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Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon |
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Introduction - January 2007 at Time of Office 2007 Launch
Microsoft have completely changed
the user interface in Office 2007. The
new user interface is called the ‘Ribbon’, and it replaces all the menus
and toolbars in previous versions of Office.
With several million beta users there has been lots of feedback, and, my
sense is that it’s generally neutral to positive.
An example of a very positive review is below:
My experience has been that Word went from being frustrating and
confusing
to fairly straightforward to use. PowerPoint went, in a single upgrade,
from being the worst widely-available presentation software to being the
best.
Here is a more mixed review:
Even though the many aspects of the Ribbon present a significant
change for
experienced Office users, the advantages of the new user interface far
outweigh the retraining this new feature will entail. I was initially
very
skeptical about this, but the Ribbon offers so many visual cues and
smart
feature improvements that I think experienced Office users will not have
much difficulty adapting to it. ...But... Why couldn’t Microsoft leave
at
least a semblance of the old menu system in Office 2007 to help people
who
have extensive classic-menu muscle memory? ... It seems to me that
Microsoft may have drunk its own Kool-Aid a bit too much when it decided
to
drop entirely the "legacy" classic menu system. It might have been
better
to make that an option that some of us could turn back on...
With no option to revert to 'classic menus' Microsoft are gambling on
users
quickly learning to love the new menu system. If users reacted to the
Office 2007 Ribbon in the same way as they did to the now dead Office
Assistant, Microsoft would be forced to rush out a classic menus patch
in a
humiliating climb down.
Kingsley Joseph writes:
Short and sweet, the Ribbon and new UI in Microsoft Office 2007 is
the
ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software... To clarify
the
point: Microsoft Office is a bigger business than most of us probably
realize. Office generated $11.5 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2005,
and it'll exceed that in the current calendar year. But conservatively,
you're talking about a billion dollars a month.
Now, most of us who like to prognosticate and pontificate about software
like to say things like "It'd be easy to just..." or "It's trivial to
add..." but the thing is, most of us aren't betting our entire careers
on
the little tweaks and changes we'd like to make to our productivity
applications. Try making a mistake that jeopardizes a business that
makes
$250 million a week...
Companies as large as Microsoft don't take bet-the-company style risks.
What's more, the market for third-party applications on top of Office is
bigger than most stand-alone software companies. There's a real risk of
jeopardizing those line-of-business customizations that most large
organizations use alongside Office.
Is Microsoft right to be taking this kind of risk? Hold on, there is
another angle...
By making the Office 2007 significantly different from Office XP upgrade
sales should be much higher. It’s harder and harder to add useful new
features to Word, so concentrating on user friendliness and aesthetic
design makes a lot of sense. Instead of being just another upgrade,
there
is now an enormous difference between the old and new versions.
"One of the biggest challenges... is to fight that perception that
old
versions of software are good enough... Our business model of course
allows
you to keep using Office 2003 - the software doesn't really expire, "
said
Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Business
Division.
In addition to the upgrade benefits, after having the market all to
itself
for many years Microsoft is now facing real competition for the first
time.
No one can compete with Microsoft by building better desktop
applications,
so now competitors give away ‘good enough’ versions for free. Sun
Microsystems turned it’s unsuccessful Star Office into the free Open
Office, and maintains it with a 100 strong team of paid software
engineers
and a number of volunteer programmers (today Office runs at about 400m
users worldwide and Open Office is said to have perhaps as many as 40m
users).
Microsoft are allowing other vendors to use the Ribbon for free
subject
to a no-compete with Office clause….
The [Ribbon] license is available for applications on any platform,
except
for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications
that currently have the new UI (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
Outlook
and Access).
The golden scenario Microsoft will be hoping for is to see widespread
adoption of new menu systems in other applications. By enormously
increasing
the complexity of windows GUIs it will be harder for open source to
remain
‘good enough’ to compete with commercial software.
In summary, the radical new Ribbon GUI is not just about improving
Office
2007 usability. It's also about giving users a reason to upgrade and
differentiating their product from similar looking competitors.
The cynical will say that the new interface is actually worse, that
Microsoft even knows this, and they are including it only to drive
sales.
The optimists will say Microsoft’s interface R&D has paid off with an
innovative and exciting new GUI, and Microsoft is bravely and boldly
backing it.
If the Ribbon fails it very much calls into question Microsoft’s
judgment.
Feedback looks OK but Microsoft’s GUI record is not perfect. Office
Assistant was a flop, Adaptive Menus, Web Folders and file extension
hiding
were all bad ideas, and experienced users immediately disable them.
