WTF is going on with microsoft office 2007 GUIs?



  • I'm using windowsXP onsite at a contact I've got. Im not a particular fan of it either way, but it doesn't really annoy me once I get it setup, so I don't care. But they installed microsoft office 2007. WTF is going on with the user interfaces? It's so demented with giant buttons and lists. It took me 10 minutes to figure out print was under the giant gay glassy mac rip off button. Something very wrong is going on at microsofts user interface design group.



  • It's called the ribbon, it's been talked about for like 3/4 years now. Enjoy your mug.



  • They're "task ribbons"...  get used to it, it's the wave of the future now that MS have done it.

    Gah...  WTG Lingerance - beat me by seconds....



  •  Glad you could catch up to the year you are in.



  • Its only a WTF until every other app starts using them.

    Which they will.

    I seem to recall that MS invented the icon bar as well (First used in Excel I think).



  • @chebrock said:

    I'm using windowsXP onsite at a contact I've got. Im not a particular fan of it either way, but it doesn't really annoy me once I get it setup, so I don't care. But they installed microsoft office 2007. WTF is going on with the user interfaces? It's so demented with giant buttons and lists. It took me 10 minutes to figure out print was under the giant gay glassy mac rip off button. Something very wrong is going on at microsofts user interface design group.

     

    I love interface criticism.  "the buttons are too big", not for my dad they arn't.  "took me 10 minutes to figure out how to print", it took my dad days to figure out that the print settings were under the File menu, and the File menu is still present to supliment the ribbon.  Its always amusing to see an interface change basically cause someone's world to come crashing down because they're incapable of adapting.



  • It's actually very good and intuitive, but just takes a small bit of getting used to. I can imagine a person who's never used a prior version picking it up a lot faster than the old menus.



  • I know of a company that's been using them for almost 2 years - ever since shortly after MS first started talking about them.  Though theirs is actually a web-app and the ribbon is context-sensitive.



  • Thankfully I have been spared this misery due to my own lack of desire to upgrade any ms crap. I consider myself successful in avoiding the stupidity of early adoption. Unlike the rest.

    Having said that I would adapt easily if it didn't suck. And you have adapted to something that sucks. Please stop embarrasing yourselves with the cliche of programmers who don't understand design. Trust me, it's bad.



  • @chebrock said:

    Trust me, it's bad.
    Buttons organized into groups based on function is bad. You heard it here first.



  • @chebrock said:

    Thankfully I have been spared this misery due to my own lack of desire to upgrade any ms crap. I consider myself successful in avoiding the stupidity of early adoption. Unlike the rest.

    Having said that I would adapt easily if it didn't suck. And you have adapted to something that sucks. Please stop embarrasing yourselves with the cliche of programmers who don't understand design. Trust me, it's bad.

     

    Please go back to trolling /.

    Take Lysis with you.



  • @Welbog said:

    Buttons organized into groups based on function

    That would be called.. re-inventing the menu. Seriously, that's the main complaint I have with it. I'm not blind, so I don't need big, shiny buttons. I prefer to have multiple toolbars with the little 16x16 icons that I can hide or re-organize at my whim. The first thing I do on all new installs is set everything to Small Icons, including the Start menu. If I have to click on a main icon to access a subset of icons, I might as well use the menus.



  • @Jonathan Holland said:

    Its only a WTF until every other app starts using them.

    Which they will.

    Several of our design specs say "Do it the way Word does", so yes, various Office 2007 WTFs may start showing up in our software soon.



  • @Carnildo said:

    Several of our design specs say "Do it the way Word does", so yes, various Office 2007 WTFs may start showing up in our software soon.

     

    Eeek. Of all the MS-Office products Word is definitely the black sheep.


     



  • @medialint said:

    Eeek. Of all the MS-Office products Word is definitely the black sheep.
    I thought Excel was with its lovely copy-paste behavior and other various quicks imported from lotus notes or w/e.



  • @medialint said:

    Eeek. Of all the MS-Office products Word is definitely the black sheep. 

     

    Nope, definately Excel. I'm with Lingerance on this one; I used to teach basic Excel courses and its non-standard copy & paste behaviour confused the hell out of people.

    But on second thoughts, how about InfoPath – isn't that the black sheep? No-one talks about it, and no-one seems to care what it does.



  •  I'm thinking mostly from the VBA perspective. Access has the best implementation and Excel is pretty good but Word is a hybrid bastard child of WordBASIC. I also hate it thinking for me. But for a typical end user you may have a point on Excel. 



