Journal: News & Comment

Office 2007 in blue and black

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I admire that Microsoft is trying something radically different with the user interface for Office 2007, but I also suspect that long-time users will be confused as hell by it.

There is, for instance, no traditional menu bar, and no File or Edit menu, as there have been since Word first appeared on the Macintosh in the 1980s. (There is a big button that takes the place of most of what used to live in the File menu.) Yet, in the long run the new Office might be significantly more usable, since it eschews some of the UI cruft that has been accumulating for nearly 20 years.

Disturbingly, though, this new interface is a relatively recent addition, which is never a good sign. The interface of a computer application should really be the first thing you design, not the last. And it makes me wonder what the next version of Mac Office is going to look like.

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