The Inq reviews Office 2007, and concludes: “It’s hard to define, but the new office suite feels good and is comfortable to use. That said if your requirements don’t stretch beyond the normal usage of the odd letter, a spreadsheet to balance your budget and some email then there isn’t a lot to recommend forking over cash for Office 2007, when there are several free options out there are increasingly attractive and compatible with Office documents.”
short but pretty good overview, i’d say. i love the new interface as well (really innovative, even tough it might ‘look like previous interfaces’ it’s enough of an improvement to be new to me). but yes, there is the money… and of course the freedom you loose by using it and being tied to it – and the fact you’re helping MS to tie others to Office, or nag them when they don’t use it. so it’s not a very social act to buy and use it, unless you always convert files to some open format when you share them…
The article mentioned Google’s product and OpenOffice as alternatives. Obviously MSOffice is better (I hope).
But for many purposes, unmentioned alternatives such as Abiword, Gnumeric, and for the webbased part, AjaxWrite. AjaxXLS, etc., will do the job. And don’t forget KOffice, which is very promising, given the latest KDE-developments.
It’s great that some people drive brand new SUVs, but most prefer nice little Toyota’s or second hand Volkswagens. Gets them where they’re going.
Gobe productive was quite nice too – still prefer to use the spreadsheet component of the old BeOS version, as opposed to Excel.
In terms of Word files, I’ve found that a fairly good solution (in BeOS and *nix) is the combination of antiword and ghostscript – does a decent job of converting .docs to PDFs (no graphic support, but handy when you just need to extract content).
i invite people to try word perfect office
http://www.corel.com/
i find wp easier to use than ms office and a lot more stable
I like WordPerfect myself. At work we currently use version X3. Haven’t had any problems with it and as always Go Reveal Codes.
Speaking of Reveal Codes, they may not be needed with programs such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, but I find them to be very useful. Nothing like being able to dig down into a document to see what’s really going on.
Speaking of Reveal Codes, they may not be needed with programs such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, but I find them to be very useful. Nothing like being able to dig down into a document to see what’s really going on.
Personally I think they’re one feature that’s sorely needed by both. I can see no reason for MS not to implement them other than their usual “NIH” attitude. Pathetic.
You mean “now invented here”? Like parental controls (Bill Gates verbally said “we have a lot of stuff Apple don’t have… [about 5 things] parental controls”)? Like almost every new feature in Vista?
I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point.
You sure you’re commenting in the right place?
Oh, I’m sure there is some patent or copyright issue that hinders other companies from using a Reveal Code like system with their programs, but other than that I’m sure your right.
I would think that with the use of XML document formats that a system for looking into the XML of the document while your working on the document would be handy, but then again maybe not. I like reveal codes and that’s all that really matters. It’s also one of the reasons I can’t get use to other office programs. I see something that doesn’t look right and I reach for reveal codes only to be disappointed that there are none.
i invite people to try word perfect office
http://www.corel.com/
i find wp easier to use than ms office and a lot more stable
Forgive me if I politely decline your invitation.
Word Perfect used to be popular a decade ago.
And due to their own incompetence they basicly gave away their market share to Microsoft.
And Corel did the same thing.
Corel is an incompetant company that has been going downhill for last decade too.
And I still have to clean up their mess they inflict on their customers because they keep installing the crappy Macrovision Installshield Updater which is a major pile of shit and needs to be forcibly removed.
So no, I wouldn’t touch anything from Corel ever again.
Openoffice is good enough for 99% of people. No need to damage their systems with the crap that Corel installs.
we have a champion
Your opinion and your entitled to it. I agree that a lot of people could get by with very simple word processing programs. Programs as simple as WordPad would do many.
However, I use WordPerfect on a daily basis (version X3 currently) and it’s a fine program. I’ve had no problems with it. Corel’s attitude toward it does suck, but I can’t help that.
For me using OpenOffice is painful after using WordPerfect. I like OpenOffice and it does somethings better than WordPerfect (i.e. opening Word docs), but overall it’s still behind WordPerfect in functionality.
At the end of the day it’s each to his own, but I like WordPerfect and I would recommend it to anyone over Microsoft Office. However, if all you need is a simple word processor AbiWord isn’t bad either and it’s got a much smaller footprint.
