Microsoft Office 2007
Office Vista - a first look
Saturday, May 13, 2006 by Draginol | Discussion: Windows Software
The next major version of Microsoft Office, (Office 2007 but what I'll affectionately call "Office Vista") is the single biggest change to come to Microsoft Office since, well, as far back as I can remember. The problem the Microsoft team was coming up against is that Office had gotten so complicated, so "bloated" and so complicated that most new feature requests made by users were for features already part of the package.
The new Office includes a new user interface across all the programs that make up the suite. The title bar has been altered to have its own unique glass style with buttons that make use of the most common features of the application. The menu bar has been largely jettisoned and replaced by what are being called "Ribbons". Until I saw the most recent version of the beta, I was skeptical as to whether this was going to work out. But having seen it in action, I am converted. It really is slick. Gone are the "we know what you want" type UI behaviors and in its place are interfaces that streamline the entire experience.
The ribbons allow users to do the kinds of things that most people want to do with as little work as they need. Power users in particular can be happy that there are tons of options that can greatly speed up common tasks.
The next version of Office will run both Windows Vista and Windows XP. On Windows XP, it looks a bit different (and in my opinion) quite fantastic.
As the above screenshot implies, blog posting (source: Microsoft's Joe Friend - not under NDA) is one of the features of Microsoft Word. While not good news necessarily to the third party programs that allow people to compose blog posts, it is good news to most users. When a user decides to create a blog with Microsoft Word, it takes care of the uploading of images and everything else to make the entire thing relatively painless.
And don't worry about what you upload being a bunch of whacky HTML, the Office team is working to ensure that what gets uploaded is the cleanest possible HTML.
The release date for Microsoft Office 2007 has not been announced officially. But beta 2 is due "soon". I don't know about you but I'm very excited. For years, Microsoft has kind of sat on its laurels with Office, adding bloat and complexity to it. Now, Microsoft seems very serious about going back and reinventing the world's most popular suite of office applications.
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Reply #22 Thursday, May 25, 2006 12:03 AM
Reply #24 Thursday, May 25, 2006 3:57 PM
Reply #25 Friday, May 26, 2006 12:59 AM
Hmph, I say. I like my WYSIWYG best. It is pure-DOM compatible with any DOM browser. Clipboard functionality is a nicety for some browsers. It the event of a completely non-compatible browser it falls back to a text box. But it's designed to work with anything supporting DOM level 1 and a bit of level 2. And the code is pristine. I've done a lot of work to make sure it is, for lack of a better word, perfect. Ex, say you have:
[p][em]Hello[/em], [em]World[/em][/p]
and you bold the space, it will immediately change to
[p][em]Hello[/em], [em]World[/em][/p]
Also, if you then choose to debold the word World:
[p][em]Hello[/em], [em]World[/em]
So whitespace is irrelevant to it (meaning no more annoying [p]Hello World[/p] which I've had to endure too many people doing).
The only flaw is that malformed HTML will be royally messed with, which is why an HTML editting mode is not provided by default.
The best part is that because it is rendering engine agnostic, I could write a program which is a shell for Gecko, KHTML, Trident, etc. and just swap engines while still having the exact same UI. Unfortunately, I'm in the process of re-writing the system, but the prototype (which was evolutionary in design) has been tested to work with Gecko and Trident. All components were compatible with KHTML except Clipboard [which was mimicked using a browser-internal clipboard, and I fully intend to write a clipboard:/ KIO slave to allow local access to the clipboard]. Seriously, everyone buy my program (when it comes out). Because I love coding stuff. Should, hopefully, be done my three major projects by the end of summer.
P.S. Gad, fix this awefull comment system that won't accept & g t ; or & l t ;
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Reply #21 Wednesday, May 24, 2006 8:49 PM