Office two thouand and why ?

December 17, 2008 8:05 PM

In Office 2007 Microsoft has changed the user interface radically. I'm interested to find material which describes why they did that ?

It seems to me that they've made life significantly more painful for existing users and I'm genuinely puzzled by what their motivation was. I also imagine that their large corporate clients would not be made more enthusiastic to upgrade if their staff now have to deal with a completely new UI.

I'm not looking for a MS flamefest but genuine descriptions of why MS thought it was a good idea to throw the old user interface away (the type of thing you sometimes see in The Old New Thing).

I realise there would be any amount of marketing BS about why it would be great for customers etc but has anyone seen a non-suit rationale for why they might have done this ?

(Just a bit of background here everytime I use it I find myself thinking 'was this simply gross incompetence or was it rational ?' - I know it sounds crazy but I'd feel so much happier if I could think it was a rational, albeit - in my view - stupid, decision !)

posted by southof40 to computers & internet (25 comments total)

Why.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:10 PM on December 17, 2008 [2 favorites]

Office 2003 does everything. In terms of productivity, it's pretty much perfect, and Word 2007 doesn't do anything new. How could Microsoft persuade corporate users to upgrade to a new productivity package along with Vista? If you want to sell more product, you present consumers with entirely new features. The changes are mostly cosmetic, although I suppose the ribbon is a better interface, once you get used to it. But I was a Word 2003 power user, and it's back to square on with 2007.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:22 PM on December 17, 2008

Link to all Jensen Harris' "Why the UI?" posts. (Start at the bottom.)
posted by nicwolff at 8:23 PM on December 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

(Same blog Joe linked to.)
posted by nicwolff at 8:24 PM on December 17, 2008

I thought the same thing when I switched from Lotus 1-2-3 to excel. Where was my backslash file retrieve to open a file? I got used to the new UI after I stopped fighting it. Regardless, the new Office 2007 UI sucks.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:27 PM on December 17, 2008

Regardless, the new Office 2007 UI sucks.

While admittedly uninvested in the old interface, I found the ribbon a success on its own terms and a pleasurable way to work. FWIW, it made styles easy enough that I've finally started using them.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:34 PM on December 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

I think it you've never used Office before, the Ribbon is much more intuitive. But it is quite a bit harder to get used to for people who have already invested lots of time in using Office. That said, I learned to adapt to it rather quickly and now greatly prefer it to the older UI. And, for certain apps, like Access, which hadn't seen a revamp in a long, long time, it's quite a large improvement. And I think graphing and pivot tables in Excel are both greatly improved in this version.

A lot of the old UI is still lurking in the shadows, if you prefer to use it (the dialog box launchers at the bottom, right-hand corner of many icon groups on the Ribbon fire up the same dialog boxes that were in Office 2003).

If you want something closer to the old UI, most of the open source Office clones take that route.
posted by wheat at 9:43 PM on December 17, 2008

First off your question sets up the question asking for negative answers. Your use of "stupid" and "incompetence" are going to color your the answers you receive.

Why the move from DOS to Windows. Hell, we all memorized the DOS commands and were pretty quick with the old shortcuts and macros, but someone of your age (which im guessing at) would faint if forced to use a DOS machine at work. Yet there's no shortage of old timers who hate losing the command prompt. Heck many of them have migrated to linux just to get away from the point and click GUI.

That's pretty much what the ribbon is. Its a more visual way of presenting options instead of the mess of drop downs and menus you've memorized. None of that was very logical and after rolling out Office 2k7 to 150 people earlier this year I was surprised at how some of my more technophobe users were actually finding things. Unlike you, they never memorized the old arcane system and found the new system to be easy to navigate.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:20 PM on December 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

I've got Office 2008 running on my 2.0Ghz CoreDuo iMac and it's slower than Office.X from ca. 2001 running in emulation via Rosetta.

