Excel might be outlier because it’s more technical and ingrained, but overall I think the jump to Ribbon in Office was a good idea and greatly improved the OS. It DID need a drastic overhaul, and I think Office is far easier to use now if you’re not an “ingrained” user, and (thankfully) 2010 brought more customization options to allow a smoother transition. That said, I do think a preconfigured “legacy” layout that retooled some of the ribbon to be closer to the old bars shoulda been in there.
As for the Win8 interface, I think it looks great. The “desktop” uses space well, and I think the interface overall looks nice and usable. Hopefully the legacy input for the new interfaces works well – that could make or break things.
My biggest complaint at the moment is that there’s a big divide between the new interface and the old interface. I was hoping to see MS integrate them together better. As it is, it looks like Win8 will kinda “bounce” between Metro and Aero.
For the record, I’ve been saying since Vista launched that MS should simply change the Start button to a “show desktop” button and build the desktop into a live hybrid of the existing Start menu and an info dashboard. The Win8 interface actually does that, but only when you’re USING the new interface.
I think what this means is Microsoft is betting against the very concept of desktop PCs as a long term item. And while I hope they are wrong because it is my device of choice for both productivity and gaming, they may be right.
Argh, that Dvorak article is awful (to be fair he seems to be reporting based on early rumors rather than newer demos). He gripes about the existence of a virtual keyboard like it won’t support physical keyboards. This is simply wrong, and Windows already has a virtual keyboard built-in. They’ve drastically improved it for those who use it – in no way is that a step back.
He complains about the lack of folders and files (despite them 100% still existing just as in Win7), despite them also being a dying paradigm for most users. Even as a power user, I interact with my file system less and less. I can absolutely imagine that, moving forward, the right approach is build systems in which the user’s interaction with low-level systems is minimized. The “future” of desktop computing is going to look different than the current system, and Dvorak is really shortsighted if he doesn’t see that.
Comically, he suggests this is a chance for Linux to dominate the desktop space. If there’s a Linux system that has a real chance of gaining dominance, it’s ChromeOS: the most “dumbed-down,” least desktop-y OS on the market.
Desktops and laptops won’t die off anytime soon. What MS is really saying here is that the improvements they most drastically need to do AREN’T in that space, and that some of the improvements to the tablet-y space may bleed through as real advantages to usability in the other form factors.
I think this is closest to reality. When you think about it, desktop OSes haven’t really changed much in almost 30 years. I mean, yeah, we have loads more features and polish, but by and large we’re all still working with the stuff that Xerox PARC is noted for (windows, icons, menus, pointer.) The bit we’ve seen about OS X Lion is that it incorporates iOS thinking into the desktop OS. If what we’re seeing about Windows 8 is what we end up getting, MS might unify them before Apple.
and when you look at it, it’s far easier to take a UI designed for touch and make it work with keyboard and mouse, than it is to take a UI designed for kb & m and make it touch-friendly. Windows Mobile is proof of that.
I expect I’ll see the 2010 version somewhere around 2014 in my office, since we only got Office 2007 at the beginning of last year.
I hate that fucker. It’s put so many things an extra click away, and the 2007 version, at least, uses a huge amount of real estate on top of the screen while allowing essentially no customization: if you don’t like what they’ve got up there, Bill Gates says ‘fuck you.’ So in Word, for instance, half of the ‘ribbon’ when you’re in the Main tab is taken up by pictures of different fonts. Gee thanks, Bill, but could you kindly go sit on it and rotate? Because at our office, our choices are Times New Roman, Times New Roman, and as a third option, Times New Roman. And even if I had the freedom and interest to explore different fonts, it was never hard to find them in the old interface. Whose toolbars were a hell of a lot more customizable and compact than the damned ribbon.
If the damned thing was actually better than the old interface, I think its superiority would have become more apparent after a year and a half. But though I can navigate it more smoothly now, it’s still something I tolerate because I have to, and I’d go back to Office 2003 in a heartbeat.