It’s too bad that WP has faded from prominence so much, I always found it much less clunky for anything that required complex layout. I’ve seem some half-decent print brochures turned out of – I tried to do that once in Word and it was nightmarish to get the spacing correct to make the brochure foldable (finally gave up and did it in Illustrator instead).
it is so frustrating watching highly paid executives and professionals two finger typing away at documents. It is much better to reintroduce fast typists and secretaries to workplaces. It’s much better to have 80 wpm at $10/hr (typist) vs 20wpm at $100/hr (executive)- simple arithmetic I’d say. Get rid of email for most staff as well – another huge time waster.
but then that would do away with the 21st century!!
Get rid of email for most staff as well – another huge time waster.
Agreed, sadly. And it’s solely because most people seem to be totally incapable of clear written communication.
“Agreed, sadly. And it’s solely because most people seem to be totally incapable of clear written communication.”
For some (professional) authors, too. Sadly. They rely on the spell checker and make more and more mistakes because the spell checker is not a “semantic compiler”.
When secretaries and typists existed, there was another profession, too. I don’t know if the term “revisor”, “editor” or “redactor” is okay for you to know what I mean; the german term is “Revisor”, “Lektor” or “Korrektor”, someone who reads a book and marks (and even rewrites) the mistakes done by the original author. This person knows the respective language very well and has dictionaries available if needed. Such a person is highly superior to any autocorrection system in a software application, because he’s a “semantic compiler”, meaning, he knows about the intention of the author which the automatic spell checker doesn’t.
The term “functional illiteracy” fits to those who are not able to use the means of written communication. In Germany, the amount of such people is increasing. They simply don’t care about how something is written, it does not matter for them.
To get back on topic, I’d like to see how “Office 2007” in its german version will handle our more than 10 deviating forms of Newspeak.
— Note: The “semantic compiler” is a term for some software algorithm that reads your thoughts and knows what you want. For example, if you enter “int a, b, sum; sum = a – b;”, the “semantic compiler” would throw an error, because “a – b” is not the sum of a and b. Furthermore, it would suggest “a + b” because all smart software does not only report an error, but come along with the solution at once. 🙂 —
When secretaries and typists existed, there was another profession, too. I don’t know if the term “revisor”, “editor” or “redactor” is okay for you to know what I mean; the german term is “Revisor”, “Lektor” or “Korrektor”, someone who reads a book and marks (and even rewrites) the mistakes done by the original author.
Yep, I’m guessing that Korrektor is the german equivalent of “proofreader.” Both the local newspapers here laid-off all their proofreaders a few years ago and it REALLY shows. My favourites: the headline “Theft of Priest Investigated” and a frontpage picture of a bombed-building in Sarajevo under the headline “City Hall Blasted.”
No, its more sending emails to a colleague on the same floor rather than using social interaction – thus causing social isolation of people in companies.
People who can’t communicate clearly in writing, are usually even worse in verbal communication.
So, I wouldn’t cut off e-mail. However, I would happily cut off all e-mail that wasn’t digitally signed. That way it would be much easier to find and sort mail from people we use to communicate with and harder for spammers.
I would also like to cut off html mail, it makes people focus more on how the message is presented than to get the information right.
The same thing can often be said about Word processor created documents. Adding too much visual style just makes it harder to search find and reuse the information by computerized methods.
I sort of see the word processor as an anachronism, that lives on from the time of the mechanical typewriter when information was stored on typed documents in binders on a shelf on the wall.
People who can’t communicate clearly in writing, are usually even worse in verbal communication.
Some people, yes, but I’ve certainly seen lots of counter-examples. E.g., people who are dyslexic, or people who just can’t type. There are definitely a large number of people I deal with at work who are much easier to communicate with by phone than by EMail.
No, it’s just a matter of waiting out the old farts who can’t type and think of email as a waste of time. (No offense if you’re one of those old farts.)
No, it’s just a matter of waiting out the old farts who can’t type and think of email as a waste of time. (No offense if you’re one of those old farts.)
I’m in my 20s myself, but I find young’uns are just as bad with EMail as the old folks. At least most of the old farts have the excuse of unfamiliarity with the technology. Most of the people who EMail and can’t seem to comprehend the “Reply-to-all” feature, or use descriptive subject lines if lives depended on it, are people near my age.
One critical difference: at least with some of the old farts, they were actually taught how to write a proper formal letter in school.
The References feature (for citations, etc.) is the one thing that may have me using Word/Windows to write all my papers for a while. Being able to put in my sources and spit out a citations page all properly formatted is my second favorite feature in the suite (after the toolbox).
