Under the Hood of Office 12

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has posted an FAQ on Office 12, plus a quick preview of Office 12 pre-Beta 1. From the review: Microsoft Office 12.0 pre-Beta 1 drastically revamps the interface layouts of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. More than a year before the final product will hit the shelves, a pre-beta version of Microsoft Office 12.0 is revealing radical interface changes and user paradigm shifts that recall the overly ambitious Microsoft Office 97 update of the past."

Competition driving innovation

[TripMaster Monkey]

...or the appearance of innovation, anyway.

Interesting tightrope Microsoft is being forced to walk here...if they don't change things enough, they still have OpenOffice and StarOffice nipping at their heels, but if they change too much, they risk alienating their established user base.

The real question is: Just how much can you improve an office suite, before it's 'good enough'? Many Office users (my employers included) feel Office 2003 is just fine, and have no plans whatsoever for Office 12. Other offices I've seen have standardized on Offive XP, or even Office 2000, and steadfastly refuse to upgrade. When these holdouts finally do upgrade, it's only because they are having issues with using documents from other facilities that are in the new format (non-backward-compatible by design...thank you so much, Bill), and when they do, they commonly skip at least one release.

The bottom line is that the strategy of staying out ahead of competitors like OpenOffice and StarOffice is becoming increasing untenable as the office suite becomes more and more complex and capable, and closer and closer to the ideal of 'good enough' for the average user.

It's new, it's pretty...

[Anonymous Coward]

and everyone will complain.

UI changes..?

[Chicane-UK]

Aren't 'heavy revamps' of the front end what users of Microsoft products have been complaining about for god knows how long? Microsoft get it to a stage where everyone is used to it then completely redo it!

Nothing beats Office 97

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing will ever top Office 97 for what it brought the table when it came out. They made it too good - several versions later and most people probably can't tell the difference, except for Outlook, which has changed more than the other apps in the suite. Is it possible that we don't need new versions of Office coming out every couple years anymore?

This will call for extra training

[bogaboga]

The radical change that M$ is introducing in Office 12 will call for training. I vividly remember what effect Office 95 had on our users.

The trouble here is that more of technology pundits will not see this requirement as an additional cost burden at all! So when it comes to comparing Office 12 to StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, assumptions will be made that those using M$ products already have the training.

StarOffice/OpenOffice.org programmers could capitalize on this, save companies the trouble or burden of training. This is not to mention licensing costs not forgetting closed and changing formats.

Re:UI changes..?

[TheRaven64]

Sounds like good news. If you have a choice between re-training your work force to learn MS Office 12 or re-training them to use OpenOffice 2.0, what are you more likely to do? Of course, this assumes that OpenOffice supports all of the features that you need.

Re:Competition driving innovation

[jav1231]

I think you're right. Moreover, now is a good time for users to consider OOo because there is going to be these interface changes to Office 12. As long as you're learning something new it might as well be something that isn't costing you an arm and a leg, no? Add to that the fact that it's open and there's a huge opportunity for OOo.

Re:Where is office 11 ?

[TheRaven64]

Task oriented design

There is a section in almost any HCI book you pick up explaining why Task Oriented Interface are a bad idea outside bespoke software for a particular workflow, and yet MS keeps putting them into general purpose tools and marketing them as a feature. Sometimes I wonder if their customers just count the number of ticks in boxes when evaluating their products, without reading the words next to the ticks.

Re:Competition driving innovation

[gcw1]

The organization I work for still uses Office 97, and I don't think we will be upgrading to any newer versions due to cost of licencing. Office 12 looks like a nice product, but personally and professionally I find that OpenOffice is a better fit, and it's fully compatible with MS Office. That said I'm still confident that MS will do quite well with their new product.

Past good enough for most users.

[LWATCDR]

Office really is way past good enough for most users. My office uses Office 2000 and really doesn't see a big need to jump to Office XP or 2003. Office 12? Big harry deal. I wonder if Microsoft will have to start droping the price.

What I really wonder is why no big PC companies like Dell, IBM, or Gateway are including OpenOffice with their PCs?
Seems like a brain dead way to give your customers a free office suit. I guess the answer is they are all hoping to sell you MS Office.
Maybe Gateway/Emachine should think about it.

Where is the innovation?

[jkrise]

The chief reason why Office is no longer attractive to enterprises is bcos of it's closed formats. It's not possible to manipulate an Office document without using the application, and that's pricey, bloated and proprietary - besides being locked down to the platform.

