The infuriating aspects of Microsoft Word are legion, and whenever possible I prefer to write in a plain-text processor. But sometimes you have no choice but to work in Word, scratching your head over its stubborn peculiarities and gradually, over the years, acclimating yourself to its interface.
Now, as Walt Mossberg details in his column today, Microsoft is about to throw out years of tradition in Word and the rest of Office. In the new Office 2007, it seems, there are no menus. That’s right — the basic tool for controlling the screen since the early days of the Macintosh is gone, replaced by a newfangled, multifaceted toolbar called the Ribbon.
Mossberg gives it a mixed review (though he admits to “cursing it for weeks”). No doubt Microsoft has invested millions in testing it. I haven’t used it at all yet, so I could be off-base. But thinking about this change, or even just looking at the screenshots, makes my head hurt.
Maybe I’m unusual, but I have always found the dizzying array of toolbar icons in Office programs profoundly unhelpful. Icons are fine when they are small in number and used constantly (think of the stop, reload, back and forward buttons on your browser). But when you have a multitude of complex tools and features, as in Word, you never really get the hang of what all those little hierogylphs really mean. Either you wait for the “tooltip” to pop up (but why should the text have ever been relegated to this second layer?) or you go to the menu, where at least the function will be represented by an English description that has some relationship to what it does.
From now on, sorry — no more menus. Maybe there’s an option to flip the Ribbon to text descriptions, but from Mossberg’s description, it sounds like this Office is less customizable, not more, than the old one. The keyboard commands that heavy users rely on for common operations apparently are unchanged, so that’s nice. But when you need to find that odd command you only use once a year, good luck rummaging through trays of icons.
POSTSCRIPT: Harvey Motulsky writes to tell me that most of the Ribbon toolbars (though not the very first one, apparently) do have text labels on them. He points me to Jensen Harris’s blog at Microsoft which records the process of the redesign — I’ll look forward to reading that later. And, in comments, Walt Mossberg suggests I’m just showing my stripes as an “old-fashioned reporter” — no doubt guilty as charged.
[tags]microsoft, office 2007, walt mossberg, interface design[/tags]
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.