Does this exist in OpenOffice/KOffice/AbiWord?
You could do this in troff since the late 1970s. If you do heavy-duty text processing, you really should use groff or TeX (which can also do this).
I know they are not word processors. Thank goodness!
LaTeX is great. I never had so easy a time writing a term paper than when I used it with bibtex.
“LaTeX is great. I never had so easy a time writing a term paper than when I used it with bibtex.”
Can completely confirm. I use it at home and at work for nearly everything: letters (dinbrief), presentations, scientific papers, tests and forms. Typesetting formulas and 300+ page documents is easy and always looks good. Citation works automatically (bibtex). PDF export is built in (pdflatex). Working files can be shared among a group of contributors (CVS), it is platform and OS independent. I can still use files created over 10 years ago and will be able to do so in over 10 years.
The new “Office 2007” looks very colorful. THe menu concept is interesting, but those who have used other “Office” versions before will encounter problems when they try to find the functions they’re looking for. For me, it does not look very… erm… professional… looks more like a… game…? 🙂 I’m sure you need some very up-to-date hardware to use it (NB the difference between “it runs” and “you can use it”). I assume it has built in document templates and style formatting templates, functions for sectioning and all this “more advanced” stuff, and again, nobody will use it. (Average users tend to use the font type, size and effect to structure their documents.)
I’d like to see how it handles language related aspects in German. I’m sure it will fail in lots of cases, just as its predecessors did.
Interesting review. But personally I won’t buy it because I’ve got no hardware and OS it will run on. If it comes to interoperability, it won’t be my choice.
> I can still use files created over 10 years ago and will be able to do so in over 10 years.
That brings on an interesting story. A couple of years ago I wanted some sections from my doctoral thesis in electronic form. The only non-paper copy I had was one I made at a former job, which was on an old 1600BPI tape made in late 1987 that had not been stored with any particular care.
I sent it off to a fellow half-way across the US, who read it and sent me back a CD. I then ran the troff code (made on a 4.2BSD Unix system running on a VAX 11/785, transcribed to tape on a Sun 3/280) and ran it through groff and its various preprocessors on FreeBSD.
It ran without any issues and gave output identical that the printed copy in my thesis.
So the longevity of the input file does matter. So does the longevity of the achiving medium, which is overlooked all too often. That experience lead me to trust tape.
Edited 2007-02-02 04:40
“The only non-paper copy I had was […] made in late 1987 that had not been stored with any particular care. […] I then ran the troff code (made on a 4.2BSD Unix system running on a VAX 11/785, transcribed to tape on a Sun 3/280) and ran it through groff and its various preprocessors on FreeBSD. It ran without any issues and gave output identical that the printed copy in my thesis.”
You gave examples of interoperability (hardware and OSes) and long life data. Most users of things like “Office 2007” won’t be interested in this. They live for the moment. Hard to imagine to “recreate” older files with actual media (CDs or DVDs) and MICROS~1 applications in 2037. 🙂 You will encounter problems sharing “Word” files between the many different versions and file types that are still around *today*.
To come back on topic, as far as I know, “Office 2007” does not use a standardized / open / free file format by default (like OpenOffice does, for example). And maybe it creates corrupted files with the “quick save” memory dump function (which you can only repair using a free office suite) if this still exists…
“So the longevity of the input file does matter. So does the longevity of the achiving medium, which is overlooked all too often. That experience lead me to trust tape. “
You’ll see modern tape systems in every installation where data has to be stored for longer periods of time – and where you can *trust* in the storage; you won’t find this among home users. They just burn their CD-Rs and throw them away after three years because the media is corrupted. Therefore, I also use tapes here for backup purposes, along with PDs.
While in general we agree, I don’t think the primary target for Office 2007 (or any of the previous Office products) is the home market. It is the standard word processor for business (large and small) and for academia (really!). It trickles to the home from there. The average home user just does not need something this powerful — even Abiword is good enough for most of them.
I can assure you that even small business is very interested in longevity of file type and archive medium. The concerns for large businesses are even greater, particularly if something like FDA, ISO 900x or cGMP tracability is important.
That is in part what is pushing Microsoft to revisit their file format to make it more long-lived. This has not materialized yet, but the concerns of large businesses are pushing them to do so. I do think this will happen.
“While in general we agree, I don’t think the primary target for Office 2007 (or any of the previous Office products) is the home market. It is the standard word processor for business (large and small) and for academia (really!). It trickles to the home from there. The average home user just does not need something this powerful — even Abiword is good enough for most of them.”
