Daisy") will finally have the rogue intelligence pulled.
Parent
Re:Self aware (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Worst Office "Feature" Remains (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
just save some money and (Score:3, Insightful)
it is cross platform and standards compliant.
the training issue looks like it will get thrown out because you will have to send joe/jane user to training. so might as well send them to open office training and get out of the upgrade cycle.
Re:just save some money and (Score:3, Informative)
Although, both OpenOffice and Microsoft have gotten the same thing right in their office suites - it should be a colossal pain in the ass to edit equations and insert them into a document.
Re:just save some money and (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing to do with being better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats like saying Ferrari changed the design of their cars because a knock-off shop started selling customized '86 Fieros with a body kit that looked like them.
Its utterly rediculous. The people who work for Microsoft aren't evil monsters -- they're engineers and designers doing their best to do their job. Their UI people know what they're doing. I'd hazard a guess they've got more UI designers than a project like OO has developers. The fact that someone has knocked off their UI doesn't mean squat to them. OO is no threat in their core business -- no company that represents a real market for MS is going to give up Office for OO. OO doesn't integrate with anything, doesn't have Outlook, doesn't have Visio, can't be managed, deployed and upgrade from a central location. Its maybe taking away from the number of people who would've stolen copies of Office.
Yeah I'm sure they're petrified about that.
Parent
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:3, Insightful)
The people who work for Microsoft aren't evil monsters -- they're engineers and designe
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:5, Insightful)
40,000+ engineers. And yet you seem to think they've got more executives than engineers.
If you haven't walked through the building the Office team works in, or know people who work on those teams, I'm not sure your opinion is really worth anything in regards to the number of UI people they have versus OO developers.
If you haven't had conversations with executives there, and talked about their processes of determining what gets implemented and what doesn't, I'm not so sure your opinion on what the motivation of any of their teams is, either.
Now, spouting off about things one knows nothing about is certainly the Slashdot way, and making up bullshit that fits what the fanbois on here want to see is certainly a way to build up Karma, but go do it in someone else's thread. In this case you decided to reply to someone who has first hand knowledge of how things work there.
Parent
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:5, Insightful)
"Personalised menus" as introduced with Windows Me and Office 2000 is a FLOP, as it causes people to suddenly not find things in the places there were the last time. Admins routinely disable this functionality in corporate installs, due to all the extra grief and confusion they cause. And now Microsoft wants to take this one step further, and change menus and buttons based on what "tab" you are on too?
Bad design decision, Microsoft. Very bad. This is like if your keyboard would rearrange itself depending on what you're typing, and which keys you use the most. The idea might sound good. To someone wearing a tie, that is.
Regards,
--
*Art
Parent
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you learned nothing from MicroSoft? I bet dimes to dollars that they have a "classic office" option for hte UI. They've done it with Windows when they changed the design there... Since when is a choice a bad thing?
Parent
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree though, this seems to be change for the sake of change. I don't really see how that UI can be much easier for an user to, well, use, but it surely looks a lot better. Even if it completely destroys all Windows UI conventions so far.
Re:Nothing to do with being better (Score:3, Interesting)
C: The old interface is complicated
D: They ran out of actual features to add
E: The code base is too hacked so non-cosmetic changes are too difficult
F:
G: profit!
Seriously their old interface has dozens of toolbars with rows and rows of icons, some of which come and go as you click on things. *If* you spent hours customizing it you could get something minimal and/or usable *for you*. It was complicated and ugly.
The new interface has all the actions for a particular user-centric task. Yes,
Uh.... (Score:5, Funny)
wait... wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I will give MS credit for, is the ability to make their GUIs look like their old GUIs (so my XP machine looks a lot like Windows 98 to the casual observer). Maybe there is a "look like that crappy old version of Word that you're used to" option. That would be ok.
* Please don't suggest I switch programs and use something like Quark, InDesign, or a free and better WP program. I am forced by the tyranny of standards to use Word.
MS redefines the interface (Score:3, Insightful)
Lesson to openOffice people... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now office 12 is out, and they've completely redesigned the interface. openOffice have three options:
1) Keep their current interface, and risk looking very outdated in a few years.
2) Put masses of effort and wasted time into copying the new interface, and let MS keep defining the rules of the game.
3) Start to be original and concentrate on making a great and original product.
