Task-oriented interfaces were "invented" back in Office XP (perhaps that explains the XP in the name) with smart tags and task panes. This is getting fixed somewhat. Unfortunately a whole new class of problems are making their way. Example : it's harder to know what is the actual selection between the highlights in the ribbon, chunk, actual content, and floatie. To me it's a mess. Your mileage may vary, however.
Of course, the question is : what's new? If people found out that they would better off simply sticking to Wordpad for most of their needs, which is the best way to ensure their documents can be read decades from now, I wonder what they should think about MS initiatives anyway...
And of course, as a user, the UI being reshuffled, it means the IT department must provision big retraining budgets. Of course, as file formats are now incompatible, it means IT must also provision for the equivalent of the Office95 / Office97 file format mess (even if MS is backing their ass saying a converter will be made available).
Will be interesting to see how it comes out. Especially when there are so much thiner, better (even free) offerings out there.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
anon: what's new? The real question about Office 12 is "what's old?"
Watch for more videos on Channel 9. My favorites? PowerPoint's new charting tool. Excel's new Pivottable functionality. Word's new Table and style functions. Outlook's new meeting scheduler.
anon
· 3 years ago
Also I believe Office 12 is more setting the stage for future "more data centric" applications, and that will happen in future releases. Excel 12 seems headed towards this, and there is a likelihood some of the underlying libraries get shared among other Office apps. Not that there is anything wrong about it, just that people upgrading their Word/Spreadsheet apps should perhaps be told that they are moving towards what's poised to become a BI tool instead. And a Windows-only tool, for that matter.
I was skeptical about retraining costs too, but not anymore. It's a LOT easier to use Office 12 than the old version.
anon
· 3 years ago
Charting? Humm, Scoble watch people crying at their UI become a pig. You'd surprised about what's not changed for almost two decades in the charting engine area. Except default translucency, and bevel. Gotta love that, heh!
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Anon: yes, charting. Have you even tried Office 12? Sounds like you haven't.
anon
· 3 years ago
That's not the first time you give a heck this way. I am running it on a VM.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
Always crowing about things yet released...
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Christopher: I'm an evangelist. Shoot me. An evangelist is paid to get developers to build software for the next version of the platform. So, thank you for saying I'm doing my job.
John Walkenbach
· 3 years ago
Robert, can you clarify how the Office 12 NDA works?
I had to sign an NDA to get the O12 Beta. The NDA states that I cannot write about the product. It seems to me that Paul Thurrott is either violating his NDA, or he's working with an unauthorized copy of the beta.
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
Robert...it may be easier for you and other geeks to use untrained.
In the real world, where people have almost-strokes because a button on a toolbar moved?
Office 12 will, not may, but will require at least a six month period so you can roll it out in rather large chunks, and train people as you do so. I'm not saying the new UI wasn't needed, but the idea you won't need training is a PR fantasy.
anon
· 3 years ago
Where's compatibility with Open Office?
Stuff like an office suite needs to be rolled up and bundled with the OS. In today's market, it doesn't make sense to charge customers extra for this kind of functionality.
Simon Brocklehurst
· 3 years ago
I think the training need point is moot, to a certain extent. People in organisations that run training courses for employees such as "How to use Word", see running training courses for things like this as a positive. So, for example, rolling out Office 12 will be a nice "project" for IT Support and Human Resources departments to collaborate on for a year or two.
Organisations that don't need to run training courses for things like this, will find that their employees will figure things out in Office 12 pretty quickly, I suspect.
Abdul Aziz
· 3 years ago
Even I'm on the Office 12 Beta and I read on a site that diff ppl have been given diff rights to disclose certain information.
ryan
· 3 years ago
Really? Shocking! When has Paul NOT liked something Microsoft made? That would be news.
" It seems to me that Paul Thurrott is either violating his NDA, or he’s working with an unauthorized copy of the beta."
Or Microsoft lets a few "select" windows bigots trumpet their horn for pr and to create a buzz.
