The whole suite
I am extremely impressed. The Ribbon (a new UI feature, instead of conventional menu and toolbars. See this video for a demo) is absolutely fantastic, and has no learning curve at all, which is very important given that Office is a program used by millions of only just computer literate people around the world who don’t like changes to their software. The improvement that it gives to ease of use cannot be underestimated, and it works entirely intuitively. The only problem I anticipate is that the Ribbon is inexplicably not used in all of the office programs. Perhaps the developers felt that it would provide unnecessary complexity in programs such as Outlook, when there are a limited number of options which need to be performed regularly, but in programs such as Publisher I think it would provide a significant advantage. If it were down to me, I would have it in all programs to provide consistency, with the option for users and sysadmins to turn off the ribbon in programs such as Outlook if they preferred the old-fashioned UI.
Word – a case study
My favourite program with, in my opinion, the most improvement on an already strong product is Word. It is truly a joy to use. It looks signiifcantly better than previous versions, as can be seen from the screenshots, and the ribbon has an incredible effect. This is because it makes normally more complex operations so easy to perform. For example, setting up a mail merge is trivial with the new program, with just a few clicks needed, making it a simple operation rather than requiring advanced experience or some training.
The visual appearance of documents is much improved. This is partly because of the great new ClearType font (Calibri), which has replaced Times New Roman as the default for the body text of documents, but also because of the ease of use with which different styles can be applied to the text. It is possible to preview the effect of these styles by simply hovering the cursor over the style option in the ribbon. The changes mean that, although it was possible for advanced users to create great looking documents before the ribbon, it will now be within the reach of every user. The days of drab Times New Roman documents are over.
Apart from the ribbon and the styles, there are lots of other nice features. On the usability front, the status bar now contains some useful information, such as the word count, as well as a zoom bar, which is effective (although I miss the ability to type ‘whole’ into the zoom box on the toolbar, and view whole page immediately. Other features include the ability to easily export to PDF, and an improved file menu. One feature which has the potential to be very popular is the ability to use Word to do a blog post. This is great, but unfortunately it doesn’t work for Wordpress at the moment, as it time stamps posts as written at some point in 1999, and I haven’t managed to properly get pictures uploaded yet. I am sure that this problem will be solved before release, and by adding the feature Microsoft have probably endeared themselves to thousands of bloggers, getting themselves some good press.
Conclusions
Will the release be a success? A resounding yes. It provides a significant advance in features (which makes the tech savvy users happy), whilst improving in usability to make those features visible and, crucially, usable to even the most inexperienced or inept. And even at this Beta 2 stage, it is a highly polished and stable product. I have not had any stability issues with the release, and the only bug I have found is not really even a bug, but a design oversight. Office 2007 is the office suite for 2007, and has really pulled away from OpenOffice.org, it’s nearest competitor. I think that this release justifies the future cost. For the moment though, the beta is free (although it expires on the 31/01/07). Grab it now, and then you’ll know what I’m raving about. Incidentally, if you’re worried about performance issues, it runs at a perfectly respectable speed on my 1.7 ghz Pentium M laptop with 512 ram.
[PS, I wrote this post in Word, and put some cool screenshots, with some great effects in it. I tried to get them up here, but failed. However, you can download a PDF of the post here. Do that, it looks absolutely mint!]
What is it the MS doesn’t understand? Have they tried their own products? Do they only give them to people who’ve never used a computer before and say how would you change it? Where are they finding all these 70 plus year olds and people who’ve been locked up their entire lives? They’ve possibly made it more intuitive for people who’ve never used a computer before but what about the rest of us who have been using them for years – you’ve seriously handicapped us. How would Bill Gates feel if the next car he had to buy had the steering wheel on the right because people in England found that more intuitive?
Outlook Issues
1. Does not let you open more than one outlook profile simultaneously.
2. Often retrieves data from one account into another within the same profile.
3. Does not close down reliably so when you attempt to switch between outlook profiles (since it won’t let you open both simultaneously) it opens the same one even if you wait a minute.
4. Using the search function in sent folders or your entire mailbox still returns only the FROM field - not sure why MS people don’t ever think we want to know who it went TO- Is this such a hard thing? Yes you can customize columns after EACH search to get the TO field but I’m pretty sure when I’m searching MY SENT folder I already know who the e-mail was FROM - what I need to know is who did it go TO.
BCM Issues- A GREAT PRODUCT - Completely GIMPED by MS.
1. All it needs to do is sync the most important contact info - name, address, phone number, e-mail address with contacts in outlook so that it is available via OWA and WM5 - no simple copy tool included - making it completely useless for any remote data work.
MS Access - no OLE or wrapper or built in handler for JPGs and other picture formats.
1. Why make a database for non techies that can’t natively handle pictures. How can you do a decent catalog, inventory, personnel list etc, if you make it so complicated that you have to use code for pictures? Might as well hire a Oracle programmer if you aren’t going to make a simple database for non-techies. Either include a good ole program with Office that handles JPGs or make the program wrap the pictures natively.
Excel -
1. Still doesn’t easily remove data/links. Copy and paste a table showing prices on any product - e.g. E6700 processors. Now go ahead and delete the rows or data. The “buy now” link is still there - isn’t it?
Word -
1. Doesn’t let you easily change spacing between paragraphs and sentences - e.g. this paragraph 1.2 next sentence 1.5 etc. If you want to vary randomly and between lines different when jumping to a new line.
[...] Now, a lot has changed in Office 2007 since we last looked at it here on Gizbuzz, and unfortunately we can’t get our hands on the RTM, but Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows has screenshots of the RTM build that you can take a look at. [...]