Microsoft unveiled its new user interface for Office 12 earlier this week, and they seem to have departed radically from past releases:
…we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented”… instead of having to learn how to make something shadowed, or what the aspect ratio is or the percent gray, you just say, “Oh, I like that one,” and you pick it, you click it and get it in your document. It’s more visual.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access are due to get the face lift, but Outlook (the one Office application that I use constantly, and which pisses me off the most), will remain largely the same, according to the press release.
(Although oddly enough, xBetas has a couple of screen shots of a similarly engineered Outlook.)
My initial reaction is very wait-and-see… True, it looks like an aqua rip-off, but considering I use the suite every day on my work PC, anything new will peak my interest.
