I had the opportunity to sit a few minutes with MS Word 2007 the other day, and I really liked it. It's killer feature, as opposed to previous versions of Word, is the well-publicized ribbon interface. I found this design to be far superiour to the menu-and-toolbar approach of most software, including OOo. Before I head over to bugzilla and file suggestions, I'd like to discuss the issue on list and form some solid ideas. These are the reasons that I liked the ribbon interface: - The user can see what options are available to him. With the dropdown menu, I'd only click what I knew I was looking for. And the sea of icons only made the app seem intimidating, it did not help me explore my options. With the ribbon I find that I can see what options are available to me. As it turns out, that had me doing everything that I needed, without even thinking about documentation, google, or a mailing list query (things that the typical MS user are not very disposed to do). - The icons are much bigger and better decribe their actions than with a toolbar. This is possible because there are less icons on the screen at any one moment. Additionally, below each family of icons is the family's name (Font, Paragraph, etc). So the user already has a bit of textual information regarding each button, and it's specific function is up to the graphic icon. This reduces the need to hover over each icon to understand what it does. It is also much easier to visualize and understand than the grouping of icons into seperate toolbars. - The ribbon can be minimized, providing maximum space for the document. It pops up when a user click on a menu item, and disappears again when the user clicks an icon or the document. So not only are the icons larger (as mentioned previously) but the document window is larger as well.
Non-ribbon issues that I liked about Word 2007 were: - The zoom scrollbar, just like a digital photo app. - The shortkey popups when one presses Alt. This feature eliminates the underlined letters in _F_ile, _E_dit, _V_iew, F_a_vorites, etc. When the user presses Alt, the shortcut letter pops up below the associated menu item. I love it. - The save, forward, and backwards buttons are always in the same place regardless of ribbon status, and that place is not in the middle of a sea of icons. I use the keyboard shortcuts anyway, but this looks very nice for mouse maids. - The help doumentation was wonderful. I did not even need it, but I examined it anyway and found it very easy to understand. I stress that I used Word 2007 in English, and with previous Word versions (and OOo) sometimes the English documentation is such that non-native English speakers may not fully understand what is being communicated. Not so with the revised Word documentation. I know that OOo is open source and that I can help improve the documentation, but honesty, I did not even think about it until I read the Word documentation. Truth is, I'd pay a good bit of money if Office 2007 supported a standard office format (odf) and ran on Linux. It's that good. To those who don't care about document formats, and who run Windows anyway, it really seems a better office suit. At least, Word did. I'll try to find some time to play with Excel later this week and report back. Maybe I'll file some bugs. It might not be a bad idea if OOo supported "traditional mode" and "ribbon mode". Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
