If you are one of the 400-million users of Microsoft Office, prepare to feel confused, lost and possibly abandoned. The user interface in next year’s version, Office System 2007, has been completely changed, and there is no going back. The file formats have changed as well, though the old ones are still supported. All round, it’s probably the most dramatic upheaval ever inflicted on a major suite of applications.
Partly to minimise the shock, Microsoft is letting millions of users try it, for free. Anyone can download the beta 2 test version from Microsoft’s website. UK users can get it on a computer magazine cover disc, such as PC Pro or Personal Computer World. Their CDs provide for easy installation and activation, and the beta suite will work until the end of January next year. (Users must also provide a working e-mail address for registration purposes.) It carries the usual risks of beta software, but it will run alongside an existing version of Office, except for Outlook, which it replaces.
The new user interface is based on a ribbon, which replaces all the menus and task panes in previous versions of office. Jensen Harris, who leads the Microsoft Office ”user experience” team, says the main advantage of the ribbon is that it puts all the commands in one place: ”It’s either there or not there: there’s nowhere else to look.” Even if you hate the blue (for Windows XP) or grey (for Vista) look of the new UI, you have to concede that point.
Easy to learn
Old hands may be distressed by Microsoft making most of their hard-earned knowledge obsolete, but it’s dramatically easier to learn the new stuff. In fact, most people could find the new UI instantly more comfortable than the old one, because it’s based on tabbed browsing. We have all learned how to do that on the web.
At the Microsoft’s Office reviewers’ workshop I attended in New York, Harris said the problem was that Office applications now had so many functions that the menu system had become confusing and people could no longer find the features they needed. The first Word for Windows had only one toolbar, he said, but Word 97 had 18 and by Word 2002 (launched in 2001) it was up to 30. At that point, Microsoft started putting new functions on task panes, and by Word 2003, there were 19 of those. Clearly it had to stop.
Harris’s team was given the freedom to rethink the whole interface. They came up with a system of tabs and ribbons as the best compromise between the old and the new. The old commands are there, and are familiar once you find them. Also, if you have lots of keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-S etc) in ”motor memory”, most of those still work, too. Microsoft reckons users can start being productive in about 10 minutes, which is a necessary target because most won’t get adequate (if any) training.
Either way, the ribbon-based system is easier to handle, partly because you can’t usually see menu items, icons or toolbars for things you can’t do. For example, in Word, you can’t see any page layout controls until you click the Page Layout tab and reveal its ribbon. You can’t see any picture-related commands if you don’t have a picture in your document. And if you don’t want to see the ribbon at all, that’s easily done: just double-click the open tab and the whole thing vanishes.
In this mode, Word takes up little more screen space than Notepad, but with powerful context-based spell checking and a continuously updated visible word count. Journalists in particular will like this. (I’m using it now, with Web Layout set.) There’s also the somewhat curious phenomena of mini-toolbars that fade in and out, like the Cheshire cat. Suppose you use the mouse to highlight a group of words in Word. Just above and to the right, a tiny toolbar appears in faint outline. As you move the mouse pointer towards it, it solidifies and you can select, for example, a different typeface or make the text bold or italic, and so on, without going up to the ribbon. If you move the pointer away, the mini-toolbar fades then disappears completely. It encapsulates the whole UI theme of making things visible when you want them and invisible when you don’t.
Not all the Office programs have the new UI. It’s in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, and in Outlook 2007’s mail editor (because Outlook’s mail editor is Microsoft Word). Other Office programs such as Office Publisher, OneNote, InfoPath, Visio, Project and SharePoint Designer still have the old user interface. It will take a while to convert everything.
Anil Dash, who works for the blog software company Six Apart, has called the ribbon ”the ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software”. His point is that Office brings in about $12-billion a year. On his blog, he wrote: ”Try making a mistake that jeopardises a business that makes $250-million a week. I’d figure a 2% error, on the order of $5-million, gets you very, very fired. Maybe they’re forgiving and you can make a 10% error, costing $25-million a week. I doubt it. Most of us would lose our nerve about suggesting radical changes if betting wrong meant betting lots of jobs on making the right call.” ()
Big business gamble
The game is actually bigger than Dash allows. Business use of Office 2007 is often tied to Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, and sales of Windows Server, Exchange Server (for email), Forms Server (supporting InfoPath), Groove Server (for collaboration), SQL Server, Performance Point Server, Project Server and Project Portfolio Server could all be affected by changes in Office. So could the Microsoft Dynamics business programs for customer relationship management (CRM) and more business intelligence functions, which will be integrated with Office in the future.
Microsoft has made a very big bet on an innovative new interface that many users may not like — especially the most knowledgeable and most committed users of earlier versions of Office. Further, there is no ”classic mode”. As Harris said at the end of the workshop: ”We believe in it a lot. There isn’t a way to revert back.” – Guardian Unlimited Â