A Better Experience with Office 2007?
Well it seems the jury is still out on whether it’s worth upgrading to Vista but there is definitely one Microsoft application that’s worth the effort, Office. Looking at my start menu and I can see 11 Office apps, but I only really use 4 of those and it’s likely that most other people will as well but I’m going to talk about the major new features that are common to all these applications and arguably the most major is the “Ribbon Bar”.
It seems at some point the guys at Microsoft decided that the features in their applications were not being used because the average user couldn’t find them, and they decided to do something about it. The aim was to make their features more discoverable and try to eliminate unnecessary clicking, generally making their applications easier to use. Well, it worked.
The aim was to make their features more discoverable and try to eliminate unnecessary clicking...
In case you haven’t had a chance to see the ribbon bar it is a replacement of the menu bar and tool bar that sit at the top of the window. “Bu why change something that has been working for years and is standard across all windows apps!?” Well, some interface designers at Microsoft sat down and decided that it was quite tiresome constantly looking through menus and some people were missing large chunks of functionality because they couldn’t find it. So they set out to develop a new user interface that made functions more discoverable and quicker to access and...
It works! Now, there are people out there that will tell you it’s useless (or worse depending on how polite they are) but I’m going to boldly say they are wrong. True, it does take a bit of getting used to but if you actually sit down at look at the ribbon bar for a few minutes you realise mostly everything is logically placed. After a week I found that the ribbon bar made creating documents easier and more enjoyable (or as enjoyable as creating a word document can be).
After a week I found that the ribbon bar made creating documents easier and more enjoyable...
Another interesting feature is automatic format previewing. For example hovering the mouse over the various options in the font drop down and temporarily changing the presentation to allow you to preview the change you're about to make.
Couple these new interface elements with the fact that the office apps seem both faster and more stable, and you have an office suite which is actually a pleasure to use. Believe I never thought I would say that!
Next time I’ll go into specifics of the applications a bit more, but I’m hoping you would have upgraded by then.
Dan Rowlands, Deputy Head of Software