  • As much as I hate microsoft and being a slashdot readin, linux using hippy. I love the ribbon, I'ts just so intuitive and it's nice to have a gui that doesn't get in your way.

    Open Office is no longer the first thing I install at a windows.office company computer.



  • I can't believe noone said yet ...

    OpenOffice.org FTW.

    One of the biggest complaints of Office 2007 that I've heard of is that it defaults to the .docx or .xlsx or .pptx file extensions.  You have to go in and change the default so you can share your files with those who have not upgraded yet.  The way I see it, more power to the people who haven't upgraded from 2003 yet, but still, OOo FTW.  

    Disclaimer, I have never used Office 2007, and have only seen short demos of its functionality, but it would take me an annoying amount of time (read:  >30secs) to figure out a lot of things. 



  • Its not "design" that's important, its functionality.  It addresses several key user interface issues, the main one being discoverability.  I'm a graphic designer and a multimedia designer.  I spend a large chunk of my working life designing UIs.  Perhaps YOU shouldn't embarass yourself by latching onto the cliche hardcore nerd who expects everything from microsoft to suck, who become frustrated and furious when confronting change, and probably spends a good deal of time skinning their desktop.  Trust me, you're wrong.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    it would take me an annoying amount of time (read:  >30secs) to figure out a lot of things. 
     

    The first document I edited in Word 2007 was my resumé.  It took me 7 seconds to come up with a nice design for the whole two pages, which I was complemented on a few times by interviewers.  The design was just a built-in Word 2007 template.

     

    I tried OOo after using Office2007, but, I'm sorry...  Menus are a thing from the past.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    it would take me an annoying amount of time (read:  >30secs) to figure out a lot of things. 

     

    Then you must not be as bright as the average bear.



  •  AFAIC OpenOffice also doesn't save as .doc but IIRC .odt?



  • @XIU said:

     AFAIC OpenOffice also doesn't save as .doc but IIRC .odt?
    On the save dialog you can change that, whereas Office 2007 requires a registry change to enable that feature.



  • @Lingerance said:

    @XIU said:
     AFAIC OpenOffice also doesn't save as .doc but IIRC .odt?
    On the save dialog you can change that, whereas Office 2007 requires a registry change to enable that feature.
     

    Or you could just go into 'Options' and change it.... But whatever...

    [URL=http://img155.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wordsaveoptionsbi9.png][IMG]http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/3198/wordsaveoptionsbi9.th.png[/IMG][/URL]



  • Or, if you want to keep your default as the program's default...  the "Save As" feature gives you the option of several formats.

    You can also add the "Compatibility Pack" that lets you open 2007 docs in prior versions.



  •  Exactly my point, it's just as hard to do in Office 2007 then in OOo, with the big difference that you can just download something from microsoft downloads to read/write .docx etc in older office versions.

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

    [EDIT] I missed GalacticCowboy comment, well at least I added something usefull



  • @belgariontheking said:

    One of the biggest complaints of Office 2007 that I've heard of is that it defaults to the .docx or .xlsx or .pptx file extensions.  You have to go in and change the default so you can share your files with those who have not upgraded yet.  The way I see it, more power to the people who haven't upgraded from 2003 yet, but still, OOo FTW.  
     

    But changing that default takes about 10 seconds, even if you've never seen Office 2007 before (at least for myself, a Delphi/C# developer, and the Access developer that shares my office). We have about 40 people in the office here, with a site license for Office XP and 10 user licenses for Office 2007. I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to play with the Office 2007 version, and I actually find it pretty nice to work with (granted, I don't do a lot with it; mostly dumping data to Excel for ad hoc reports).



  • @Lingerance said:

    On the save dialog you can change that, whereas Office 2007 requires a registry change to enable that feature.
     

    Wrong. For one time changes, you can do it in th save dialog by choosing the filetype. For persistently saving to older formats, it's a simple checkbox in a dialog.

    I know you're a big Linux/OO fan, but spreading FUD isn't right. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk about it; it makes you appear pretty lame. 



  • @KenW said:

    I know you're a big Linux/OO fan, but spreading FUD isn't right. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk about it; it makes you appear pretty lame. 
     

    Thank you. I wanted to say that, but everytime I do it turns into huge flame war. Between Lingerance and Dlikhten we have an overwhelming amount of anti-MS FUD all the time.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Thank you. I wanted to say that, but everytime I do it turns into huge flame war. Between Lingerance and Dlikhten we have an overwhelming amount of anti-MS FUD all the time.
     

