Office 2007 - Apology for Siji

[noel]

In the last two weeks, I've become intimately familiar with Office 2k7. I just finished putting together a 19 page report in Word '07, and a 50ish page slide show in Powerpoint '07.

Though I like both of the new Office Apps, mostly due to the 'Live Preview' feature when modifying a style or design, I feel I owe Siji an apology.

When Office 2k7 initially came up in a post, he stated he didn't like the ribbon interface for a variety of reasons. Initially I thought it was just Siji being Siji. I've argued with him in the past about when to embrace new applications and technologies. I never posted anything negative, but now I find myself agreeing with him.

The ribbon interface isn't horrible, but I'm also not sure it's good. Where before you'd have toolbars up for the features you use the most, now accessing a feature means remembering which part of the ribbon it's on, clicking to go to that part of the ribbon and then clicking the feature. For those keeping score at home, that's two clicks where in previous versions of Office there only would have been one. I had read that depending on what you had selected, the ribbon would display the appropriate options, but that doesn't appear to be the case at all times. Also, in the same way that a grocery store's merchandising (the layout of what they sell) sometimes leaves you scratching your head, there are times within the new office apps where you find yourself wondering why feature X is on ribbon Y instead of ribbon Z.

It's not all bad. As I said, the 'Live Preview' is awesome. The inline formatting menu is awesome, and for image inclusion and editing, the functionality they've lifted from the acquired Visio is makes using the suite much, much easier. They've also included language translation and reference lookup within the application which is really nice and very handy.

Overall it's a good thing, but the ribbon interface, like Siji said can be a real pain in the ass.

[Winnow]

Word 07 is more good than bad.

Ribbons take time to learn just as deep menus took time to learn. Switching from menus to ribbons is like switching from toilet paper to one of the new hydro cleaning toilets. At first you're like, "what the fuck is this jet of water doing spraying up my ass!?" After awhile, it's all better and less dingle berries to boot. I haven't used one of the new toilets but it seemed like a good analogy!

DOS lovers used to piss and moan about the windows environment (any windows, not just Microsoft's) Applefags still think one mouse button is swank. You'd think getting Apple to switch to a multibutton mouse would be less hard than getting them to drop DRM on iTunes.

If you're really old school, you'll know the keyboard shortcuts so it won't matter which version you use!

[Neost]

If you're really old school, you'll know the keyboard shortcuts so it won't matter which version you use!

Don't know about being old school, probably just getting old but I find keyboard shortcuts to be more efficient for about anything other than cut and paste. Especially when working in a large word doc.

I just recently installed o2k7 but haven't really messed with it yet. I'll have to take a look.

edit: Decided to go take a look and read some on word/ribbons and found this customization app for ribbons:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/marke ... 31033.aspx

might be worth a look.

[noel]

Keyboard shortcuts are all well and good until what you're trying to do is modify the color scheme of a slideshow.

There's lots of keyboard shortcuts that I like. I've been using laptop for the better part of the last 12 years, so I've found lots of keyboard shortcuts I absolutely love.

I was pretty bummed that I could no longer just hit Ctrl-Esc, U in Vista to get to the shutdown menu... That said I don't really use shutdown anymore anyway.

My new favorite keyboard shortcut is Windows Key + S, which is a huge improvement over the print screen key.

[Siji]

Overall, it's a nicer product and the new options (especially in the graphs/charts area) are wonderful. It would have been nice however for them to allow the option of reverting back to the old menu style. It's like trying to use Word Perfect vs Word now.

[Aslanna]

My initial impression of the ribbon: Don't like it.

Maybe for new users it's not as bad since there's nothing to 'unlearn.'

The option of having old-style menus would have been nice. I guess I can see why they don't have it in there but I'm not sure I agree.

[Funkmasterr]

I have messed around with it a bit too, when I had to show my dad how to use vista and I didn't like it at all. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but I still don't like or prefer the layout.