My initial review:
Word 2007
I am basing these comparisons on my usage of office 2003 so some things I mention may not be new in this version, just new since the 2003 version.
The menu button
The first thing I tried to do with Word was take a screenshot, then crop the image in Photoshop so that it only showed the new menu button (shown below) and paste it directly into the document.
It didn’t work (to be fair I just tried it in Office 2003 and it didn’t work either), so I saved it as a jpeg and inserted it.
It took me a few seconds to find the right option to insert the new item. (Click on the insert menu item and insert picture is on the “ribbon” about a third of the way in.)
There seem to be lots of menu items, which at first seem confusing to me.
The interface reminds me of 3D Studio Max in a lot of ways. A lot of the information seems to be present on the screen at one time (as much as can fit it seems).
However I do like the way in which, if you change the size of the window, each of the toolbar sections contracts to a clickable drop down menu:
Scroll Wheel
My scroll wheel doesn’t work unless I actually click on the page then move up and down. Just scrolling does nothing, even when I do click the scroll wheel, moving the mouse up or down moves the page too fast. This may be because of my settings; however having to use the click-scroll method is just annoying. Almost every other application I use that deals with text can scroll effectively with the scroll wheel. That’s what it’s for after all.
Why would you remove something like that? It seems to be in every other office application with the exception of office 2007.
UI Design:
I
really don’t like the new main menu. One of the main principles of User Interface design is to make everything obvious to find.
Finding something in Office 2007 is a case of click everything until you find it.
Using office 2007 will become second nature no doubt as it becomes more prevalent in the workplace, however just because people will become used to something and the way it works is no reason to make a program that isn’t obvious to use.
The default font:
Calibri it’s called (and it’s not in the dictionary apparently).
It’s not bad; however I have one problem with it. Trying to type a document and decide if you’ve actually typed one space or two is nigh on impossible. (I also just noticed when I type c and e together such as in the word space, sometimes the letters flow together – see screenshot below)
What the hell is this?
Excel 2007
Ok, now onto excel. The first thing I have tried to do is replicate a piece of a document I am using at work.
Part of the document uses hyperlinks to link to Microsoft Visio files that are associated with a number in a cell. (Such as a list of numbers, 00 to 10, each number links to a vision named xxxx00.vsd etc.
Ok, so the keyboard shortcut for inserting a hyperlink is the same (Ctrl-K). The insert hyperlink dialog is nearly identical to 2003
Then I came across my first slight annoyance. Once I had inserted the hyperlink, to open it I have to press the mouse button, hold it, and then release, instead of just clicking the link to follow it.
Functions
To test function usage I used the concatenate function as an example. One of the first things I noticed was the function suggestions. I normally love these things; it provides useful shortcuts to typing long names (I use the same type of thing in Visual Studio etc).
Except it doesn’t work properly (or at least the way it should).
Narrowing down the function you want is pretty easy, you just type letters until you have narrowed it down enough:
However, then I tried to select the function that I wanted. It seems the only way to actually do this is to double click on the function you want. This is very annoying.
Normally something like this would work by pressing either the right key, the spacebar or even enter, but no. I don’t know about everyone else but when I’m creating a spreadsheet I like to use just the keyboard (I prefer to use the mouse as little as possible in general, using the keyboard is just faster). Not providing the option to use just the keyboard to select a suggested function seems like a bit of an oversight for me. It’s not a massive problem, just another annoyance.
Conclusion:
Some of the features of Office 2007 so seem good, however, it just seems like there are too many annoyances at the moment. I’m hoping this is just a result of it being a beta.
Im going to continue to use office 2007 for a while and i might post an article on it once ive been using it for at least a few weeks.
