TinyCybOrg

Office 2010 preview

I’ve been a recreational and professional computer user for, what, 25 years, and I can’t make heads or tails of the user interface on this Office 2010 preview that Gruber linked to.

I know that Microsoft replaced the traditional toolbar with something called a “ribbon” and I’ve never understood what it’s supposed to be. It seems to be a categorized toolbar where you can arbitrarily stack icons of varying sizes, with or without labels, in whichever layout strikes your fancy.

Seriously, go look at this thing. There’s some sort of “mini toolbar” in the title bar of the window in addition to the standard window controls. (Before my fellow Mac users get too sanctimonious, let’s consider Safari 4 beta’s “top tabs”, which my internal jury is still out on.)

Then you’ve got the ribbon itself, which appears to be tabbed, and one of the tabs has what I can only guess is a resize widget. I mean what is happening here?

The first section of the ribbon is “Delete” which has, as far as I can tell, three separate icons for delete. Do you have to use a specific delete button for a certain type of data? Why? What is this about? The delete icons are also two different sizes, and one has a popup menu hanging off of it.

The ribbon has an “Actions” section containing a “More Actions” popup.

The Find section is, unlike all the other sections, unlabeled. It appears to contain a toggle button with a popup arrow underneath it.

I also like the Zoom section which contains a single icon, also labeled Zoom.

This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea to begin.

I think this stems from a corporate culture that is unable to say no to anything. Office has a bazillion features, and no doubt is being marketing-driven to add a few thousand more to justify the upgrade to 2010. Everyone has a particular way that they use Office, and they are literally trying to accommodate every possible layout or customization that anyone has ever wanted in the history of time. They are terrified that someone is going to stop using Office (as if they had a choice) because they couldn’t position their three delete buttons just so. It’s madness.

It’s usually at this point in the argument that Windows advocates say “well, this is why Windows makes a REAL computer — just look at all these options I have!” There’s no question that Address Book and iCal do only 10% of what Outlook can do, but somehow that 10% is 80% of what I need. It is hard to make a simple interface for an application that does a lot of stuff — I can attest to that. I don’t envy Microsoft’s task here. I know they’ve got smart people in there somewhere, and I don’t think this is the best they are capable of.