Microsoft wants users to actually use Office 2007

MICROSOFT SAYS its upcoming revamp of its Office product will be so easy to use, customers may begin to use more than twenty percent of its functions.

Up until now, Volish research suggests that people use only about twenty percent of the features crammed into the apps they use. Quite why they buy it, then, is anyone's guess.

Darren Strange, Product Manager for Office in the UK, told the INQUIRER the software maker had amassed some 300,000 hours of video of folk using Office and had a massive database of facts and figures about how users use the software. He said the data proved "invaluable" to Voles working on the next version, Office 2007, due around the end of this year.

The result will be an Office that is pretty much stripped of drop-down menus. "The user-interface is startlingly different - and better," said Strange.

In the first Word for Windows there were 100 features, he said, while in Office 2003 there were 1500, all buried in the program in places many users dare not go. "Users found it difficult to remember where everything is," he said, so now "everything will be contextualised". If you're working on a chart in Excel, everything to do with charts will be at your fingertips. Drop-down menus have largely been dumped in favour of tabs, he said.

The aim is to "unlock the other 80 percent of the product". But that previously-tried user-aid, "Clippy", won't be making a comeback, he confirmed.

The aligned development of upcoming Windows revamp, Vista, helped shape the way Office 2007 was designed. "For the first time, the O/S and Office were both designed around compatible design goals," said Strange. These revolve around a couple of "mantras" - "better results, faster" and "clear, confident, connected," he intoned.

The alignment should give a "clear and consistent feel" through the O/S and the Office applications. Security aspects are highly integrated, as is the search function and meta-data handling. Vista makes use of "virtual folders" with these containing selections of the same files collated together differently, depending on how the user operates. The idea is extended through to Office.

With the 2003 release of Office, Microsoft labelled it the Office "System". The firm will do the same again, only more so, with this release, after all, it's at businesses and corporates that the product is primarily aimed.

So the "number one thing", said Strange, are the server-side enhancements in Office 2007, which will include six servers, and an emphasis on "enterprise content management". The enhancements will allow the product to be used as a platform on which to develop a "richer range of server-side offerings".

The good news for the home user is that the Vole has done away with offering a cut-price Student and Teacher package. Instead home users can choose the new "Home and Student" offering. The differentiation, he said, "suppressed sales to people who like to be legal".

"The British people are surprisingly honest about that and it was costing us sales," he said, even though there were no detailed checks on who was a student and who wasn't.

The home/student version is likely to end up at around £70-£80 with a licence that allows up to three installs. µ

Darren Strange is the 2007 Office Product Manager in the UK. He's been a vole for eight years. He has a blog under the moniker Office Rocker here.