David Emery Online

Word Up

12 January 2007

Almost completely lost in the jet-stream of the iPhone announcement was Microsoft’s announcement of Office 2008 for the mac which is shipping in the second half of the year. Before reading onwards, check out the pictures of the interface up on Appleinsider:

Quick-and-dirty snapshots of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac

I have to say, I’m really quite impressed. MacBU has managed to very effectively combine the ribbon as seen in Office 2007 for the PC with a “traditional” Mac interface. In fact, what it reminds me of most is Apple’s iWork suite – high praise indeed, as Apple are simply the best UI designers working today (you did see the iPhone interface, right?).

The Office 2008 was always going to be an interesting challenge. On the one hand, there was a pressing need to modernise the interface, as it was feeling quite out of date by current Mac interface fashions. On the other hand, the huge overhaul of Office 2007 on the PC must have caused a major dilemma over at Microsoft – it would be impossible to do a full version of the ribbon while maintaining the Mac look and feel, but some interface consistency across the two versions is very important.

They seem to have managed to pull off balancing both quite nicely.

I will readily admit that the “Elements Gallery”, which is the ribbon-like component, is quite over-sized but it’s obviously not going to be used all the time; it contains things like document templates and chart tools which really benefit from small visual previews, but don’t need to be visible most of the time. The rest of the interface seems to benefit from a huge amount of visual polishing – rounded ends to the rulers for example, and subtle gloss and gradients all over the place. It’s also nice to see a move away from the floating toolbars of the current Office to a more Mac-like in-window toolbar.

Other than the interface, some of the features like “Publishing Layout View”, which promises DTP-lite type features and the new more powerful graphics features along with the obvious universal binaryness really make this upgrade very significant. I’m always wary of heaping praise on something I haven’t used and isn’t shipping, but Office 2008 is looking very promising at this stage.