My sneaking suspicion is that this is due to Office being a ground-up rewrite in C# and that there's a CLR runtime in the product now. I lack the interest to verify this but that would make sense to me.
posted by troy at 10:34 PM on December 17, 2008

KokuRuy gets part of it. Customers weren't upgrading. Corporate had been buying upgrades to preserve their upgrade discount pricing, but only deploying ever other version. Microsoft had recently wheeled-and-dealed to get their corp customers to sign on to a sort of subscription bundle of a wide range of MS software, but both sides probably knew that the status quo pattern of Windows desktop and Office upgrades were not going to justify the same price when it came time to renegotiate.

So they had nothing to loose. If Office 2008 was more of the same, they'd be less and less able to use the value of office to justify the cost of their licensing program, and it might be worse than that, customers might start looking for other options for everything else. So, they went for it. If Office 2008 didn't reinvigorate the franchise, they'd be no worse off than they would have been with a more conservative upgrade.
posted by Good Brain at 11:39 PM on December 17, 2008

My sneaking suspicion is that this is due to Office being a ground-up rewrite in C# and that there's a CLR runtime in the product now. I lack the interest to verify this but that would make sense to me.

You would be exceptionally wrong about this. It would be WONDERFUL for us devs if Office2007 was .NET based, but unfortunately it's still using large amounts of COM/ActiveX and C++ code.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:57 PM on December 17, 2008

That old office code is really a millstone around their necks. They're never going to be able to get rid of it, because it's so complicated. Look at the new "XML" document formats, they're basically mapped to pretty crazy stuff because it needs to match closely to Office's existing memory model in order to implement all of the features.
posted by delmoi at 1:07 AM on December 18, 2008

That video Joe Beese linked to is excellent, by the way. It's a testament to just how deeply they thought about the interface, how it should work, and how to make it better for millions of people.

It's a shame the MacBU didn't learn any of those lessons and instead made a cargo cult ribbon ... with a traditional toolbar stuck on top.
posted by bonaldi at 5:09 AM on December 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

To sum up what the developers have said since they announced it: Office, especially Word and Excel, did a lot of things, but not much of it actually got used. After research and focus groups, the developers felt like this was because the features were not exposed well enough. The Ribbon UI was supposed to help by exposing context-sensitive features to the user.

I believe this answer in part, but I also agree that it was probably a move to try to get more users to upgrade. I actually like Office 2007 a lot, and I was happy to see the upgrade.
posted by joshrholloway at 6:46 AM on December 18, 2008

I can tell you that as a power user of Office 2003 (especially Word), I can't stand the ribbon interface. I had customized 2003 so that all of the commands which I regularly used were on my toolbars. Now I have to hunt and search through the stupid tabs to find the commands I want. And usually I guess wrongly about which category I need to look in.

I think that MS, at least in part, recognizes how bad the interface is (or perhaps that there's whiners like me) because they released an embedded search engine to help you find stuff.

Also, there is some software that you can buy to customize the interface somewhat (but you're still limited to choosing palettes and not individual commands). The add-in also displays a not-quite version of the 2003 interface (that's not customizable itself).

And of course, there's the "quick access tool bar" which you can add commands to, but you're limited to 80 or so and can't have multiple rows or group them very effectively.

If they had created the new interface but hidden an option in there to have the 2003 interface, I would be so much happier.

Every day I have to fight with this damn software.

Blah!
posted by reddot at 6:47 AM on December 18, 2008

It's a testament to just how deeply they thought about the interface, how it should work, and how to make it better for millions of people.

Or, it's a testament to how badly a committee can design something when they have misguided developers heavily preinvested in their own design preference playing at being UI specialists.

Put someone new down in front of a Word 2007 doc.

Tell him to print the fucking file.
posted by felix at 6:57 AM on December 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

I think it you've never used Office before, the Ribbon is much more intuitive. But it is quite a bit harder to get used to for people who have already invested lots of time in using Office. That said, I learned to adapt to it rather quickly and now greatly prefer it to the older UI.

this.

for a brand new user, the ribbon is MUCH more intuitive. it's just us old power users who had everything memorized that had a hard time adjusting. but, it took me about a month of adjusting, and now i shudder when going back to 2003 on other machines. it takes so much longer to do things (like formatting) than it does in 2007.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 7:36 AM on December 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

bonaldi writes "It's a shame the MacBU didn't learn any of those lessons and instead made a cargo cult ribbon ... with a traditional toolbar stuck on top."