Don’t mind, we completely agree. At least from my experience in Germany it’s true. People want to use at home what they know from their work, and, of course, nothing else exists. So you encounter the phenomenon that nearly everybody uses MICROS~1 products, but almost no one has paid for it. Home users usually find someone who gets a pirated copy of the desired software for them (and installs it for them). In some cases, it came preinstalled as OEM software.
The average home user treats his expensive high-end PC as a better typewriter and does stuff nobody would imagine, such as putting a RAR archived AVI video in a DOC file. I’ve seen it all, don’t tell me anything. 🙂
A word on academia: When I was at the university long long time ago, some students seemed to have a diploma in stupidity – oh, our educational elite! 🙂 They really assumed that their “Word” would do form and contents for them by itself, as long as you have “Auto Correction” enabled. Their results were not worth the paper it was printed on. Wow, good I don’t have to read such mindcrap anymore… As a fact: The best application won’t help if it’s handled by a moron. Sadly, but true.
“I can assure you that even small business is very interested in longevity of file type and archive medium. The concerns for large businesses are even greater, particularly if something like FDA, ISO 900x or cGMP tracability is important.”
And in governmental installations, such as the ministry of finance, the carriers of wellfare or the crime prosecution organs.
Maybe the use of a standardized XML based format will serve this purposes, but as far as I know, “Office 2007” does not use its “OOXML” by default. The predecessors of “Word 2007” usually were incompatible with modern standards.
“That is in part what is pushing Microsoft to revisit their file format to make it more long-lived. This has not materialized yet, but the concerns of large businesses are pushing them to do so. I do think this will happen.”
We’ll see. Personally, I don’t think so. Until now, MICROS~1 failed to achieve this goal. Let’s just try to open an “Office 2007” file in 2037. 🙂
“Maybe the use of a standardized XML based format will serve this purposes, but as far as I know, “Office 2007” does not use its “OOXML” by default.”
OOXML is the new default format for the Office 2007.
I’m confused about this part of your post.
“They just burn their CD-Rs and throw them away after three years because the media is corrupted.”
I haven’t had any experiences with burned cd’s becoming corrupted. I have burned cd’s from years ago and theres nothing wrong with them at all (not the least to mention they are a write once medium, which makes them ideal for backups and grandfathering).
Now 700 mb or so isn’t a lot of space but backing up to dvd for example is a fairly solid solution and its cost effective to boot.
just my $.02
>>I’m confused about this part of your post.
“They just burn their CD-Rs and throw them away after three years because the media is corrupted.”
I haven’t had any experiences with burned cd’s becoming corrupted. I have burned cd’s from years ago and theres nothing wrong with them at all (not the least to mention they are a write once medium, which makes them ideal for backups and grandfathering).<<
I’ve seen both sides, for example (attention, anti-commercial following) cheap and crappy discs from BASF / Emtec that were corrupted after a year of regular storage. On the other hand, I have discs from Siemens-Fujitsu that are from 2000 and still run well. Okay, BASF and Siemens just label the discs they buy in india. For the medium reader: Usually “modern” drives fail to read some CDs while “old” drives don’t have any problem… I even own a CD that’s green on the underside and the silver topping is falling off, maybe a strange chemical process…
“Now 700 mb or so isn’t a lot of space but backing up to dvd for example is a fairly solid solution and its cost effective to boot.”
I like DVD-RAM because they have something in common with the PDs which were (and still are) ideal backup media. 700 MB is still a lot if it’s up to effective data (source code). For video backup (from VHS etc.) DVDs surely are the better solution.
A unified interface, nothing is hidden in menus, Tabs are ordered in a sensible way, the equations are nice!!
When I use it it feels like I am working one one paper rather than working on a paper and a UI. It just gets out of your way!
MS Office has got to be the most consistently misused and underused software in the world. I don’t know how many times I’ve developed a beautiful Powerpoint master slide, only to have other coworkers override the master and micro-edit every single element manually on 30 different slides. Then comes the inevitable major style change, but unfortunately NONE of the slides adhere to the master. Therefore it is necessary to manually change fonts, colors, spacing, paragraph styles, bullets, everything slide by slide…. Same goes for MS Word. NOBODY used the “Styles” menu. They hand tweak every paragraph, momentarily aligning paragraphs and columns with the spacebar! MS Office does allow one to separate content from formatting, and thus totally avoid these problems, but it’s not obvious to uninformed users (the majority) and it doesn’t force the user to use those features. LaTex got it right, in my opinion.