    You're welcome. And, just for the record, your list forgot our one and only mega-anti-MS everything FUD spouter asuffield. Mustn't forget the biggest troll of them all. 



  • @KenW said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Thank you. I wanted to say that, but everytime I do it turns into huge flame war. Between Lingerance and Dlikhten we have an overwhelming amount of anti-MS FUD all the time.
     

    You're welcome. And, just for the record, your list forgot our one and only mega-anti-MS everything FUD spouter asuffield. Mustn't forget the biggest troll of them all. 

     

    Good point, but I consider him the same as Lysis in most cases. I just ignore them, no important/intelligent content ever comes from them.

    Hence my beloved 'Just more asuffield rhetoric' tag.



  • @chebrock said:

    WTF is going on with the user interfaces?

     It's called "progress". Microsoft have this bad habit of attempting it every few releases. Their competition is similarly agitated about it, albeit for a different reason. ;)

     I hated it for about a month. Then I got used to it. Then I went and tried to use Office 2K3, and was all "OMGWTF this sux0rz".

     Same thing with Vista. Hated it for a month, got used to it, tried to go back - not happening.

     



  • @CDarklock said:

    Same thing with Vista. Hated it for a month, got used to it, tried to go back - not happening.

    That's interesting. I use Win2K at work, WinXP, Vista and KDE (yes, this isn't an OS - we're talking about GUIs) at home. There's nothing that I have in one that I can't live without in any other. I can switch between them no trouble. Do you use Vista exclusively? I'm wondering because it might be that I don't use it exclusively that I have such an easy time going back to other systems.



  • @Welbog said:

    Do you use Vista exclusively?

    I still have one XP machine I use occasionally, since I have some pro audio stuff that doesn't have Vista drivers, but it frustrates me. I prefer to access it over the network as just another remote storage location whenever possible.

    If you had asked me what the most important feature of Vista was before I used it all the time, I would have said "security" or "stability". Today, I would say "search boxes". The ability to just type in a box and search has become so integral to my computing experience, I simply can't function properly without it. Initially, it was Google that made this such a great thing to have, but Vista puts search boxes in places Google really can't. 

    I'm uncertain whether I think that's a good thing objectively, in the competitive-market sense, but on my desktop where it makes my life easier? Yeah, it's a good thing.



  • @CDarklock said:

    @Welbog said:

    Do you use Vista exclusively?

    I still have one XP machine I use occasionally, since I have some pro audio stuff that doesn't have Vista drivers, but it frustrates me. I prefer to access it over the network as just another remote storage location whenever possible.

    If you had asked me what the most important feature of Vista was before I used it all the time, I would have said "security" or "stability". Today, I would say "search boxes". The ability to just type in a box and search has become so integral to my computing experience, I simply can't function properly without it. Initially, it was Google that made this such a great thing to have, but Vista puts search boxes in places Google really can't. 

    I'm uncertain whether I think that's a good thing objectively, in the competitive-market sense, but on my desktop where it makes my life easier? Yeah, it's a good thing.

     

    I can change your life again, let me introduce you to SSDS...



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @chebrock said:

    Thankfully I have been spared this misery due to my own lack of desire to upgrade any ms crap. I consider myself successful in avoiding the stupidity of early adoption. Unlike the rest.

    Having said that I would adapt easily if it didn't suck. And you have adapted to something that sucks. Please stop embarrasing yourselves with the cliche of programmers who don't understand design. Trust me, it's bad.

     

    Please go back to trolling /.

    Take Lysis with you.

     

     

    You call everyone a troll and you have 928345734 times the amount of posts as everyone else.  STFU. 


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lysis said:

    You call everyone a troll

    Technically incorrect. Are you on the right sort of  $MESSAGE_BOARD?

    @Lysis said:

    and you have 928345734 times the amount of posts as everyone else.  STFU. 

    Hyperbole. Regardless, would it change how you think you are viewed on here if a few others called you a troll?

    You're a troll.



  • @PJH said:

    You're a troll.

    I don't think so. I think he's more of a Flumph.



  • @PJH said:

    @Lysis said:

    You call everyone a troll

    Technically incorrect. Are you on the right sort of  $MESSAGE_BOARD?

    @Lysis said:

    and you have 928345734 times the amount of posts as everyone else.  STFU. 

    Hyperbole. Regardless, would it change how you think you are viewed on here if a few others called you a troll?

    You're a troll.

     

     Message board? My kitty senses smell an AOLER!!!!1!!!!



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