Companies around me have stuck with Office 97 for docs and use the Mozilla range for mail and internet. IE and OE are too buggy and bloated - and more easily replaced than Office. In a year's time, Open Office 2 should stabilise and remove the need for the OS itself.

Re:Competition driving innovation

[Zemplar]

"The real question is: Just how much can you improve an office suite, before it's 'good enough'? Many Office users (my employers included) feel Office 2003 is just fine"

I can tell you that there is great room to improve Excel, good as it is. Many statistical functions in Excel need work in addition to addressing the poor memory limits - and I don't mean a marginal bump as is common with most Excel upgrades. Someday I'd also like to be able to address more than 65,536 rows and 256 columns.

Threading in Excel is poor! Admittedly this is not an issue for your average user.

So basically Microsoft will only marginally update Office for power users needing an extra speed or function fix and totally rework the GUI for the newbies to gawk at. Unfortunately this is a good business move if your business is to simply make as much money as possible from upgrades.

Desktop Real Estate loss

[Fox_1]

While the more visual and tabbed layout may reduce mouse clicks, it eats up more screen real estate than Office 2003 does. Visually, Office 12.0 will look dramatically different, though just marginally more attractive than its predecessor. Icons and charts appear less flat, but our jaws didn't drop at first sight.
I'm one of those guys with dual 19 inch moniters running at greater then 1280 by 720 resolution and I still don't have enough desktop area. It's a shame they are adding more onscreen buttons/tabs/menus to the interface, making the word processor more mouse dependant. They are also screwing with the shortcuts, messing up the Alt+ shortcuts. It is their software though, not mine, so they can do whatever they want, and I'll keep on with Open Office.

Re:Where is office 11 ?

[coolGuyZak]

Paraphrasing/compiling the parent:

New feature -> Translated as:

1. Tabbed browsing -> Ripoff off Firefox
2. Missing menus -> Bye bye familiarity
3. Clippy replaced with a Ghost -> Transparency showoffs
4. Shortcuts change for no reason -> Alt keys are teh suck
5. Task oriented design -> All users are idiots

And now appraoched in turn:

1. A couple things about this one:
   • Firefox was not the first application to feature tabbed browsing.
   • User interfaces are "ripped off" all the time. When someone comes out with a good idea, others copy it. This is a good thing, as it allows evolutionary development. Say the first person to come out with the button had patented (and enforced) it. We'd all be screwed.
2. Sometimes familarity has to be sacrificed for the sake of advancement. This will irritate more than a few users though.
3. Mostly, yeh. But I can see if having its uses. Personally, I'd rather have smart tags similar to the ones in VS2005. They're hot.
4. True, but when I lose mouse support, it would be nice if my computer is still usable :)
5. Even if all users are idiots, that doesn't mean that they are second-class computer citizens. As a matter of fact, since "All users are idiots" it would make sense to tailor the interface to them.
   A mental exercise: Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that "not all users are idiots". Changing from a "functionality based" system to a "task based" system still has benefits:
   • Users can learn the interface faster, as it makes more sense to them.
   • Users can access the interface faster, because all of the tools they need for a particular task are grouped together.
   • The interface has the potential to becomes less cluttered, as only tools pertinent to your task are displayed.

Before anyone tries to "call me out", I am not a MS shill or apologist. (May be a KDE apologist, though).

Re:Competition driving innovation

[at_slashdot]

Oh, but it's really easy to make people upgrade. You break the files compatibility just a tiny bit, nobody will notice, except for the companies that want EVERYTHING to work (pretty much everybody) so they will have to upgrade since they cannot have a mix of versions. Bill you are a genious! We need the latest Word because of its features -- bullshit! We need it to be compatible with other people's Word. That's why Massachussetts did a smart thing by switching to an open format.

Same-named files

[Grincho]

Not to mention that you can't open two files of the same name, at least in the Mac version. They should be ashamed.

Office 97 is still good enough for me...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I still install Office 97 on every Windows computer I own. There are no license key or registration "phone home" issues to deal with and it's a pretty lean word processor compared to the others out there today. Honestly, I can't tell you what features have been added to Office in the last 8 years that would be of any use to me.

Gone is the Application Style Guide?

[dpbsmith]

"Gone are the familiar File, Edit, View and other drop-down menus."