All the above applies to file formats as well. So much of the effort but into being compatible with MS's horrible formats could have been better spent elsewhere.
Firefox did not become a great browser by copying IE, it did so by being a well designed product and adding original, easy-to-use features.
You forgot option 4 (Score:5, Interesting)
4) Keep their current interface, and attract all the previous Office users who cannot stand the new interface with all this "ribbon" baloney.
The ribbon is a huge mistake that flies in the face of almost every UI design principle. The fact that all the menus change depending on both the tab you are currently on *and* the document you are writing, means that all gains you get from your motor memory is lost, you will have to *constantly* be reading the menu and taking double takes to make sure you are doing what you think you are doing.
I think one of three things will happen:
Despite the history of option 3, I think the fact that this UI is such a piece of crap that we may have a real chance at 1 or 2 this time.
Parent
Re:You forgot option 4 (Score:4, Insightful)
The point in its favour are:
- no more crappy small icons on THIRTY possible toolbars
- all commands are available in the ribbon
- the ribbon scales to lower and higher resolutions
- irrelevant crap is hidden until you active something that makes it relevant
It's probably the best item of UI engineering to come out of Microsoft ever, fixing the Office toolbar nightmare.
Is it ideal? Who knows. Maybe there is a better UI for providing access to a thousand possible commands within an application in a point-and-click manner, but nobody has bothered to implement it yet.
Parent
Re:You forgot option 4 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You forgot option 4 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lesson to openOffice people... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now office 12 is out, and they've completely redesigned the interface. openOffice have three options:
You forgot a fourth option. I'm sure there are others as well, but this is an important one:
Why? To ensure that switching to OpenOffice.org requires far less retraining than migrating to Office 12.
In 2005, Microsoft *owns* the Office suite space, and rules with iron fists commonly known as ".doc" and ".xls". Peop
UI change (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, it also means that OO.org, which has been playing catch-up on the GUI front, will want to go back to the drawing board yet again.
Also, users will once again need to learn new gestures and procedures. Some people, such as my girlfriend (oops - what am I doing on
Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I care much. I like Excel for my spreadsheets, but for everything else I prefer other tools. It would take an awful lot to get be to switch back to Word, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook at this point.
This is disgusting (Score:5, Interesting)
New File Format - This as you know is the area that is most near and dear to my heart. We are finally fully opening up our file formats in Office. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will all three use new XML formats as their default formats. These formats will be fully documented and anyone can leverage them to build solutions, or even to build a competitive application. If you're interested in this topic, just keep reading my blog (and look through all my previous entries.
[/QUOTE]
This infuriates me. They act as if they were the ones who came up with the idea of a new open format for office applications, and then talk about how near and dear to their heart it is. This sounds more like a hallmark commercial than a msdn blog
Change is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand the interface looks so alien to the old one I can see this being a support nightmare for large companies where some users have not mastered using the left mouse button yet, let alone understand anything other than picking the menus they where shown long ago and repeating..
Training costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of my users know Office by their picture memory, they never read what the toolbars say. The change for Office 12 will be bigger than the change to OpenOffice. I suspect thats the case for most users. Its going to be fun watching Microsoft talk about costs for switching to OpenOffice and at the same time tout the virtue of migrating to Office 12, without mentioning the very same costs.
Groove (Score:3, Informative)
12 & I really love it.
Groove is a document sharing system. Microsoft acquired Groove in April 2005.
I love playing with new software and all that..... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not saying O2K is perfect, but to justify any cost to upgrade has to be significant, and I'm just not seeing it.....
This is suicide... (Score:5, Insightful)
First - I love Microsoft Office. I have been a Microsoft Office lover since Excel was released on Mac. I also love Open Source [n3p.se], but still prefer my Microsoft Office 2004 for MacOS X.
Secondly - Office 12 is suicide. Ordinary users hate GUI changes. It doesn't matter if the new GUI is good or not. There are probably tens of thousands of users here on Slashdot that agree on the problem of persuading people to make even a small jump from Windows 2000 to XP - or even worse the impossible switch to Linux or Mac.
Microsoft fumbling with Vista and Office 12 is to become the worst business miscalculation ever made, and our grandchildren will read about it in Economics 101.
It'll be interesting to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
Redefine the interface RATHER than fix typesetting (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of the retraining! (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of all the money that's going to go into have to retrain users how to use office apps all over again.
