Office 2007 demo video

[Lazybones]

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/3/27/3360



When I saw the screen shots and how big the new toolbar aka ribbon is I thought it was a big mistake.. Watching the video how it works I am really looking forward to trying it out.. This has to be the biggest change to office in years.

[Mr. Analog]

I see heavy use of templates and an emphasis on real time editing. "The Ribben" harmonizes the warren of existing Office toolbars into a single UI. These are good things, groundbreaking for MS Office but not wholly unique.



I dunno, looks great for office monkeys who rely heavily on canned creativity, what I'm interested in is: How easy is it to modify the existing templates and/or create new custom templates? Does it integrate better with .NET Windows forms? How compatible is it with previous versions, and if it's 100% compatible, how bloaty is it?

[Shayne]

Ive been using the beta for about 3 months now (irc.winbeta.org), its EXCELLENT.  Though i find some of the things im looking for to be rather hard to find, but thats getting used to a new GUI for you.



Im also not a fan of the whole always cleartype text smoothing.



To move a little off topic, will OpenOffice try and compete and change?  It seems that they just try and clone the functionality, and now you have Microsoft totally moving in a different direction.  I dont use OO as i find it horribly slow in comparison.



I think you gotta give Microsoft credit when credit is due.  In the crowded market of word processors Microsoft truely does move the industry forward, at least more so then any other company or product.

[Mr. Analog]

To say that MS Office is competing in a market with other non-Microsoft options is absurd. MS Office has had big business lock-in for the better part of a decade. The last few iterations of their business suite were mind-numbing, lacklustre treadmill releases that were starting to make managers think that future MS Office versions wouldn't be worth the hassle of paying for and deploying accross large organizations. Make no mistake, some Governments did switch to OSS solutions (a bunch of European cities and the U.S. DoD) for their office productivity needs, but as much as the F/OSS community touts these as victories they are a microscopic slice of the pie.



MS Office 2007's main competitor is MS Office 2000 & 2003. 2003 was marketed so poorly and contained so few user experience improvements that to most there was very little reason to upgrade (in fact there are still large organizations cautiously lumbering towards 2003 upgrades). Microsoft was smart in *finally* getting their UI updated this time to consolidate the maze of sub-menus, toolbars and property dialogs they have been cobbling together since Office '95 because it's the most visible, tactile change to Office that Joe User is going to notice. It's going to sell well, but the bitter taste of the last treadmill release will linger in the mouths of many consumers.



I will give them credit for finally making a release that isn't merely closed-format compatibility bullying, but I won't hail an upgrade that has been needed for years as innovative either.



MS Office saturation reminds me of a quote I heard from a former Russian co-worker:

"Of all the Kruschevs I could vote for, Kruschev is best"

[Melbosa]

I've been watching this thread, expecting it was going to turn out to be one of these M$ vs the world ones.  Now I can't deny either side.



So instead I will put this in there.  M$ does drive the industry standard for word processing because it is the biggest supplier of word processing products.  They may not be the best at everything, but they are one whole package, instead of partials of here and there.  Let me get into some others, including other M$ products:



OpenOffice - used it, found it to be a best copy effort of the open source community of M$'s product.  Now this isn't a bad thing, as they would appeal to a lot of people for a transition.  But as Shayne pointed out, it was bloated and not very optimized.  Sure it wasn't as bloated in the back end as the M$ templates and such, but when I'm typing a document, I don't care about the backend crap; I care that I type something on the keyboard it shows on the screen in real time, it saves in minimal time, and it reformats fast when I want to facy it up.  OpenOffice had problems with this when I tried it out.



StarOffice - found it similar to above, and not really sure if they are even the same product.



Works - Basically this has evolved into the infant version of M$ Office, the freebee M$ gives out with OEM Comps.  So obviously no comparision.



WordPerfect - Ouch, now as powerful as this suite was, man did it have harshness to it as well.  Kinda the Powerbuilder to VS comparison.  Was definately not the user friendly for the average word processor person.



Lotus123 - Not bad either, very compariable to the M$ Office of today, but alas licensing and pricing just kills you on this one.  Great spreadsheet tools, terrible word processing ones. So I think this one is dying.







Having said all that, obviously you can see which one I prefer.  I'm not saying M$ rules, I'm saying they lead the industry in simplicity, combination of products, and usage.  Similar to the Linux vs M$ OS; sure linux is capable of more, better designed, more secure, but it takes a freaking lot more effort to get it working than a Windows install.  And when we're talking word processing, sorry it better just work well, work fast and be simple to use.  And it better work well with the rest of the world too - and as bad as it sounds, most of the world lives on the M$ Office for business word processing.



As for the biggest change for Office 2000 - Office 2003?  Well if you run Exchange 2000 or 2003 in your organization, then you had a huge move to get to 2003 for the Outlook 2003 feature set and options that opened up.  But yeah other than code fixes and general GUI look and layout, wasn't much diff in the new version.

[Mr. Analog]

I'm saying they [Microsoft] lead the industry in simplicity, combination of products, and usage.

I'm not ragging on you or Microsoft, but, you've been using the MS Office for probably what? 10 years or so. Is it not possible that you are overlooking the many eccentricities of Office because you use it all the time?



I find MS Office "easy" because I know where everything is and where all the shortcuts are. I don't even think about the slow rendering time in large documents when I have Visio diagrams linked in them because I've come to expect that Word has to link, embed and redraw the diagram in my document. These are things I know and I mostly ignore them (or at the last, don't give them much thought when they happen). I admit I'm biased towards Office as well, but I wouldn't say it was any simpler, easier to use or a better suite of products than StarOffice or OpenOffice.ORG.



I will say one thing though Lotus really, really sucks.