The success or failure of the new Office 2007 Ribbon will have a large
and
long term impact on moral, image and revenue at Microsoft. Investors in
Microsoft should be on tender hooks…
Office 2007 Sales Are Nothing Short of
Spectacular - Jan 2008
From
www.microsoft-watch.com
For now, Office 2007 sales are nothing short of spectacular.... For
the first 10
full months in the market, Office 2007 had a 137.4 percent increase in
unit volume
and a 118 percent increase in dollar volume compared to Office 2003...
Office 2007's
success is much bigger than retail. According to a CDW study published
this week,
by early November, 24 percent of enterprises had already deployed Office
2007.
So far it's a storming success, but in the longer term upgrade sales are
less important
than the number of people switching to Open Office. It would be
interesting to know if
Open Office market share is increasing - especially in education,
government and
business. In other words, behind these great upgrade sales how many ribbon
hating
customers
have permanently abandoned Office?
My
Ribbon Review - April 2007 - Update
Resources:
Microsoft articles about the Office 2007 Ribbon
My first shock came looking for the new edit, replace menu in Excel – I
couldn’t actually find it! By changing all the menu titles and menu
contents, the Ribbon renders all those years of experience with Windows
Applications and Office Applications somewhat useless. If this was
shareware I would uninstall immediately, but coming as it did from
Microsoft, I persevered.
The Ribbon also lays menu items out by popularity rather than by logical
connection. For example, I read a Microsoft article about watermarks in
Word saying that research shows it is a feature people love when they
discover it, but which they rarely know exists. So the developers gave
it a
prominent place in the new Ribbon, whereas with the old logical menu
structure they were limited to put it in the format, then background,
then
watermark submenu. So accidentally finding watermarks is now easier than
before, but I found deliberately finding the edit replace menu is that
much
harder!
In fact the edit replace menu now appears on the far right of the ‘home’
menu, after the font name, size, color, alignment etc options. Clearly
edit, replace is popular, hence it’s place on the first home menu - but
for
the majority, it’s less popular than changing font styles in Excel -
hence
it’s place on the far right of the home menu.
Here is a screen shot of the new edit, replace menu in the Excel 2007
This philosophy of organizing menus by popularity instead of by logical
connection may appeal to novice users, but it aggravates me as a power
user. It reminds me of the Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer 7
menus which seem designed to look good and do a few things easily, but
actually end up making life much harder for the power user. For me
placing
edit, replace to the very far right after the font styles is also
aggravating. As a financial model builder I don’t think I
have
ever changed the typeface, but I use edit replace all the time. I also
immediately disliked the way precious screen space on the eye catching
far
left is taken up with Cut & Paste icons. Novice users may like this but
power users know it’s much faster to press Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X and will
probably never ever click these buttons.
The size of the Ribbon and the Excel 2007 fonts also annoys me. I have
four
1600x1200 monitors on my desk at work but screen space is still very
precious to me. Unlike previous version of Office it’s now impossible to
run Excel in a small window – first the ribbon starts compressing menu
items, and then it simply disappears.
This screen shot below shows how running Excel 2007 in a smaller window
compresses the menus - for example see how several number format options
above have now been folded into the world “Number”. Yet the old excel by
its side runs perfectly at this size.
As Excel 2007 is shrunk further the ribbon just vanishes making it
completely impractical to use the product at this window size:
After a few weeks I abandoned Excel 2007 and the Ribbon for at least the
following reasons: (1) The general increase in font and
icons sizes and the
Ribbon sacrifices valuable screen space. (2) A feature I use every
time I draw a chart had been removed (“sized with window”) presumably
because it added to Ribbon clutter. (3) The new hugely over designed
auto filters make simply selecting an entry or setting a
custom filter just
that much harder (especially with dates). (4) I never grew to like the Ribbon
and prefer a conventional logical layout of the menus. If everyone
started
using the Ribbon learning to use new applications would become a
nightmare.
(5) As a power user totally in touch with my product the only way the
new
Ribbon can really make me more productive is to reduce the number of
clicks
and mouse movements it takes for me to select the feature I want. The
ribbon doesn’t do this at all – it increases clicks and mouse moves but
supposedly makes it easier to discover new things. That, in a nutshell,
is
its raison d'être.
Even if, as claimed, the Ribbon brings productivity improvements to the
novice user, I believe that this comes at the expense of the power user.
Microsoft’s claims that the Ribbon will allow them to pack in more
features
without overwhelming the user looks extremely dubious to me – I think
highly logical multi level menus offer much greater scope for
complexity.
Annoying the power user is dangerous because although they represent
only a
small market share, the endorsement of the power user contributes to
sales
further down the line. For example, by maintaining its reputation as the
ultimate photo editor used by all professionals, Adobe Photoshop picks
up
sales from less sophisticated users who would be in truth better served
by
a cheaper and easier to use package. Also the power users are the ones
most
likely to lead any move Open Source, which is the greatest threat to
Office.