Not to mention a buggy-as-shit back end, no VBS, and insisting that the "toolbox" is useful even though it has 95% of the commands you'll ever need jammed into one frigging panel that helpfully auto-collapses itself the second it loses focus, increasing the number of clicks it takes for me to do damn near anything. If you are having a hard time getting used to the Ribbon please, by all means, try using Office Mac for a while.

The Ribbon interface was painful to use for the first few days. Now, every time I fire up Office 08 on my Mac I wish I were at home, on my Windows box, running Office 07. Actually, the Ribbon in many ways feels more like a Mac app UI than a Windows one - no more floating toolbars, everything on one chunky tabbed UI element. I just cannot understand why the Mac BU didn't adopt this. But I also can't understand why so many of the features in Office Mac are so severely limited (Why can't I view "styles in use"? It's either "all styles" or "available styles", WTF?)

If there is a god, please ask him/her/it to convince Microsoft to unify the goddamn code base for Office, so that we can finally have cross-platform feature parity. If Adobe can do it for their software, so can Microsoft.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:36 AM on December 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

For the power users, I found the Search Commands tool handy. The one flaw is that you have to reload/repair it occasionally because it disappears but that is small inconvenience for finding features immediately.
posted by jadepearl at 7:45 AM on December 18, 2008

Power users don't use toolbars.

Not only do all of the ctrl- keystrokes still work, most of the alt- keystrokes still work. Additionally, they have done a better job sharing keystrokes across the suite. For example, Ctrl-F2, long the keystroke to invoke print preview in Word, now works in Excel and PowerPoint. This is progress.

Not including a close document x-button in Word or PowerPoint but having it in Excel seems like a more egregious inconsistency. Of course, a power user would just use Ctrl-F4. It is easy to nitpick and fight progress but the reality is that it is progress.

The way that Word 2007 handles MLA/Chicago/etc references is amazing and any serious student could benefit from it.

Also, I agree with damn dirty ape
posted by geekyguy at 10:21 AM on December 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

Word does handle the references really well, except on Mac where it mangles the fuck out of them. Seriously, Word 07 is so much better it's not even funny. I've spent a lot of time shifting a lot of words in most major word/text processors over the years, and I think it's easily the best I've ever used. But on Mac I've ended up back with Nisus, like it's 1992 or something.

Felix: did you watch the video? Either way, first-time discoverability can't be the be-all and end-all of UI design. Nobody is going to have trouble printing second time around, unlike 1000s of the operations in 2003, where learning the incantations and meaningless icons required was like reading runes, until memorized.
posted by bonaldi at 11:52 AM on December 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

@JoeBeese + @nicwolff - thanks just the sort of stuff I was looking for.

@GoodBrain - interesting take on MS motivation I hadn't thought of it that way , certainly sounds like you're a long way towards the truth.

@jadepearl - thanks for that. I didn't know "Search Commands" existed I think it will be really useful.

@damn dirty ape - "...but someone of your age (which im guessing at)..." - hey I love your guesses ... if only it were true :-)

thanks to all for an interesting thread.
posted by southof40 at 2:10 PM on December 18, 2008

Felix: did you watch the video? Either way, first-time discoverability can't be the be-all and end-all of UI design. Nobody is going to have trouble printing second time around, unlike 1000s of the operations in 2003, where learning the incantations and meaningless icons required was like reading runes, until memorized.

I am not a UI designer, but if you're suggesting that newbies to Office 2007 be required to go watch painfully depressing self-congratulatory development team blogger videos in order to understand how to print a file in a word processor, I think I have a good idea where the problem is.

First-time discoverability isn't the be-all end-all, but some sort of user interface that makes some kind of goddamn sense would be nice. Like making printing front and center in an application that, you know, is about putting documents together, instead of hiding behind a shiny glossy chrome interface element that is not shaped like, nor has any relation to, any previously seen user interface element that Microsoft or any other company has ever produced.

