Microsofts main aim at the moment with Office and Vista is not so much to offer greater technology and improvements to workflow etc, but to make it look preety, have little animations, and transparency and little bouncy icons that glow etc etc.
If you like the chrome grease nipples, fluffy dice and foxtails then its great for you.
If you are more interested in performance, ease of use and getting the job done, then M$ has lost the plot!
Office 2007 is a joke! From GUI to File system.
The company I work for has spent a lot of resources looking at Vista, and Office and is ademant that neither will be incorporated in the foreseeable futures upgrade plans! The incompatabilities, expense of retraining etc can not be justified with the minimal, if any, benefits.
Linux, and Apple are creeping in to the corporate office!
Thanks Microsoft:)
Dazza,
Funny you say that when it seems like it is the influence from Mac and Linux that caused these horrible UI choices in Office 2007 and Vista.
Like I said previously they have hired way too many old mac and linux nerds and they are moving away from what has traditionally been associated with Windows which is a huge risk.
MS claims they have made extensive research in the area, is this the same kind of research that lead Apple to the menu bar ? It’s not the novice user they should listen to when making UI choices, it is the power users.
As soon as a novice user learns how to do soemthing he will too apreciate the power choices, if you make a dumbed down UI everyone is annoyed except the novice user (which soon becomes a power user).
Annoying UI choices should not be made because you think people cannot learn things. This has been Mac OS and Apples problem from day one, they think giving the user a single way of doing things is user friendly while in fact it quickly becomes annoying for everyone.
I get so tired of watching change for it’s own sake. We’ve trained millions of users the menu system, which isn’t bad (the prolification of toolbars is), and now we say “nevermind”. Most UI books I’ve read state that consistency is one of the most important aspects of UI design. (How 'bout them personalized menu’s, everybody loves them so). Now we are told to embrace dancing ribbons… I don’t buy it, it’s just one more way of Microsoft branding their stuff, there is no need for this type of UI
Fr*king hide the ribbon if it takes up space. Those who are complaining about the switch from menus to ribbon are basically the ones who complained “oooh, we don’t need to stinking GUI, we will do with teletype”. Fogeys
Apple menu system is the most lame-ass system I have ever seen.
I found the hotkey for hiding/showing the ribbon: Ctrl-F1.
It’s nice minimized, since the tabs are still visible and you get a cleaner interface, but you can still take advantage of the ribbon features. I like the ribbon myself, since I have to do a lot of image placement, and Word puts quick buttons to options like altering the text wrapping in easy reach instead of having to repeatedly right-click - Format Picture - Layout tab - Advanced. I just wish the ribbon was customizable without having to figure out how to deal with its XML or going off to find a 3rd party ribbon creator/editor.
Obviously with Office 2007 and Vista with it’s bulky explorer windows and sidebars and all that, they assume everyone has at least a 20" widescreen tft today.
Well office 2007 has just cost me another 200 to buy the user a ‘better’ office application and install office 2003.
Having now seen the app my comments are this - If I wanted to change my complete understanding of my office suite I’d have installed Open office, Ability Office or Thinkfree office. 2007’s blury user interface is overly complicated and a waste of space. Now we’ll have every app using a different gui and no common structure. Na if anything it’s moved me away from Office to better written code like Thinkfree and Open Office.
Bye Bye Microsoft and hello Apple it’s so more appealing on the other side if the industry.
Nightmare on my block
well you little bastards think that this vista is so grand and office 07 is sweet… well how sweet will it be for novice endusers who loved 98SE!!
These changing of the menus and all should not be for look but functionality. I support 350 novice users on a server with active directory they tell me everyday “just want to send email” nothing fancy… seems as the software gurus are moving at a different pace than the world… sorta like bush and the war…
bob
Opera (Show transfers in background when starting download)
Do this:
CTRL+ALT+T #8594; View #8594; Show transfers in background when starting download
WIMP really stands for Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pulldown menus.
sorry folks, but the UI of Office 2007 is just plain awful.
-non-intuitive
-poorly organized
-painfully slow
yes it is amazing that M$ would risk their flagship product to this mess.
I’ve been trying out Office 2007 on a test server for work.
Hate it! Normal tasks that take only a second or two in Office 2000 or 2003 are now painful… if I can even find them. I still have not located the Heading 2 style, which used to be right there in front of me. Worst thing that ever happened to a GUI is this new [ef]Fluent Ribbon.
Access 2007? The nice application toolbars I have meticulously created for the users to make things easy for them have been banished to the “Add-Ins” tab! I can’t seem to get them back out into a place that is actually going to be useful.
What the !@#$ is with this “Home” tab? Stupid name. Doesn’t tell me anything about what it contains. Microsoft keeps telling us the ribbon makes features “Discoverable”… I like my features to be “Discovered Already So I Don’t Have To Go On A Hunting Expedition”. The classic menus and toolbars were very easy to find.
Micro$oft have dumbed down the interface to the lowest common denominator, and as a non-novice, I actually feel insulted that the way I work efficiently has been deemed not only obsolete by Microsoft, but that I should be made to do it their way (which, I might add, has proven to be completely awkward for me).
They claim the new UI makes me more efficient and productive. Hmmmm… I’ve been trying to format a particular paragraph for two weeks to the way I need it but haven’t so far found all the commands I am looking for. I did the same document up in Word 2000 and again in OpenOffice.org Writer (which I have installed but not yet had occasion to use before this test) as a comparison. Both of those allowed me to get things done in a couple of minutes. Office 2007 has taken two weeks and is still not done.
