New Shots of Office 2007 Beta 2 on Aero

[ttadword]

New Shots of Office 2007 Beta 2 on Aero

If you like Vista's transparency teamed with the new Office 2007 look,
then you'll love these screenshots.

For more details:
http://ttcom.blogspot.com/2006/05/new-shots-of-office-2007-beta-2-on.html

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

New Shots of Office 2007 Beta 2 on Aero

If you like Vista's transparency teamed with the new Office 2007 look,
then you'll love these screenshots.

It looks "cleaner" thank the previous shots I saw, but I still don't
know what to think about their "dynamic toolbar" though... I'm not sure
I'd like it :-\


Corentin

 

[Tim]

i think they are having troubles now...they may delay it again.......

 

[mmmmark]

It looks "cleaner" thank the previous shots I saw, but I still don't
know what to think about their "dynamic toolbar" though... I'm not sure
I'd like it :-\

The dynamic idea goes against most interface guidelines which advocate
consistency. If a person cannot depend on the same elements being in the
same place all the time, it creates uncertainty, unteachability and trouble
(IMHO).

The devil's in the details, however. Since I've not used it, I can't speak
to its usability. Perhaps the consistency lies in how the toolbars update
predictably to the exact same events.

Who knows, but rest assured, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth
during the transistion period--especially when you consider the new file
format happening at the same time. I predict that adoption will be very
slow. Enterprise customers will not want to spend their hard earned money
on this upgrade.

Stay tuned....
-Mark

 

[little_creature]

Hmm.. Interesting but I love the formating palette in Mac Office which is
handy and WORKING keybord shortcuts in excel which are just mentioned in
help on PC but that's all if you want to assign shortcut for paste special
you have to use macro and assign shortcut to macro on PC. Would not change
Macs office. There are some features missing in comparison to PC office, but
the keyboard shortcust and formatting pallete worth. MBU seems to be thing
what the user does and what wants but I do not have the same felling about
PC Office developer unit. All that worthless and confusing windows and
layout in Outlook... absolutely incomparable to Entourage.
Maybe I will be surprised in the end what the new PC office and Windows can
do after they are released but at these days my choose is MacOffice.
I also love the f9-f12 keys in Tiger and apple+h shortcut. I'm also a bit
confused about ther HW requirements for Vista, on my laptop now XP occoupies
about 2GB which is about 10% of my HDD space so no one can wonder I'm a bit
nervous.
Ok, the mixed enviroment's (PC+MAc) seems me to be the optimum.

 

[Michel Bintener]

Those of you interested in the new Office UI should definitely read Jensen
Harris's blog; Jensen is the Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office
"user experience" team, and his blog gives you a detailed look behind the
scenes of the development of the new Office suite.

Mark, the new interface with the ribbon was created with consistency in
mind, and you should find a better explanation than I could possibly give by
reading some of Jensen's older posts. As far as I know, the dynamic part of
the ribbon is always in the same place, i.e. the right side of the screen,
and it is in the same place for all the different ribbon tabs. I cannot
really speak from experience, as I have never used Office 2007, but based on
what I've read and seen so far, the new UI is going to be more consistent
than the current one. I'm really curious what the new version of Mac Office
is going to look like.

little_creature, again, based on what I've seen, the ribbon is strongly
influenced by the formatting palette, in the sense that it is
context-sensitive and adapts to the currently selected object. As for
Windows Vista: since your laptop only has a 20GB hard disk, I assume that it
is an older machine, so it might not even be able to run Vista. If you want
to find out more, there's an interesting article on eWeek
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843945,00.asp>.

--
Michel Bintener
Microsoft MVP
Office:Mac (Word & Entourage)

***Always reply to the newsgroup.***

 

[little_creature]

Michel,
Thanks for the link and your insight.
It's just my thoughts somewhere between solving diferential eq. for my Ph.D.
work and abosolutely idealess state...
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I sometimes do not understand the MS approach -
I cannot imagine that the assistant will have to have up-to-date high-speed
computer to compose letter in WORD.
I did'nt consider to run Vista on my laptop, it's an older one, but I like
it and I do not need more efficient one. I just write papers, perform some
calculation in excel, sometime do color profile work or edit photos but
still It's fast enough for me.
What I meant is that the Ms ideas are some times good, but as their are not
finished to the utmost detail (that's for example the not working keyboard
shortcusts in excel) they are lossing worth. And that§s the main reason I'm
so fascinated by the Mac Office.
Let's wait for the experiences that the new office and vista will bring.
Wishing you all nice weekend

 

[mmmmark]

Thanks, Michel.

We'll have to see how it turns out. As someone who ends up helping train
people on Office (by default, not job description) at our facility, ANY
changes are hard for people to stomach. We have finally got everyone at
least at Office 2002, and are trying to get them to 2003. I.T. will not be
springing for 2007 anytime soon due to the expense of not only the
applications themselves, but the expense of the subsequent rollout and
training.

Mark

 

[Jim Gordon]

Hi Little Creature,

Thank you for adding your comments to this thread.

The MVPs advocated to not change the user interface of Mac Office too
much. In order to be file compatible with Windows Office some changes
might be necessary, but we, too, felt strongly that the Mac Office
interface with the floating palettes is far superior to the Windows
Office. Personally, I detest the Windows Task Pain and love the
Macintosh palettes. It makes no sense to me to even attempt to do a mail
merge in Office Windows, or varieties of OpenOffice for that matter. The
Mac version is the only sensible way to do mail merge.

The shortcut keys are somewhat problematic in that the people who design
operating systems seem to love to map shortcut keys, too. The problem is
that OS shortcuts intercept the keystrokes and they never make it to the
application. I share your frustration that shortcuts have never been
something that OS and application developers keep their hands off. Just
the same, at least on the Mac you can freely make shortcuts for Excel.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

 

[little_creature]

Hi Jim,
Thanks for ensuring that Mac Office will not change the UI too much.
I fully agree with yours

the Mac Office interface with the floating palettes is far superior to the

Windows Office.
I was little afraid...
The formating palette on Mac Office is optional, so you can have it as
addition to standard bars or If you need that part of screen tou can easily
switch the formating palete off whereas on that new PC Office seems that
this is not optional, so that from my point of view could become a crucial
issue on small laptop screens.
Tx or good news, BTW when we can expect the new Mac Office?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

The formating palette on Mac Office is optional, so you can have it as
addition to standard bars or If you need that part of screen tou can easily
switch the formating palete off whereas on that new PC Office seems that
this is not optional, so that from my point of view could become a crucial
issue on small laptop screens.

I personally don't like the formatting palette at all--but I can switch it
off, so not a problem.

The new WinOffice, however, is making the task panes optional, and in fact,
part of the new UI seemed to be driven by the need to get rid of task panes.

More on the size of the new WinOffice UI here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

Tx or good news, BTW when we can expect the new Mac Office?

The next version will be a universal binary. The next MacOffice version
*cannot* come out until after the next WinOffice version, which is scheduled
for the second half of 2006 and called Office 2007. There are a lot of
changes being made for the next Mac version (recoding for Intel, XML
support, and I think *some* interface changes), so my guess is that it will
take at least a year after WinOffice. But the timing is just my personal
guess.