The New Microsoft Office Design: STFU and Get Used to It
It's amazing to me how people who are supposedly tech-savvy and "in the now" with technology can still hate change just as much as your grandma.
Let's talk about the history of software interface design. In internet years, I'm an old man (being 40, I'm old in many people's books, but whatever--call me Gen X Rising). Back in the day, before the advent of the GUI, you had the command line. Nerd City. Then, you had a mouse and you had menus (plus the command line). Then the GUI came along, so now you had toolbars with commands that were redundant to the menus (and the command line was still there). A while later, there was a problem: too many fucking buttons on the toolbars.
Why?
Because the art and science of interface design didn't exist yet. This shit was designed by nerds and it was an evolution. It grew like a coral reef: organically, without that much thought going into it (I mean, how long is the save icon going to be something nobody uses, anymore? A floppy disk? Really?). The solution of course, is to just jam more shit into the interface.
That's when we got those unholy disappearing toolbar buttons and appearing/disappearing floating toolbars from Microsoft. They were a pain in the ass. Then we got taskpanes after monitors got bigger and the 16:9 aspect ratio was born.
We had reached the logical end of the "jam more shit onto the screen" method of interface design.
And just because you're used to it doesn't make it good.
So, Microsoft started over. Dreamweaver had used a tabbed horizontal interface (which it declined to call a toolbar) to great effect, and nobody complained. We've been using tabs in dialog boxes for years, so they're nothing new. It makes total sense to bring that kind of space efficiency to the main controls.
Office 2007 (and forthcoming 2010) totally rocks. Stop whining about how it's different and get used to it. Once you get used to it, you'll see that it's way faster (if you know what you're doing, and isn't that ALWAYS the case?). About the only concession I've made is to customize the Quick Access toolbar to include the Print Preview button.
I know there are some things that aren't better, but which simply aren't ever going to change, like the QWERTY keyboard vs. Dvorak. But I can out-perform anyone using a prior version of Office with 2007 and do things with it they simply can't. When you look at all the stuff that's completely new or revamped in Excel, it's enough to make your inner number nerd drool into his pocket protector. With Word 2007 I can format beautiful ebooks in moments. The best PowerPoint shows NEVER used any defaults anyways, so nothing's changed there. And Access is now, finally, somewhat usable.
Office 2010 looks to have slimmed down some of the interface chrome to an even simpler layout, which I'm really looking forward to.
If you're going to use desktop software, use the good stuff. I've used everything there is out there, and nothing holds a candle to Office 2007. Buy a book, take a class, but get going.
Oh, one more thing: it's not even really new, anymore, considering that 2007 was three years ago.