Finally, a small point, but changing the file format at the same time as
introducing the ribbon makes it only harder for corporates to make a
gradual transition to the controversial Ribbon. Office 2007 feels
generally
rushed and lacking attention to detail. Only after the support forums
were
inundated with help requests did Microsoft release various Ribbon
learning
tools and better help files - a mistake that smacks of either
incompetence
or arrogance.
Pimped Up
GUI - October 2007
At one time Winamp was
a popular shareware media player, and many users
enjoyed 'pimping up' Winamp
with fancy looking 'skins'. In truth these skins
only made the product
harder to
use, but people enjoyed them, and a media
player is such a simple
program it
hardly mattered anyway. After loosing a
little market share Microsoft
began
rebuilding its media player and incorporating
these ideas. Today,
supposedly sexy
looking but impossible to use GUI design is
widespread, perhaps the
worst
example I have seen is the unusable and
downmarket Motorola Phone Tools.
Motorola Phone Tools- a 'Pimped Up' but impossible to use GUI
IE7 - Where are the menus? Is it really easy to use, or just "prettier"?
Vista Photo Gallery - Notice the excessive waste of
vertical space caused by the two
command bars. This photo does not show it, but often times an ugly 'Make a
Video'
button appears when you view photos.
I believe Microsoft is making a mistake
fully embracing these new fangled
designs. Making the Office Interface a little slicker and better looking
will help
sales, but it must not be allowed to jeopardise the entire product.
Serious
software for serous corporate users requires a serious, familiar, powerful and
logical
interface. Once Microsoft GUI design was unbeatable, today they are
increasingly
producing flashy dumbed down designs which ultimately fail both to be
easy
to be use and to be stylish. In chasing Apple they appear to have lost
all
advantages - compare the awesome iPhone Safari interface with Pocket Internet
Explorer.
Perhaps at this point in its
life Microsoft needs a hard nosed business
person
running the company focused
on down to earth revenue generation and sensible
design. I fear Microsoft has allowed itself to become far too carried away
with
creative gambles and idealistic blue sky thinking. Look at
Microsoft's
Mobile
Device/Phone Operating Systems. In the early days all the bells
and whistles
in Windows CE gave way to the best selling Blackberry. Why? Because
Blackberry
realised, quite obviously, that an old fashioned keyboard (instead
of handwriting),
push not pull email and a long battery life are vital.
Microsoft were there from
the very start, but their loss of focus on the
real life
user at that time cost
them the battle, although not the war. Bringing
the geeks
back to earth is vital
to the success of any software company or
project.
New
ideas are like
lottery tickets, even if you buy thousands you are unlikely to win.
Big
companies
don't need these gambles because they can just sit back, watch, then
steal the
winners.
An example is Apple's iPod: several years after the first Digital Audio
Players appeared
Apple stepped in with good design and easy to use software and totally
dominated the market - this is how to leverage big company engineering
know how.
Apple TV Take 2 (No PC required) is another example of user focused
impressive design
and content leveraged on the big company name. If Microsoft had a Chief
Executive as
impressive as Steve Jobs it would be unstoppable.
Microsoft's strengths and flaws are beautifully demonstrated by 'MSN /
Windows Live
Messenger'. The program is technically light years ahead of it's
competitors and
the most popular instant messenger on the market. However, the GUI is
cluttered with
advertising and distractions, the Apple Version is crippled, there is no
Linux version,
and despite having offered audio for years Microsoft just sat back and
watched
Skype dominate voice calls. It's a depressing record.
If I were Microsoft I would be
expanding the
product base, for example
competing with other major business applications
such
as Adobe Photoshop.
Also I would compete in the smaller program shareware
market
where Microsoft's
GUI skills would wipe away the competition with only a
modicum of effort. It's
simple - draw up a list of every popular shareware / open source /
commercial
windows app (from UltraEdit (text editor) to Apache to Photoshop) and rebuild
them
one by
one selling from Microsoft.com with no retailer margins. Microsoft
could
potentially totally dominate the software
application
world (remember
years ago the powerful and innovative Excel destroyed
Lotus
Notes almost
over night), and this will help it's operating system
business by
making the
move to open source harder.
Microsoft has instead committed itself to beating Google. At the heart
of this
issue is the search algorithm. I regularly experiment with Live Search
and although
it is much better than it was Google is still clearly way ahead.
Microsoft's superb
programming resources can not easily crack this problem - a new
algorithm is
needed. Probably a more sophisticated interface will part of it (how can
typing
a few words and then pressing submit give good results?). Early
in Google's
life Yahoo had the chance to buy them but stupidly failed to appreciate
their
technological advantage until it was too late. Microsoft will probably
have to
pray they get the same opportunity, that Google slip up the way Yahoo
did,
and they don't. It's a tall order...