Office 2007 UI Preview

Microsoft as posted an Office 2007 Preview site with some screenshot of new UI elements. Jensen Harris, the Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office "user experience" team has a blog and also posted A New Look For Office.

The obvious change is a new feature known as the ribbon. The menus and toolbars that so cluttered Office have been replaced with what seems like a large tabbed toolbar. This seems like a good idea, giving more space to show complex controls than just a text menu or a single line of toolbar buttons can give. Here's the ribbon from Word:

Word 2007 Ribbon - Click to enlarge picture

One problem in Office is finding commands in a sea of choices. Previously they tried Personalized menus which hated. The idea was to rearrange the menu putting more commonly used tasks higher and removing unused commands. To me this just made everything harder to find because they kept moving. Now MS is using Contextual Tabs added to the ribbon. By default the ribbon only show options that you can use on the document. However if you do something like add and select a chart, a new Chart tab appears. It's a bit like right-clicking on something to bring up a context menu, but it has more space to show the commands.

But of course all this extra space is only good if you use it well. While these are just a couple of screenshots I'm a little concerned. Here's the ribbon for PowerPoint:

PowerPoint 2007 Ribbon - Click to enlarge picture

I'm not sure I'd know to look for font choices in a tab called "Slides" instead of the "Design" tab. Now look at the contextual Table tab in PowerPoint shown below. Notice how much space is taken up in "Table Styles" by seven large icons (which seems to be scrollable) that differ only in color. Wouldn't a button that popped up a color picker be better?

Table Tools in Office 2007 - Click to enlarge picture

My last complaint is an old one. I like to see as much of my document as possible and the limiting factor in this is usually vertical space. That ribbon does take up a lot of space at the top of the screen that my document can't use. I hope I can move it to the side and position it vertically. Or maybe make it a floating palette as found in many programs like Photoshop or even Office 2004 for Mac. The more things change...