Just curious, is your post deliberately ironic?
Off to google latex, wish me luck
Actually, I use the styles task pane all the time, and I wonder if Office 2007 allows me to use syles as easy as 2003 does.
Office 2007 really “promotes” styles. They’re on the first tab (the one where all the main formatting controls are) and it displays as a pallete with about 3 styles horizontally, and a vertical scrollbar. (Larger or potentially smaller depending on your resolution.)
It also displays a nice set of three options next to the styles palette: “colours”, “fonts” and, I think, “themes” (which specify margins, spacing and the visual style of the headings). This should get more people used to the idea of consistent formatting and the fact that using Styles can help them quickly change the visual look of a document. (That’s a Very Good Thing(TM).)
Fonts are specified in pairs – heading font with body font. Colours are specified in groups of about eight (I don’t have Office 2007 to hand). Themes specify almost every other aspect of your styles.
Clicking on the little icon on the “Styles” group opens the “Styles” task pane. You can dock it, float it, change which styles are shown, and enable previews of styles (like Office 2003). Previews allow you to quickly identify the style. Alternatively, you can disable previews so that you can see more styles at a time.
Try the Test Drive on the MS website and you’ll see what I mean. (ActiveX required, I believe.)
Agree, even though I doesn’t particularly like the latex user interface. I would even take it one step further.
As I see it there are at least three aspects of documents and document parts:
– It’s look. (E.g fontsize, color, layout,…)
– It’s meaning. (E.g if text is a headline, a pagination number,..)
– It’s contents. (I.e. the actual text).
Today styles (and ordinary unstyled formating) only handles looks. The meaning, such as telling that a particular part of the contents is a headline somtimes can be guessed from the name of the style, but what if you want different presentation of document parts with the same meaning in different situations.
In a sense word processors makes us more efficient in handling information the way it was handled back in the typewriter era where looks was the only thing you had limited possibility to change. In the modern computer era it would be much more effective to separate markup for looks, and meaning.
Totally agreed – by far the most useful feature of word (styles) is one of the least obvious. I’d been using Word since the DOS days, but I actually figured out styles in HTML first (then had the epiphany that the same thing can be done in word). Although, I do find CSS styles easier to work with, but that’s a digression.
A rather simplistic review considering that what may be ‘lacking features’ to one person, might be very useful for another – having had a look at the features, there is probably very little to the average user, but for the enterprise coupled with the Office system and all of Microsofts other titles, its a pretty damn good upgrade.
But like I said, it all depends on what you want out of an application – the interesting thing will be how smoothly it’ll be for old users of Office to upgrade their files to the new format and how well it saves in the old format, and whether Microsoft will release plugin/filter of their OOXML format for older Office suites.
” the interesting thing will be how smoothly it’ll be for old users of Office to upgrade their files to the new format and how well it saves in the old format, and whether Microsoft will release plugin/filter of their OOXML format for older Office suites.”
———–
The OOXML plugin for older versions of Office is already available:
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3…
Works with Office 2003 and Office 2000, but not older versions (i.e. not Office 97).
Edited 2007-02-02 06:19
Awesome, thanks for the link; that’ll be really useful for those who don’t want to move to 2007 all at once, but want to standardise on one file format for the whole organisation without any loss of formatting in the process.
As far as I know, Office 2007 uses it’s OOXML as the default format when saving.
OOXML by the way is basically a zip file, meaning you can rename your document.docx to document.zip and then browse the contents of your document.
And this longetiviy issue is totally blown out of proportions. I mean seriouslly, do people really except to open a document they created in 2007 in the year 2057??
In 50 years, computers will have evolved so much that humans will probably have quantum-computer implants in them!
And no way on earth is any hardware or software created in 2057 going to open any file created in 2007. And that goes for ODF as well!!!
The only way to open files created in 2007 is to store a PC with the appropriate software and energy supplies in an acrhive with the archived files. Then in 2057 you just power up the PC and open your old files on it.
“As far as I know, Office 2007 uses it’s OOXML as the default format when saving.
OOXML by the way is basically a zip file, meaning you can rename your document.docx to document.zip and then browse the contents of your document.”