Marketers! Marketers! Marketers!...
solomonrex
· 3 years ago
Things MS Office hasn't fixed in 10+ years: 1. text import in Excel is great, really, really great. Try bringing in unformatted data in OpenOffice 1 and you'll see what I mean. But Office doesn't like text documents and won't let you work with them. This is backwards for most people who work with data in a mixed environment (like everybody outside Redmond). I don't expect OpenOffice support, but come on. Everybody uses data in text format. I don't need error messages constantly while saving. Just give me one when I do something in Excel that can't be saved to text format. 2. Save dialog is inconsistent with extensions - if I save as text.csv, but I don't use quotation marks, I get text.csv.txt, etc. 3. Can I have post-it notes, Calendar and tasks enabled for home use without needing to setup up Outlook? Shouldn't these things be in the OS? 4. I'd like a vi-compatible mode for the editors in your IDEs. 5. Actually, I'm not sure about this one, is VBA getting updated? Is there a plan? Can we know this upfront? 6. It's time for some housekeeping. Start with the ridiculous WordPerfect 5.1 compatibility options in Word. End with cleaning up the gi-normous Outlook options dialog box.
colbert
· 3 years ago
I'd prefer a cheaper version of Office 12 where I can remove the functions I don't want in it. I'd hate to pay big bucks for useless features. Let's hope it can also sync well enough with PDAs like my Eten M600. I'm just sick of it hanging like a dead rat during the syncing process
All Comments
Jeez, that guy has been so wrong the last couple a years about apple, it's hilarious (actually, pathetic is a better term).
Hope he's a bit more accurate on the Office front.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx
Task-oriented interfaces were "invented" back in Office XP (perhaps that explains the XP in the name) with smart tags and task panes. This is getting fixed somewhat. Unfortunately a whole new class of problems are making their way. Example : it's harder to know what is the actual selection between the highlights in the ribbon, chunk, actual content, and floatie. To me it's a mess. Your mileage may vary, however.
Of course, the question is : what's new? If people found out that they would better off simply sticking to Wordpad for most of their needs, which is the best way to ensure their documents can be read decades from now, I wonder what they should think about MS initiatives anyway...
And of course, as a user, the UI being reshuffled, it means the IT department must provision big retraining budgets. Of course, as file formats are now incompatible, it means IT must also provision for the equivalent of the Office95 / Office97 file format mess (even if MS is backing their ass saying a converter will be made available).
Will be interesting to see how it comes out. Especially when there are so much thiner, better (even free) offerings out there.
Watch for more videos on Channel 9. My favorites? PowerPoint's new charting tool. Excel's new Pivottable functionality. Word's new Table and style functions. Outlook's new meeting scheduler.
I was skeptical about retraining costs too, but not anymore. It's a LOT easier to use Office 12 than the old version.
An evangelist is paid to get developers to build software for the next version of the platform. So, thank you for saying I'm doing my job.
I had to sign an NDA to get the O12 Beta. The NDA states that I cannot write about the product. It seems to me that Paul Thurrott is either violating his NDA, or he's working with an unauthorized copy of the beta.
In the real world, where people have almost-strokes because a button on a toolbar moved?
Office 12 will, not may, but will require at least a six month period so you can roll it out in rather large chunks, and train people as you do so. I'm not saying the new UI wasn't needed, but the idea you won't need training is a PR fantasy.
Stuff like an office suite needs to be rolled up and bundled with the OS. In today's market, it doesn't make sense to charge customers extra for this kind of functionality.
Organisations that don't need to run training courses for things like this, will find that their employees will figure things out in Office 12 pretty quickly, I suspect.
" It seems to me that Paul Thurrott is either violating his NDA, or he’s working with an unauthorized copy of the beta."
Or Microsoft lets a few "select" windows bigots trumpet their horn for pr and to create a buzz.
Marketers! Marketers! Marketers!...
1. text import in Excel is great, really, really great. Try bringing in unformatted data in OpenOffice 1 and you'll see what I mean. But Office doesn't like text documents and won't let you work with them. This is backwards for most people who work with data in a mixed environment (like everybody outside Redmond). I don't expect OpenOffice support, but come on. Everybody uses data in text format. I don't need error messages constantly while saving. Just give me one when I do something in Excel that can't be saved to text format.
2. Save dialog is inconsistent with extensions - if I save as text.csv, but I don't use quotation marks, I get text.csv.txt, etc.
3. Can I have post-it notes, Calendar and tasks enabled for home use without needing to setup up Outlook? Shouldn't these things be in the OS?
4. I'd like a vi-compatible mode for the editors in your IDEs.
5. Actually, I'm not sure about this one, is VBA getting updated? Is there a plan? Can we know this upfront?
6. It's time for some housekeeping. Start with the ridiculous WordPerfect 5.1 compatibility options in Word. End with cleaning up the gi-normous Outlook options dialog box.