Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

[steddenm]

Those everso nice people at Microsoft have sent me a copy of the Technical Preview for Microsoft Office 2010 and I have to say I am quite impressed with it!

Below are a couple of screen shots I have took whilst I'm getting used to it! The ribon is now more promenant in ALL applications, such as Publisher (which wasn't before) as well as more funky things to play and do!

Plus the splash screen is now animated. Apparently the public version (BETA1) will go live in July, and Microsoft hope to get the new Office 2010 in stores by the end of the year. It works seamlessly on my Windows 7 machine as well as my Vista laptop.


The new Word splashscreen


The new Excel splashscreen


The new Access screen


The new Outlook


The new SharePoint splash screen

[Philip]

I believe the splash screens animate.

[Nick Harvey]

Do the splash screens animate by any chance?

[cdd]

You know, I think they do. Excellent!

[Dr Lobster*]

same whore, different cocktail dress.

[cwathen]

To me, Office 2007 suffers from a bit of an identity crisis - the new interface was it's big much vaunted feature, yet Microsoft only took the time to bring it in to the core applications, everything else just looks like a development of Office 2003. Hopefully this time they'll take the time to make it look like a coherent product again.

I'd argue though that the biggest thing Office 2010 needs is a 'classic mode' which gets rid of the ribbons and tabs and makes it look like a traditional application with toolbars and pull down menus. Why is this needed? Much as I understand the argument that modern versions of Office have spawned so many features that I rethink of the UI was needed, the simple fact is that the average person doesn't actually use (or even know how to use) even half the features it has - although I use Office 2003, in all honesty I could probably kick back to Office 97 (even earlier than that were it not for the different file formats) and not really miss anything.

If you are going to change the entire user interface, it might well be of benefit to power users who really get get their teeth stuck into all the amazingness that Word and Excel can do, and of course people who just *need* to run the latest version of software will get to grips with it and then wonder how they ever managed before, but with Office 2007 your average user is being forced into a relearning process in order to rediscover how to do things that they allready know how to do perfectly well with a traditional interface.

For that reason, despite 2007 having been out for well over 2 years now, there are still people (luddites like me included) which flatly refuse to touch it with a bargepole simply because they'd be forced into an environment which they don't know how to use, for no discernable gain. In that respect, the product is fundamentally flawed.

Given also that the basic premise of Windows was supposed to be a consistant and predictable user interface from application to application rather than every program doing it's own thing as happened with DOS, and that no one else has followed Microsoft with this type of user interface, a 'classic view' is IMO a very important thing to have.

Now, if 2010 comes with an option to just make Office look like a normal application (even if that does result in an unwieldy number of toolbar options and menus), it may well succeed in capturing the market which 2007 just can't get to. If it doesn't, then in a few years time it could well be that ageing Office 2003 installations get replaced with OpenOffice rather than a newer version of Microsoft Office.

[Dr Lobster*]

To me, Office 2007 suffers from a bit of an identity crisis - the new interface was it's big much vaunted feature, yet Microsoft only took the time to bring it in to the core applications, everything else just looks like a development of Office 2003. Hopefully this time they'll take the time to make it look like a coherent product again.

remember that the 'biggie' used in most corporate environments (outlook) actually didn't get that much of an update to the interface in 2007 - it's mostly a shinier office 2003 and the only truly useful new feature was instant search. a few things are a bit easier to find (like when you share calendars) but other than that, like publisher it was almost entirely left alone.

which brings me to publisher, it's been neglected for so long, why don't they just dump it. word is so much more powerful, if i need to layout anything like that (which is a rare occurrence) i find ms word does it with a lot more control and flexibility and it doesn't even come near to indesign (or corel draw for that matter, and that's been slowly rotting away for years too)... i'm puzzled as to which market publisher is really aimed at... grannies making cat calenders?

[steddenm]

You know, I think they do. Excellent!

Yes they do animate - all shiny and new!

[Pete]

If you are going to change the entire user interface, it might well be of benefit to power users who really get get their teeth stuck into all the amazingness that Word and Excel can do, and of course people who just *need* to run the latest version of software will get to grips with it and then wonder how they ever managed before, but with Office 2007 your average user is being forced into a relearning process in order to rediscover how to do things that they allready know how to do perfectly well with a traditional interface.

See I think the opposite is true. I was never a "power user" of Word before 2007, I mean I could do stuff in it, plenty stuff, but I never really took the time to learn all the things that it could do. Since 2007 I've been able to do far more, I find activities such as setting a picture to use "square" wrapping are far quicker.

there are still people (luddites like me included) which flatly refuse to touch it with a bargepole simply because they'd be forced into an environment which they don't know how to use, for no discernable gain.

In which case, isn't that just evidence of your ignorance rather than a problem with the system? If you refuse to use it, refuse to try it, then you're hardly in a position to slag it so much. Unless I've misread your post.

Given also that the basic premise of Windows was supposed to be a consistant and predictable user interface from application to application rather than every program doing it's own thing as happened with DOS, and that no one else has followed Microsoft with this type of user interface, a 'classic view' is IMO a very important thing to have.

PowerArchiver has an optional ribbon view, and a refined version is appearing throughout Windows 7 and is indeed built into the api's I believe to make it easier to make use of.

[dosxuk]

This blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/rss.xml - goes into a lot of detail about the changes to the ribbon UI from toolbars & menus in 2007, specifically the posts in a series called "Why the UI?".

Anyway, this section answers some of your questions about why they didn't keep the old UI, and the alternatives:

There are several ways one could approach this kind of scale problem. We could have just cut half of the features from the product and left the UI as-is. (Well, actually a pretty major redesign would have been required to deal with half of the commands being gone.) But which half to get rid of? Many attempts have been made to imagine a "Lite" version of Office, both at Microsoft and elsewhere in the industry. It's hard because virtually all of the features do get used and every feature is someone's favorite.

When we get evidence that a feature is hardly used at all, we sometimes do remove it from the product--but even then Microsoft feels pain as the people who rely on that feature lash out. No one's ever figured out the true "half of a spreadsheet" that appeals to the broad market.

Another way we could deal with the scale issue is by factoring the products differently. Perhaps if Word were broken up into eight separate apps--say a text editor, a printing/page layout app, a table maker, a picture editor, a drawing program, a spelling/grammar checker, a mail merge engine, and an envelope/label printer. Then each one could have a more manageable menu and toolbar structure. When you install Office, we could put 65 icons in the Start menu.

But that would be going in a direction completely contrary to what our customers ask us for. We're constantly prodded to do more integration, to do better integration. In the places where are there separate "apps" today (such as the Equation engine in Word or the Chart engine in PowerPoint), these are incredible pain points for customers and they implore us to integrate the functionality.

So, our decision wasn't to make Office 2007 stupider or more fragmented. Instead, we worked to embrace the integration and rebuild the user interface to give us runway to build the next decade of productivity features. This is why concepts such as contextualization and galleries are so pivotal to the new UI--they help break the functionality of Office into more manageable pieces while maintaining the integration that makes the product powerful.

[Gavin Scott]

For that reason, despite 2007 having been out for well over 2 years now, there are still people (luddites like me included) which flatly refuse to touch it with a bargepole simply because they'd be forced into an environment which they don't know how to use, for no discernible gain. In that respect, the product is fundamentally flawed.

I felt 100% the same until I started using it.

The gain is very discernible. I use many more features than I did, and I work faster. No question on either point.

Give it a proper try - you might be surprised how quickly the benefits present themselves.