The BillG keynote - a look at Office 12 (Part 2)

After the set of Vista demos, Chris Caposella moved onto something a large number of people in the audience were waiting for - the very first public preview of Office 12.

One of the major focuses of this new upcoming version of Office is simplification of the user interface - making things easier to discover, making complex tasks easier to perform faster. Chris admitted that the current UI of Office tends to be rather complex, with features buried deep inside menus and dialog boxes. The goal is for this to change in Office 12.

My first reaction when I saw the new user interface was - yikes, it's big! And it is. The toolbars are probably twice (or maybe more) as thick as they are in Office 2003, and many of the toolbar icons are much larger. But when he started actually demonstrating the way one would go about doing simple little things, or more complex tasks, it became clear to me how this is going to be beneficial. The Excel demos truly showed how the new UI makes doing complex tasks with spreadsheets a one or two click process. As I mentioned earlier, the goal is to make common tasks easier to discover, and the new UI does just that...perhaps at the expense of some screen real-estate, but I'm guessing Microsoft assumes that more and more people are moving to higher resolution displays everyday. I mean, one can go and pick up a laptop with a 1920x1200 WUXGA display today, and screen real-estate on something like that is hardly something someone needs to worry about. And for people using lower resolution displays, the toolbars can be hidden with a single click, leaving more room to work with the document itself.

There also seems to be tighter integration between the various apps in the Office suite. As an example, Chris showed us how Powerpoint presentations that an information worker receives as an email attachment in Outlook can be opened and played within Outlook itself. Not something revolutionary, but it's the little things that make things simpler. Outlook Tasks now have deadlines associated with them like calendar events and can be displayed as a new pane, just like the mail preview pane. Again, this ends up using a lot of screen space, but it can be turned off on lower resolution displays. Outlook 12 also has built-in support for RSS feeds, which is currently made possible in Outlook 2003 through third-party addons like Newsgator and intraVnews. The difference is that Outlook 12 leverages the system-wide, common RSS data store in Windows Vista.

All in all, the Vista 5219 and Office 12 demos got me quite charged up! There are obviously some quirks and things I don't like, but that's what external beta tests are for. I'm looking forward to the Office 12 beta, and I hope to be able to participate and share my feedback with the team.

Tags: Office12, PDC05