The New Office UI is Delicious

Filed under: Tech

Posted 2 years, 3 months ago at 9:44 am. 2 comments

Office 2007 Beta 2 is up for public download. I have been lurking on the UI and Office XML format blogs for a while, and I even went to the UI talk last month to see its demo. I finally got to test drive it and am thoroughly impressed by it.

If you haven’t heard already, Office got a complete face lift and the interface is now workflow-oriented. What I dislike about the current Office or OpenOffice is that, there are so many toolbars/buttons, but they are customized/jam-packed/docked by the sloppy users, us. We only use a small portion of the features, because we decided what buttons to put on our toolbar and we never bother to check what is outside of it afterwards.

In the new toolbar (called Ribbon), buttons are categorized and put under different tabs according to the stage (workflow) they belong. The height and width of the Ribbon do not depend on the number of docking toolbars anymore, and they stay constant unless you resize the window. When you resize the window smaller, the buttons are grouped to save space. The Ribbon hides itself automatically if the window is smaller than a certain size. By the way, there is no menu (File, Edit…etc) in the new Office.

I am sure the new UI is going to piss a lot of people off, because users don’t like to see drastic changes in things they have been familiar with for ages. I like it a lot because I suck at Word and never learned it properly. With the new UI, I can make fancy charts and stuff with little effort. Now the irony is, I am out of school and I don’t need to make fancy reports anymore.

I am going to publish this to my blog from Word now, /clicks Publish.