Office 2007: On Its Way

It startles me to say this, but the upcoming Microsoft product I'm most excited about isn't Zune or Windows Vista--it's Office 2007. Office suite upgrades have been so mundane for so long--there's no more mature software category on the planet--that I kind of expected we'd never see another one that was more than moderately interesting. But Office 2007 is a great big deal.

I've heard the notion advanced that it's the most significant Microsoft Office upgrade since Office 97, which would be saying a lot. But--and again, I'm surprised at what I'm saying here--I think that might be too conservative, given that Office 97, in initial form, had some major downsides. (It introduced some big file-format headaches, fixed only after the fact, and unleashed the insult to the intelligence known as Clippy.)

As my colleague Narasu Rebbapragada blogged this morning, Microsoft announced today that it's finished working on the suite and is ready to roll it out. Microsoft's slow-motion introduction plans for Office and Vista involve the two packages getting a business-oriented launch event on November 30th, with availability to corporate customers in that timeframe, and then a more consumery launch event at the end of January to coincide with availability of the software in boxed form and preinstalled on new PCs.

In other words, it'll be a few more weeks until most people can get their hands on Office 2007 in finished form. But I've been using various betas for months, and am now working with a nearly-final edition which Microsoft provided to us last week. And I'm just plain impressed with the extent to which Microsoft has made it easier to get the Office apps to do everything they're capable of. Certain computer magazines have been known to mock the very idea of Microsoft innovation, but Office 2007 is one of the most genuinely innovative pieces of software I've used in a long time.

As we've reported in multiple early looks, Office 2007 scraps the menu-and-toolbar interface that dates back a couple of decades in favor of the Ribbon, a new way of doing things that's sort of a menu/toolbar hybrid. Both the Ribbon and other aspects of the Office interface are far more likely to show you what a feature will do to your document than describe it with words. And there's lots of good stuff for folks who aren't graphics experts but who do want to make their documents look slick and professional. It's an interface that feels like it was designed to harness what computers can do in 2006--a VGUI (Very Graphical User Interface) rather than the SPTHGUI (Still Pretty Text-Heavy Graphical User Interface) that almost all applications sport.

Microsoft has also gotten around to fixing some things which were unaccountably still issues in Office 2003. It's always staggered me how difficult it is to get tabular information from Excel into PowerPoint without formatting hassles. (How long has the company had to make this presumably rather common task easy?) In Office 2007, it works just fine.

I don't mean to suggest that the new suite is a slam dunk. People who already know how to do what they want in an earlier version and who don't have any ambition to do more may not find the cost and learning curve worth it. On the other end of the spectrum, Office gurus who have heavily tweaked the apps may be frustrated by the new versions, which remove a pretty high percentage of the customization options that the old interface offered. And it's yet to be seen whether Microsoft's new XML-based file formats will matter--while Microsoft has a pretty good strategy in place to help users of earlier versions of the suite use files saved in the new formats, the simplest way to spare your coworkers headaches is to save your stuff in the old, pervasive file formats.

But like I say, for the first time in years, the list of reasons why a typical serious Office user might want to step up to the new version is long and compelling. I'm a big fan of browser-based productivity tools--at the moment, I'm nearly as likely to do my word processing in Google Docs as I am in Word--but Office 2007 is, among other things, tangible evidence that desktop software can still do things that purely Web-based tools can't. It's going to be awhile until any productivity tools that live in a browser match the best things about Office's new interface.

Stay tuned for our full review...

Comments

In fact, Office 2007 Menus and Toolbars could be show again. Just download and install Classic Menu for Office 2007 from
http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice , you will see the Main Menu Bar, Standard Toolbar, Formatting Toolbar in Excel 2007, Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.

huntgold

February 27, 2007

5:57 PM PT

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