Ah, I see. As far as I know, OpenOffice and KOffice are using this type of data storage for years now, i. e. a zip file containing standard XML files and additional binary files for included images (for example), so I can extract all information from a SXW file without having OpenOffice installed – I just use system wide available standard tools. But I think MICROS~1’s “OOXML” is not entirely compatible with standard XML… so why didn’t they just use XML like anyone else?
“And this longetiviy issue is totally blown out of proportions. I mean seriouslly, do people really except to open a document they created in 2007 in the year 2057??”
Where did you get 2057 from? I’m sure I wrote 2035. I used this year because in one posting there was a file mentioned that could be re-used 1:1 30 years after creation, so I added 30 years on today.
“In 50 years, computers will have evolved so much that humans will probably have quantum-computer implants in them!”
Maybe maybe… computers will start thinking and humans will abandon thinking entirely… 🙂
“And no way on earth is any hardware or software created in 2057 going to open any file created in 2007. And that goes for ODF as well!!!”
Uh… if you would be right, there would be a major problem! Let me answer back as follows: Long term institutions like the pension insurance fund need data from 2007 if you get retired in 2057 – if they still exist – in order to calculate your monthly retirement fund. As you know, this system had worked for decades without computers, but now as they are available in any scale and nearly everywhere, they are used and will be used in the future.
But you’re right in an implicit concern: Hardware and software evolve faster and faster, so 1987 – 2007 would be a small step compared to the quantum leap of 2007-2037 or even 2057. At least a file from 1987 could be used in 2007.
“The only way to open files created in 2007 is to store a PC with the appropriate software and energy supplies in an acrhive with the archived files. Then in 2057 you just power up the PC and open your old files on it.”
As you might have read from the example given, opening and processing a file from 1987 in 2007 was no problem, even if the original hardware was not present (only a compatible tape drive was).
The problem with Microsoft OOXML proposed standard is that it is not complete, in the sense that it requires knowledge of non standardized undocumented Microsoft software to be fully implemented.
ODF on the other hand, builds on previously well known, well documented formats.
This means that it will be possible to create some kind of software in 2057 that could interpret all of ODF, while doing the same thing for OOXML would require reverse engineering of Microsoft code.
There are also several conflicts (e.g. date formats) with existing ISO standards in OOXML, so it will either require a lot of work, or something like a Ferrari to each of the voting members of ISO to pass as ISO standard.
I doubt that OOXML will be the great success Microsoft hopes for. Even if they somehow manage to get it to pass as an ISO standard, it will take a while before everybody have upgraded and until then the old .doc format will remain the defacto standard. In the mean time ODF will grow. It is already popular with many governments and many large companies. The fact that it allready is ISO standardized and there are software that uses it available for free makes it a very tempting option.
As an example, in todays issue of Computer Sweden, there was an article about the French car manufacturer Peugeot switching from Microsoft to Novell on 20 000 desktops and 2500 servers. According to the same article the American Pund-IT analyst company thinks that the costs of moving to Vista and office 2007, could make companies look elsewhere than Microsoft for office functionality software.
And this longetiviy issue is totally blown out of proportions. I mean seriouslly, do people really except to open a document they created in 2007 in the year 2057??
Some people, certainly – writers/journalists come immediately to mind. There’s a great piece by Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt where he wrote about trying to open some unfinished work that he’d written years earlier in a then-defunct word processor.
i just don’t get why everybody seems to take the ribbon for the best since sliced bread …
of course its better for beginners than the old menu bar, but its still not half as usefull as officeX’s pallet on the side because of one simple reason: if you write text you write from top to bottom, so wasting vertical screen space is just plain stupid – i would love it on the right, but on the top its a big show stopper for me and i will stick with office2k3 where i can stick my toolbars to the left and right …
Edited 2007-02-02 11:26
Agreed – for people who like to customize their interface, palette’s generally are best for that sort of thing. That’s one thing I always liked about Gobe Productive, they way you could “tear off” the font, styles, etc menus to get a floating palette with more detailed options.
Of course you’re probably right too that the ribbon is better for less advanced users, which is why I’m assuming MS went that way.
With more people using wide screens (I think almost every laptop is 16:9 now) perhaps you would have expected MS to go for a vertical toolbar. (They did it for the Vista Sidebar, after all 😉 )
However, I think that adoption of wide screens is still too low for this, and additionally I think that horizontal toolbars are easier to scan quickly. Also, the Ribbon has far more text than the traditional toolbars, so left-to-right scanning of the whole toolbar would make sense.