The latest version of Microsoft Office is the biggest change we’ve seen in years. Visually, the new Ribbon user interface in its core applications—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is the first major design improvement in over a decade, and I’m very pleased with the new graphics engine. As I’ve been working with Office 2007, I’ve been compiling a list of features I’d like to see in a future productivity suite.
So with that in mind, I talked with Antoine Leblond, the new head of Microsoft’s Office Productivity Applications group, about where Office is now and where it’s going.In these core applications, Office 2007 lets you minimize the UI so you see a blank page unless you need a command. That’s convenient, but I’d also like a classic mode for those applications. Leblond said there’s no practical need for that because people adjust to the new UI pretty quickly. He did say it makes sense to have Ribbon in more applications but that the new UI was designed more for the authoring apps (those that create documents) than the transaction-oriented Outlook app, which may require a somewhat different interface.
Another new feature that Leblond touted is Outlook’s built-in search, which, he said, will turn “filers into pilers,” in that people won’t use folders as much. I’m sure that’s true of some people, but I still use both. I’ve been using third-party search engines for years (my favorite is X1), so Outlook’s isn’t revolutionary. Performance is one of my concerns with search, so it’s good that Outlook uses the Windows Vista index service. We wouldn’t want two indexers on one machine. I’m also concerned about Office 2007’s performance on machines with less than 1GB of memory.Leblond noted that the development team usually doesn’t focus on performance until near the end of the release process, so it’s too early to judge.
As for PowerPoint, Leblond and I agreed on the dramatic evolution it has undergone. Most schoolchildren now learn to make presentations, something I never would have predicted when I first saw the program many years ago. But PowerPoint needs many more improvements. It was designed for a world of static text and graphics, and we’re moving into a world of cinematic presentations. Leblond said that creating richer presentations—and ones that run on the Web—was a goal for the future.
Office’s main competitors are the Web 2.0 productivity applications, including Writely, Zoho Writer, and Google Spreadsheets—all Web-based applications for creating and sharing documents. They don’t match Office, but they offer a very simple way of sharing information. Leblond dismissed those options as “mini-applications” but did agree that the ability to save and share information over the Web is interesting.
For big companies, Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint servers are solid infrastructures for such collaborations. If your company doesn’t want to maintain these applications, you can find hosted versions. But for individuals and small businesses, setting up a hosted plan takes too much effort and may be too expensive. Offi ce Live is a step forward in making it easier for small businesses, and there are also a number of good competitors out there, such as Near-Time and HyperOffice.
I’d like to see the collaboration process made a lot easier for individuals. That’s the best part of the new Web applications, even if the programs themselves don’t have all the features you’d like, such as better ways of tracking changes. Leblond indicated that Microsoft will invest more in services such as Office Live, but that the company will deliver “what works best as a client and what works best as a service.” He pointed to the existing Office Web site as an example of integration of client and server applications, and he said the team was looking at much richer integration possibilities down the line.
In many ways, Office 2007 is yet another revision of the basic productivity applications we’ve seen for years. Those applications are essential, but we’re now using richer media, much more information and storage, and always-on communications. I’d like to see Offi ce move forward and embrace the Internet even more.