I find it hard to believe they used any input from real users of their software before they revised it. I haven’t kept track of the number of things that take longer but it’s substantial. I would love to love the new version but it sucks and it’s not a function of loving the old layout.
MS is actually positing two ecosystems right now: Win apps as usual, and new interface (ie tablet) apps, built on web standards.
I don’t see this being a problem. Everything Windows users currently demand can still comfortably exist, but MS will also be adding a simpler, more refined way to expand devices.
I’m curious what you’re running into frequently that meaningfully takes longer. In my experience, the most common tasks are now quicker and more prominant, and the “deeper” functions are more logically grouped. With a couple exceptions, I can locate features quicker.
If you’re a power user, keyboard shortcuts are still your friends.
Not to sound like I’m bending over backwards to apologize for MS, but if you’re using 2007 instead of 2010, I can understand the hate more.
If you’d never used Office (or a computer) and were handing 2007 and 2003, I’d wager you’d find 2007 much easier to use. The problem was that they did a terrible job at the learning curve. 2010 has a few changes I disliked from 2007, but it does a much better job at helping pre-Ribbon users.
Microsoft received all kinds of feedback from users asking for features that were already in the software, nested several sub-menus and dialog boxes deep. Hence the ribbon, to bring everything to the surface whether you like it there or not. But if you want your screen real estate (in Office 2010) back there’s a little up arrow beside the help button that collapses the ribbon down to menu size.
So yes, your hatred of O2k7 and 2k10 is precisely because of your familiarity with the old way. Look, Office is huge. it has so many features because it has so many users. You may only give a shit about 10% of its features, but everyone out there has a different 10% that they use regularly. With so many features, the UI model of toolbars, menus, and dialogs just breaks the fuck down.
So what’s Windows Phone, then, if not grids of icons?
And I don’t know which version it is, but the MS Office programs in the computer lab here are much harder to use than they used to be. It used to be, if the feature you were looking for wasn’t on the menu tab you were on, you would go over to the next menu tab and keep looking. Now, though, it’s hard to even tell what the “next menu tab” is. Every control seems to have a different design. It feels like one of those old computer games where you had to mouse over everything on the screen pixel-by-pixel to see if you could pick it up, with no clue as to which ones you could grab until you moused over them.
Windows Phone is a grid of dynamic informative tiles. iOS does this to a degree, but it’s much more ingrained in WP7. That’s the idea of Win8’s touch interface, too – live tiles that operate somewhat like “information thumbnails.” It’s a genuinely cool interface, and it’s definitely different than iOS or Android (you can emulate the look on Android, but not the feel).
It’s the little things like the drawing tools. Before you could bring up a separate tool bar. One click to bring it up and it stays open. Now if you use it and want to make more than one object you have to keep going back to it. And the ability to resize the pivot table has migrated to another ribbon. One would expect a data function to be in the data ribbon but no. I did enjoy looking for it though.
Making a product easier to use is a great idea but the core function of the program is to serve the business community. Regardless of how easy it is to use it still requires a person to sit down and learn how to use it. If MS made any attempt at all at using input from the business community they did a piss-poor job.
I hate Microsoft software because they seem to design everything to be counter-intuitive. If you start from scratch, learning how to use WordPerfect versus how to use Word is ridiculous. In WP, if you need to say, format an envelope, you go to “Format…Envelope” You can even put a macro on the toolbar that has a picture of an envelope, and figuring out how to put that macro there is easy. Not sure where to look? Hmmm…let’s try “Tools” Settings" “Add Button” Easy Peasy.
I can’t even imagine how to do that in Word. Just figuring out how to do tabbed indents and change the margins is almost impossible to figure out. They do not seem to want you to be able to figure things out.
I refuse to get Windows 7. The rest of our home computers are on it, and it just seems like a bloated sack of animated pictures.
It seems like a great OS for anyone who doesn’t want to do anything important or useful with their computer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - indeed, frivolity is one of the major driving forces in the market, but I wonder how this will all work for business - and by business, I mean the folks at desks in offices running business-specific software systems and applications.