Leaked screen captures of Microsoft Office 14 alpha surface

I don’t know what MS has against toolbars. They turned them off in IE, put the dumb ribbon in office products. Just bring back the menu bar!

Yes, but I want to see a picture of Outlook to see if they have revamped it this time around.

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

@ User All you have to do is hit Alt and the menu bar pops up…or if you write click in IE you can make the menu bar stay so I don’t see what the issue is…

The overall look looks just like Office 2007 which isn’t a bad thing.

Looking good, the one thing that i hated about office 07 was the blue colour layout (the black and silver weren’t any better).

This version is looking better. It gets right down to business, the formal feel of office 2003 with the functionality of 2007.

But judging by the screen shots there doesn’t seem to be any added features, But i’m sure more will be “Leaded” as release draws closer.

“leaked”

I still hate Office 2007. I use Office 2003 at work and maintain Office 2007 on a laptop for support only. Otherwise Office 2007 pushed me over the edge to OpenOffice.

I just don’t like the feel of 2007.

I hear all this hate towards the ribbon bar, but not unlike the other people, I disliked it at the beginning too. It took me at least two weeks to get used to, but I did. Now I really don’t like the old interface, I find it clumsy and counter intuitive at best. For all those who complain about it, just use it for two weeks first and then see if you can get the hang of it. Good luck if you do not like it because the world is going touch screen and this ribbon bar will be needed.

I’ve only used office 2007 here and there. The times I received MS office documents however, they were NOT backwards compatible with 2003.

Here’s to hoping there is some compatibility between programs that seem to be upgrading every two years.

It’s obvious some posters here have never seriously used the ribbon, especially in Word. It is simply head and shoulders above any other product out there in terms of access to and ease of using the myriad functions available. It’s also good to see Publisher get the full “2007 treatment.”

I think Open Office is a good choice for people who don’t want to pay the $ for office, but it’s not as easy to use and it certainly isn’t as fast.

It’s visual, it’s context specific and it’s the future of UI’s. People have such a hard time with change, especially when it’s led by MS. How dare they. It reminds me of the howls of outrage when Apple abandoned it’s outdated OS 9 to OS X, then again with the move from Motorola to Intel.

There’s a few posts in favor for the Ribbon interface with a couple just sticking their wazoos out there by qualifying the interface yields better functionality and production. Bullshit.

As a company president, albeit a small one, who does most of my own typing and works with production-related staff, in Word, the Ribbon slows me down, offers absolutely no functional enhancement to the application, and changed a metaphor present in no other group of related applications.

In a production environment I can change paragraph spacing by the key combination “ALT/O/P/ALT-E/Up Arrow” in less than a second, and I don’t have to reach for my mouse once. I don’t pay my PAs to be cute, I pay them to work. Layout is done in Desktop Publishing apps. MS changed the interface metaphor and disabled access to key functions OR changed the required workflow from the keyboard AS AN OPTION to the mouse-centric GUI; my PAs hate the 2007 Office interface in a venomous way – to use it, they and I had to learn a completely new interface (you should have seen the production rate drop) or memorize the keyboard shortcuts (some of which have no mapped equivalent). Keep in mind that people have been using Office in a production environment since the early 90′s – and I’m paying the bill for their lost productivity.

I fixed Office 2007 by ditching it and reinstalling the 2003 suite, and all of my staff stopped bitching and got back to work. MS should have called the latest version Office 2007 – Artsy/Fartsy Edition, and offered a version that didn’t fuck with the interface for businesses that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on MS software every few years.

Wonder if it’ll support the superior ODFs (OpenDocument Formats), which is currently supported by Google Docs, OpenOffice.org…

Of course, knowing Microsoft, they’ll probably stick to their inferior, proprietry formats.

@bonesb:
“In a production environment I can change paragraph spacing by the key combination “ALT/O/P/ALT-E/Up Arrow” in less than a second, and I don’t have to reach for my mouse once.”

That combination still works in Word 2007 – you just need to substitute ALT-E for ALT-B for before spacing, or ALT-F for after spacing. There is nothing I can’t do with a keyboard only in Office 2007, and the visual cues just make it that much easier to discover the combinations. Nearly all Office 2003 keyboard shortcuts work in 2007 (but they are not advertised), some with minor changes.

It’s change – always manages to piss some people off, but without it, there will be no progress and we’d still be stuck in the stone ages.

@Flaming.Cowboy
It will. In fact even the soon to be released Office 2007 SP2 does, and hell, Wordpad in Windows 7 does. Question is – to what extent

Are you auditioning for the role of a hard-bitten corporate kinda hitman? Sweet Jeebuz. “Your PA’s.” Goshem massa … yowsa, yowsah, ribbon bad, jes like you sez. You da man, hear you roar.

And even if this weren’t true and they, amazingly, feel JUST LIKE you feel about Office 2007, (and terribly want to bust some “ALT/O/P/ALT-E/Up Arrow” moves, just who was the dumbass who obviously didn’t practice due diligence before buying the new version and authorizing it’s deployment across the board?

Now, THAT guy oughta have his ass fired back to the stone age. Talk about major stupid. The betas were there, the screenshots, some people even trial tested it for 60 or 90 days, free of charge (ooh!) before they made what’s called an informed decision.

Imagine that. An informed decision. Well hell, that’ll save a small country of keybord shortcuts, know what I mean?

Because of the very very large office user base, it is almost impossible to please everyone. People who have never used office before seem to like the ribbon. I had a tough time at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. My office tried going the “free” openoffice route and it just didn’t work out. Overall, I lost some productivity with the learning scale, but we got back to full scale work in a very short time.
I might suggest, that you stick to it as once 2003 support drops, you may be stuck with a dinosaur with on support. If your employees can’t master the interface, they might have a tougher time in a few years when versions changes force them to learn a new OS AND a new Interface.
Adapt and evolve or become extinct.

Don’t much like the ribbon, although I see the point about touchscreens.

Crescentdave post is amusing but off the mark. By forcing people to use the mouse MS are slowing down their Word users, that means PAs, so he IS da man.

The ribbon is appropriate for most of the rest of Office 2007, but for Word they should have left the Shortcut keys accessible.

As has been mentioned, shortcut keys are available. Style sheets help. So do templates. It’s the nature of the beast that we’re forced to make changes we may/may not want to- when we don’t control the software. For me, the current example is Dreamweaver CS4. Don’t get me started. That’s why I’m staying with the CS3 version as long as I can.

My snark had more to do with the vitriol of the original post-written by someone who had absolutely no reason to “subject” his office to change. If he’d done the slightest bit of research, he would have realized he was better off with Office 2003.

Being “da man” includes responsibilities like research prior to roll-out. Pretty basic.

Awesome!

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