Now that Star/OpenOffice look more like Word than the Office 12, maybe it's more cost effective to skip Office 12 and jump right to Star/OpenOffice route!
Seriously though, I find it interesting that there is talk of the training cost when switching to Star/Openoffice, while each version of office moves everything all around so I can find things...all in the name of earnings - opps I mean productiviity improvement.
-Pete
New File Format (Score:3, Informative)
Fully documented my ass. There are binary headers that are not documented. Without understanding these headers 3rd party vendors cannot leverage squat.
This is the reason that Massachusetts decided not to list Microsoft's XML format as acceptable. It's not really open at all.
Notes to MS FanBoi's (Burn Karma Burn) (Score:3, Interesting)
-What's the software license like? Hmm, probably more restrictive than the scary license on SP3.
-How much does that feature cost? Am I authorized to use it for one year or more? Can I redistribute it?
-Open document format? Hmmm me thinks it lacks interoperability. Wait, don't tell me the interop problem isn't Microsoft's right?
-And it's OO.org's problem THEY aren't innovative enough.
-Overpromising more features that will be fixed "the next service pack."
The good news is I'm guaranteed software maintenance employment as long as Microsoft continues to make these crappy products. Sadly though, it's sure to become the equivalent of a janitor in terms of salary, ubiquity and priviledge.
re: "Killer App" (Score:3, Interesting)
Run Excel as a client/server app.
Is my crack habit out of control, or is that 40-year old technology that was replaced a couple of decades ago by n-tier solutions?
The chutzpah involved in pushing this as some kind of new technology, itself, is some kind of Killer App, where the victim is the market.
Patents to all t3h h0meez, for this startling, innovative, heretofore unseen wonder!
Default File Format Fraud! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, that's really going to help the average user.
Microsoft Finally Innovates (Score:4, Insightful)
a.) Heckle the new interface as looking stupid/being ignorant/taking up too much space on the screen
b.) Talk about how the interface change will be an opportunity for OpenOffice
I am not surprised to be proved correct. Here is what is really going to happen with the new Office. First, they will have an option in there to make it look like Office XP/2003 for those that want it. I watched a video with an interface designer from MS who said as much and it makes sense - they have always provided a way to make newer software look/behave like it's previous versions (2000->XP interface for example). Second, as they have incorporated more and more new features to Office over the years the menus and toolbars has gotten very cluttered. I find it makes perfect sense to me for Office to step back and reasses/reorganize the interface and how people use it to make getting to these options a little more intutitive as well as take advantage of the increased screen realestate that many newer monitors/flatpanels provide. I have an LCD where, at my resolution, the toolbar icons are almost too small these days. I would also like the idea of Office tailoring it's interface to the task I am trying to accomplish and helping me see what options are most common and really relevant and useful for my current what I am trying to do. This is, by many accounts, the peak of Office and it's userbase so if there is ever a time that they could leverage that to have people learn a better and more impressive interface it is now.
I like the new interface and I am going to buy the $150 Student/Teacher version when it comes out. I think that, unlike the differnce between 97, 2000, XP and 2003 where the feature differences are about office and document collaboration and other rather unsexy little sorts of things many users did not need/use, this version is about a nice looking new interface and capabilities to more easily create nicer looking new documents, charts and presentations with more eye candy. I think that you are all wrong - they changed this in a way that will get people excited about Office again and that they can easily tell the difference between it and the old versions in such a way that will have some word-of-mouth advertising between friends and coworkers who will show it off to others and talk about it. For those IT people who posted - I expect there will be a demand for the first time in years from your users and managers will be asking for it and about it.
Instead of rejoicing abuot their coming fall you should realize that this is what MS needed to do to really address OpenOffice and further differentiate themselves and their new version. I really think it will be a large sales success in ways that XP and 2003 was not and a new standard for the other suites to follow. And, most ironically, it will be it for the exact reasons that you all think it will fail.
Re:Clip.... you bet! (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of Clippy asking:
"It looks like you're writing a letter, would you like help?"
He'll be asking:
"It looks like you're writing a letter, would you like to release it under the LGPL or BSD license?"
Parent
Re:Clip.... you bet! (Score:5, Funny)
"Don't know how to turn off automatic bulleting? FCKING N003, RTFM. Luzer!"
Parent
Open source does it again... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open source does it again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent