Office turn ups with ribbons and all sorts

MICROSOFT RECENTLY released a second beta of the highly anticipated update to its office productivity suite, Office 2007.

A massive overhaul of Office's antiquated binary file formats, the entire Office GUI, and a slew of other features have combined to make this a highly desirable upgrade.

The main point of contention that has caused the majority of discussion, has involved the new zipped-contained XML file specification that forms the basis of Office 2007's file format mechanism, along with the option to use the built-in automatic PDF/XPS exporting tool (this could face the axe in the final release, due to ongoing anti-trust concerns).

This is a radical change from Microsoft's existing binary formats that have existed since the inception of the original Office, having had various changes, upgrades, and overhauls over the suite's lifespan.

XML is inherently textual based information, so it makes sense to then compress it in some manner; using the industry-standard ZIP algorithm allows other third party application vendors to easily edit the underlying data - an open, albeit Microsoft-defined, XML document format. The Office 2007 suite of programs will still open the older formats with alleged perfect compatibility, and even more usefully The Vole will release tools to allow Office 2003 (and older suites), to open, edit and save to the new Office 2007 file formats. Interestingly this document stored in the new .docx file-type was half the size of the same document when saved in the '97-2003' standard .doc format, promising smaller files from Office-created files.

The new interface and file-formats haven't impacted the performance of the suite - loading the main applications and the loading/saving of files, seems fairly on par with Office XP/2003. The Beta appears very stable, very polished, and is now feature complete.

The major GUI overhaul involves the new 'ribbon' that's slotted in place of the deluge of iconography that was the Office 2003 task menu's. This contextually-based menu appears in all of the suite's apps, and exists to hide the underlying complexity and multitude of features of Office, via a dynamically updated 'ribbon' of useful tasks and possible useful functionality based upon what task you are currently performing.

Instead of a drop-down menu from the usual file, edit, view type menu bar, headings such as home , insert, view appear which when clicked upon change the ribbon layout. Each heading displays a multitude of well labelled icons and commands. These headings also change depending on what you are currently doing, for example, in Word clicking on insert and opting to draw a table will add the headings 'design' and 'layout', under an additional heading 'Table Tools', which allow you to perform various table-related tasks to your table - these headings disappear when you move back to your normal typing, and reappear anytime you reselect a table.

This change has been coupled with a significant alteration at the top left of the main application window - a large office icon that is used to open, save and print documents, basically replacing the ubiquitous file menu. We're unsure why this couldn't have been replaced with its own ribbon instance, as this would appear to be more intuitive to new users, and also allowing for precious screen real estate to be saved.

Despite preliminary reservations concerning the new Office interface, expecting it to hide advanced functionality that may often be required, the addition of the ribbon to tidy up the increasingly complex features that belly the Office Suite works incredibly well in normal day-to-day use.

All the standard often-used features are rapidly available for quick use; present along-side the less utilised advanced features, without hindering the interface - and more importantly - your work.

Overall we're quietly impressed with the direction this office suite has taken. Usability has certainly been the key-goal for the Office development team at Microsoft, and they definitely seem to have realized their ambitions. Office and its heavy feature-set has never been so easy to use. But don't let us be the only judge - you can download a copy of the second beta from Microsoft free of charge for personal evaluation until the beginning of 2007.

Over the next week we'll be using the suite in a normal day-to-day working environment, to report back our findings on a per-application basis. Watch out for further previews as the week goes on. ?

L'INQ
Office download site