Similarly, which tab of the stupid bar do you go to in order to search your data in Excel? Your choices are Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, View.

Let's try process of elimination. It's not Insert, and probably not Page Layout. Most likely Data, since that's about sorting, filtering, manipulation, right? Wrong. OK, Review? No, that somehow involves a commenting interface, and some obviously misplaced security features. View? No, that seems to contain duplicate Page Layout features, and some visual stuff. So where the fuck is search your data in Excel?

Oh, the 'Home' tab. Yes, that seems the most likely place to put it, because when I want to search my data, I shouldn't look on the data tab, instead I should look on the 'Miscellaneous catch-all' tab. Great.

Microsoft is eternally the least competent player in the software game, and its engineers are tasked, mandated, and compensated with ensuring that will forever be the case. They can put out a thousand videos about how dedicated and focused they were on making sure they finally broke out of the mold, but at the end of the day they created a product, and the product is comically, laughably, unusable. And why is that? Because the real actual true reason for doing what they did has nothing to do with user experience, and instead has everything to do with 'make it shiny and different so we can charge again.' Period. And that is reflected, as reality dictates, in the end result.
posted by felix at 7:49 AM on December 19, 2008 [3 favorites]

but if you're suggesting that newbies to Office 2007 be required to go watch painfully depressing self-congratulatory development team blogger videos in order to understand how to print a file in a word processor

No, I'm suggesting that people who throw around sentences like "it's a testament to how badly a committee can design something when they have misguided developers heavily preinvested in their own design preference playing at being UI specialists" should work out whether that's actually the case or not, rather than going on their hunches. There's no evidence anywhere for any of that.

instead of hiding behind a shiny glossy chrome interface element that is not shaped like, nor has any relation to, any previously seen user interface element that Microsoft or any other company has ever produced.

No relation? It still seems pretty much point-and-click to me, which is a fundamental relation. It is a giant glowing thing though, which positively invites clicks. And as Word is spreading round the world as Word does, people are learning it perfectly. I suppose it makes less sense than looking under "File" for printing?

Oh, the 'Home' tab. Yes, that seems the most likely place to put it, because when I want to search my data, I shouldn't look on the data tab, instead I should look on the 'Miscellaneous catch-all' tab. Great.

Hang on, you want printing to be front and centre (which, by the way it appears to be, what with the printer icon right at the top of the screen but that might just be my install), but you don't want searching to be right up there in the default Home tab?

Seriously, I've got precious little time for MS either, and the woe they inflict upon the industry and users is legion. But if you can't see leagues of improvement between 2003's row upon row of buttons and 2007, I'm not sure where to begin and strongly suspect prejudice has a role here. I don't know why that prejudice doesn't extend to 2003. How you can defend the button and sidebar explosion of that dog? The old organisation was shit, and arguing against that is so bizarre it sounds like Stockholm syndrome. Seriously, they have empirical proof! Nobody knew how to find a quarter of the functionality in 2003.

Should MS have been forever bound to an interface that had steadily evolved into a nightmare merely because your intuition is that it is "comically, laughably, unusable", an intuition contrary to the thousands of studies they carried out? You're like the guy grousing that Ford has put three pedals on the floor for make you operate your horseless carriage, instead of the clearly and manifestly right way to do it, which is with the throttle and brakes as a lever by your hand as we've always had.
posted by bonaldi at 9:13 AM on December 19, 2008 [3 favorites]

first-time discoverability can't be the be-all and end-all of UI design

Theoretically, at least, first-time discovery is about the least important part of the design, because presumably, if users respond positively to your design then they will be using it again, genius. Which means you should really be designing for the every-day users and don't break the #1 rule of UI design: don't fuck with the user's expectations. Buttons and tabs and right-click context menus might not seem intuitively obvious, but by sheer weight of exposure we've grown accustomed to how they should or should not work.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:16 AM on April 6, 2009