Well, has the Windows Application Style Guide changed? Or is Microsoft giving up any pretense at Windows applications having a consistent UI?

Re:Competition driving innovation

[drsquare]

You never know, this new MS Office interface might be a BETTER interface, rather than the poor OO interface. It's not the fact that it's different, it's whether it's good or bad.

Re:Screenshots

[ilyaaohell]

Please explain to me how having the most useful features GIVEN to you on the top of the screen for the specific task you're doing is LESS intuitive than a system of pull-down menus and submenus where you go looking for (and often don't find) the feature you need.

Just because you memorized where things can be located within the menus does not mean that this is more intuitive than just being shown the possible tasks in a graphically organized, dynamic manner.

And incase nobody has seen this yet, here is video of the Office 12 GUI in action. [msdn.com] I don't know about you, but this kind of a dynamic graphical approach seems to me to be FAR more user-friendly than a system of menu memorizations needed for previous Office verions.

Re:Past good enough for most users.

[LWATCDR]

Your probably right. But... Wait. They could offer them them support for a fee. They might actually make money then. It would be smart to make a new company called OpenOffice Support or some such critter so people wouldn't get mad at Gateway for charging. It could actually turn into a profit center.

I keep forgetting that people actually call for support for things like word.

Re:Competition driving innovation

[Idaho]

Many statistical functions in Excel need work in addition to addressing the poor memory limits - and I don't mean a marginal bump as is common with most Excel upgrades. Someday I'd also like to be able to address more than 65,536 rows and 256 columns.


Or maybe you should try to use the right tool for the right job. That much data in one spreadsheet? Say hello to mister Relational Database! Statistical functions? Enter SPSS or similar programs that are explicitly intended to handle such stuff.

Threading in Excel is poor!

Threading in Excel? You do realize that Excel is not a programming language or Integrated Development Environment, but in essence a Spreadsheet program, right?

(Okay, I admit that you can do so many things in Excel that it's easy to mistake it for a lot of things that it's not really intended or suitable to do....but you ignore this at your own peril...)

Just my $0.02 ofcourse so don't feel offended, but sometimes I can't help wondering why people want to use Microsoft Office to do basically *anything* that a computer can be programmed to do, even when there are much better tools available for a particular job.

Re:Screenshots

[eyegone]

It looks like this is going to be almost unusable on anything less that a 1280x1024 screen. As a laptop user, I dread this.

Re:Screenshots

[Rude Turnip]

Intuition be damned...no computer interface is intuitive, period. If you use Office every day, you just naturally end up remembering where everything is and what the most useful keyboard commands are. Once that happens, you usually don't want some fluff interface slowing you down.

One major problem I run into in helping others with Office is that it hides less-used features in the menus...which means you never learn about all the other features. I turn off menu hiding wherever I encounter it.

Re:Competition driving innovation

[tsa]

If it takes you more than five minutes to find out how to do something simple, it's not worth trying anymore. I can imagine he wiped it off after five minutes. OOo has come a long way but is not nearly as 'good' as MS Office, I'm ashamed to admit.

Re:Past good enough for most users.

[LWATCDR]

You just said it. "It doesn't make them any money". A per call support center could make them money for Open Office could make them money.
That is one of the things that I do not like about windows machines. Out of the box they are useless. I can not surf the net safely, I can not do a simple spreadsheet, I can not write a program until I put a lot of other programs on my system.
Why the heck doesn't Windows come with at least Perl of even Basic? That is one thing I think most Linux distros do out of the box. Provides a useful computer with the software on the install disks.

Re:Office 97 is still good enough for me...

[KillShill]

that and the fact that office97 programs start up faster than notepad. on a modern computer, it's so fast that it opens before you finish clicking the second time on the icon. and just about every function most people want is in 97. and you can pick up a copy on ebay very cheap http://search.ebay.com/office-97 [ebay.com] .

though, unless you absolutely need it, it's best to stay away from office altogether. it'll only add to your problems. even if OO and other FOSS programs aren't as good, they won't change the file formats on you or lock you in. that point alone is worth never considering MSO.

good business and ethics/morality clearly are mutually exclusive.

Re:Competition driving innovation

[fbg111]

Well, now that you've somehow achieved a +5 Informative rating without actually being informative (opinion w/ no fact or details), would you mind elaborating a bit on what shortcomings you found? I'm not being critical (except maybe of the mods), just curious.