I think I will stay with what works until/unless MS releases a service pack that lets me choose to work with menus (key term is “work”). Otherwise, Microsoft will not be selling me any future versions of Office.
My $0.02 worth.
Office Fluent Ribbon is great for soccer moms and CEOs emailing porno and jokes to each other.
For those of us who like to customize the applications that we work with, the Ribbon is a huge step backward. (Somewhere above, we were mentioned as the 1%, but I believe that number is higher.)
Microsoft should offer a backward compatible add-in so I can use my old-fashioned WIMP paradigm with Office 2007 or it will be see you later Microsoft!
Perhaps Office 14’s Project Team could think about this?
The Office 2007 interface is the worst UI in terms of usability that I had to use in a long time. I can only conclude that the designers are incompetent fools. Main reasons:
- Random rearrangements of UI elements. Computers are stupid and using one can be infuriating. However, they have one redeeming feature: when programmed bug-free, they can be very consistent, hence predictable, hence “usable”. Any UI “feature” that takes away their single strength is a very bad idea. This explains the failure of such past “innovations” as menus that automatically hide away less used items.
The ribbon interface rearranges size and presentation of buttons and their labels (apparently based on the window size). As a result, I need to internalize the position and appearance of many times more buttons than there are actual operations before I can use them “without thinking”.
- Loss of control. People dislike situations that cause them to have less control over their environment. It literally increases stress levels. Another example of the “control effect” can be seen in people’s assessment of relative riskiness of driving vs. flying. They feel cars are less risky because they are in the driver’s seat whereas the planes are controlled by an unseen, unknown, unpredictable “captain”. (Incidentally, that’s why the pilot’s make a small speech at the start of the flight, and why they are called “captain”, a title of ancient authority, instead of just pilot.)
When you take away any chance of customization from an UI, you take away control from your users. It is like taking away the steering wheel, the escape hatch, or the emergency brake. They feel trapped, controlled and the stress levels shoot up. I have seen long-time users of Office beg their IT support people to deinstall 2007 version in favor of the old one. Please note that users can get negatively impacted even if they are not heavy users of customization. Just the idea of losing any means of “escape” is enough to cause stress.
Finally, claiming that customization cannot be justified on a cost/benefit basis is just rich coming from a corporation that has been raking in monopoly profits for decades. It is adding insult to injury.
“2. Loss of control. People dislike situations that cause them to have less control over their environment.”
Don’t mistake options/features for control. People also feel trapped and stressed when given more control than they can handle. If you put a person in a cockpit of a plane and gave them 5 minutes training, they’d have more control, but I don’t think their stress levels would decrease. Also, people’s perception of driving and flying is also due to relative exposure to the medium. I drive a heck of a lot more than I fly.
"I have seen long-time users of Office beg their IT support people to deinstall 2007 version in favor of the old one."
Key word here, long-time. My grandmother prefers her old car to her new one. Not because it’s better (couldn’t pass MOT, zero clutch control, produced more leadcarbon than a power plant) but because it’s what she’s used to. Personal preference is not the only usability statistic.
“People also feel trapped and stressed when given more control than they can handle.” That is not very relevant, because it only applies should they end up with “more than they can handle”. For Office 2007, that is certainly not the case. Marshalling a few buttons on an application is not exactly string theory.
You are right, the key-word is “long-time”, but not for the reason you imply. It is because they are aware that having no customization options at all is a regression and users do not have to put up with that BS.
I am not sure what “usability statistic” you have in mind, but I presume it is some sort of measurable proxy for the (not-directly- measurable) personal preference. In that sense, personal preference is the “real thing”, as far as the user is concerned, and no usability statistic can trump it.
BTW, in your example, the old car does have more usability for your mother, but fails on other, non-usability related criteria, such as environmental stuff. Cars are a good comparison point when thinking about software interfaces:
–Cars are (for economic and technological reasons) not easily customizable. Yet there is a whole industry, and a multitude of popular TV shows dedicated to customization. On the other hand, SW vendors can ship their products with easily cutomizable UIs, but some choose to take away any possibility of customization. Lesson for SW?
–All (automatic) cars have the same basic UI with an accelerator, brake and steering wheel. Despite huge competitive pressure for novelty, manufacturers don’t fool with the most important parts of the UI because their users are familiar with it. Lesson for SW?
Actually, it is not a coincidence that the major overhaul of the Office UI happens at a time when there is almost no competitive pressure on Office. I doubt MS would risk alienating their customer base if they still had Lotus or other commercial suites as viable competitors. An opening for the OpenOffice?
Sorry Jeff
You are way off line on this one. This is a backward step for Microsoft - all it is doing is pushing users to other alternatives. I support many small bsuienss users and they are horrified by the interface and the performance of this abysmal software. Microsoft has spent countless millions on developing a “new” version of Office that is not better and has very few improved features - it’s just different. This is a case of $$$ driving development, pure and simple. Make something different and charge for it. Users want good reasons to upgrade and this release provides no compelling new features.
Some of my client are buying licenses with downgrade rights. Others want me to install OpenOffice - they say if we have to learn something new, lets get something we don’t pay a fortune for.
The one thing that stops me reading a blog - and Jensen’s suffers from this - is “once you’re in the archives, there’s no way to go to the next post without hitting Back and selecting the next post from a list.” Ugh.
The Office 2007 UI is a violation of reasonable UI design guidelines. The user cannot see available options without clicking on each top level button first. This is an even worse design than javascript rollover navigation in web pages because the user must rollover and click to uncover functionality. The UI also takes much more room to show less options, so some options that were on the old menus are not even available without going through the hassle of adding them to the UI.