Many of you will already have seen the preview screenshots of Microsoft’s next release of Office. Currently referred to as Office 12, it will likely arrive in late 2006.
Microsoft have been busy of late. Windows Vista is finally showing progress (all the features from MacOSX are just about in) and they’ve recently been plugging away at the new revision of Office. Screenshots are emerging and quite unexpectedly, I’m extremely impressed.
Microsoft have been criticised rather a lot over recent years because Office has evolved very little. In fact, the word evolution seems far to strong. Office 12 changes this rather. It’s the first piece of genuinely unique and innovative UI I can recall seeing from Microsoft for a few years. I guess OneNote was a bit different in appearance, although it was really just a port of Word:Mac’s Notebook functionality.
Office 12 perhaps demonstrates a realisation that MS have been sitting on their laurels and the first screenshots look like it’s going to try and really change the way people use the software.
Before I continue (and before some pedantic type jumps straight to the comments) I know that a handful of pre-beta screenshots is not a very reliable way to judge to functionality, quality or box-colour of software. However, whilst the preview screenshots of Windows Vista have been largely underwhelming, offering minimal clues as to what using Vista will really be like, there’s something striking about the new Office interface. Please bear with me.
Vista’s screenshots are bad to judge because you have to guess at huge parts of the functionality. Thus, responding with Vista rules! or Vista sucks and is just copying all Apple’s progress from the past five years! are both equally useless and unsubstantiated phrases. The reason I think it’s worth talking about the Office screenshots is that these screens leave much less to the imagination. You can clearly see where the old functionality has been altered and you can immediately see how the new UI is supposed to be used. That doesn’t mean it will work intuitively (though if it doesn’t then someone in the Office team will need a good slapping) and it doesn’t mean that Office 12 won’t somehow suck, but I think it’s a more solid foundation on which to base an opinion.
Disclaimer aside, here’s why the new interface might just see Microsoft leap ahead of the competition.
Right now, Office contains a lot of functionality. Some would call it bloat, but I’m fairly sure that all of the functionality is used by different groups of people in different places. The collaboration stuff that ties into SharePoint, for example, is useless to the home user but yet invaluable to a team with the misfortune of a SharePoint deployment. Then there’s the functionality for reviewing changes, drawing, email, layout and inserting external content into documents. It’s all munged together into the File/View/Tools menu structure and free-form toolbars.
What Office 12 is doing is to say: Why do you need the drawing tools when you’re not drawing? Why do you need writing tools available when you are?. And that’s it. That’s the entire UI change in a single sentence and it’s bloody brilliant.
Tabs along the top of the application determine which tools are available to you. Choose Write in Word and you have access to fonts and formatting controls. Choose Layout and you get the page orientation options. Both useful sets of functionality but what the Office 12 team have done is to logically group them by context. It seems painfully simple now that it exists, but no-one had done it before. OpenOffice.org just copied the established Office 97 look, so did all the knock-off suites.
First-time users will see clearly named tabs and should need very little instruction on how to start using the new Word. Existing users should take very little time to get accustomed to the new layout and based on the grief I have trying to find functionality in Word’s existing labyrinth of menus, I can’t see how it won’t boost productivity.
Office 12 is also confirmed to have integrated support for PDF (theoretically superior to existing PDF printers and if Joe Clark bullies them enough, may allow for accessible PDF tagging too), plus the new Open XML formats should allow for some quite fancy document extensibility. Office 12 looks like a genuinely tasty proposition.
There’s loads of further reading on Office 12 thanks to Microsoft’s new love for blogging. A lot of it I only discovered after writing all this so my effort may now be completely redundant.