Road to Office 2008: installation and interface

Mousing over the dentures causes them to slowly glow in a blue light.  Selecting a tooth rolls down the Gallery view of templates, but then the buttons animate across the screen and the template items dance into place.  Mousing over templates invokes a minor magnify effect.  Unlike the Dock, the animation feels artificial and jerky.  It conveys the behavior of a website built in Flash, except rather than being wowed by an animated interface you'll only encounter once, you're stuck with the glowing, zooming, bouncing animated behavior on a daily basis. 

This doesn't seem appropriate for a word processor and other productivity applications.  Fortunately, you can mostly ignore the Vista-inspired Elements Gallery (apart from the dentures), and confine yourself to the Office-style toolbars. 

The toolbar icons also animate on rollover, somewhat less subtly than the existing Office 2004, but not in the same manner of the hyperactive Gallery.  In order to match the unified look of Leopard, which blends the Toolbar into the window title bar, Office 2008 renders all of the Office toolbars in the same dark aluminum finish, which makes its applications look very dark overall. 

That darkness seems particularly out of place next to the Gallery decked out in vividly glowing candy colors and bright white highlights (below).  The Gallery menu item's teeth also popup a "tool tip" that repeats what is already being displayed below it:

Inspector Clouseau

AppleInsider'sinitial installment of its Road to Office 2008 series introduced the look of the new Office Formatting Palette, which now looks more like the inspector panel from iWork.  The problem is that while it copies the idea of icons across the top, it choses its own icons and functions, so there is no real commonality with Apple's apps. 

It might be obvious why the MacBU didn't follow the design of iWork any closer; on one hand, they don't want to look imitative, and on the other, doing so would require reworking a lot of the historical arrangement of settings in Word. 

Here is the new Office 2008 palette, the previous version from Office 2004, and the iWork Inspector from Keynote:

Apart from some new polish, it's the same old Office 2004 Palette; a half dozen rows of settings hiding behind disclosure triangles, and now a series of icons at the top that tack on new features.  Some seem smart, like the citation manager window for bibliographies, while others not so much, such as the dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, and translation sections all stuffed into a single panel. ( Mac OS X already has a system wide dictionary, but Microsoft has chosen to use its own.) 

The MacBU could have delivered a system wide plugin for Mac OS X's new Dictionary 2.0, then added the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia.  Another section of the Palette is the Scrapbook, which could similarly have been delivered as a Dashboard widget.  Instead, it too is buried away inside Office, thus far negating some of the value Microsoft could offer customers. 

Even more oddly, the Office Palette flips around like an Dashboard widget for setting its display settings, turning into a modal, translucent black window (below).  Flipping the palette in the beta of Office 2008 causes other windows to stutter and redraw, making for a somewhat clumsy effect. 

On the flip side, there are settings for configuring what the panel does after a period of inactivity.  By default, it rolls up into the icon bar (below).  It's an entirely custom built human interface device. 

Worth an Upgrade? 

It may be that the MacBU can refine certain elements such as the palette to work and act more fluidly over the holidays prior to the mid-January release of Office 2008, but the real issues in Office don't seem like bugs as much as design compromises. 

At the same time, there's not many options for replacing Office for Mac.  Apple's simpler iWork will appeal to some users, but it doesn't yet deliver all of the features in Microsoft Office.  Alternatives such as NeoOffice also have serious weaknesses.  The degree of stability Office 2008 attains by January will have a major impact on whether the update gets rated as a buggy mistake or a solid update saddled with a few too many interface features. 

Outside of the user interface, Office 2008 also delivers Universal Binary support for Intel Macs, a significant step, albeit a couple years overdue.  That alone may be enough for Mac Office users to upgrade in January.  So what about the new features of Office?  AppleInsider's next article will take a deeper look at Word. 

Although I do think you make some very valid points, in general I feel that your review comes over as a bit mean-minded.  Throughout the piece your comments are couched in a critical style, which I don't feel is entirely justified by the reality of what I have seen of Office 2008.  Please try and find something positive to say in the next article in the series to balance this up!  I hasten to say that I have no connection whatsoever to Microsoft and dislike them intensely as a company.  But I do think it is always very important to maintain a degree of measure. 

Points I would like to make/reinforce:

1.  The gallery - the main reason I dislike this is that it drastically reduces the screen real estate available for editing the material being produced, which surely should be the primary purpose of any software.  It seems like a very programmer-oriented approach to focus more on the UI than on the reason for using it.  In this way I think Microsoft have lost sight of what the product is actually for.  I like the fact that you can optionally hide the toolbars if you want, so that you can focus on what you're writing - I just hope that between now and release they add the ability to totally hide the gallery as well.  In other respects I think the MacBU have done an excellent job of the toolbars and I am sure that this UI has the potential to add to the attraction of the Mac for the many people I know who hate the Office 2007 UI for my reasons and the reasons elucidated in your article. 

2.  I assume that the reason Apple have shied away from making it possible to use iWork as an Office alternative (in particular, by not providing an option to use Office file formats as defaults) is so that Microsoft don't finally walk away from the Mac, although I don't think this really makes sense as an excuse.  Otherwise I don't know why they haven't pursued this approach, as I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to be able to junk Office altogether.  However I can't do this while I have to have both iWork and Office versions of files on my Mac, so I will definitely be buying Office when it comes out, and iWork will sit on my system not being used, irrespective of its (many) merits. 

3.  I think your point about the floppy icon is likely to cause many people to discount your article because it is just TOO anally retentive.  Quite honestly, who cares? 

4.  Palette - seems OK to me in all respects.  I really don't know what you're getting at here! 

5.  System-wide Dictionary/Thesaurus - I agree entirely.  Who wants to have to maintain two totally separate custom dictionaries? 

If you own Office today, you will have to upgrade.  Not right away, but someday. 
Someday you will start receiving documents, spreadsheets and presentations that were created in the Windows version and can only be edited in MS Office.  When that magic event occurs, you will have to upgrade. 

If you own Office today, you will have to upgrade.  Not right away, but someday. 

Someday you will start receiving documents, spreadsheets and presentations that were created in the Windows version and can only be edited in MS Office.  When that magic event occurs, you will have to upgrade. 

Not entirely accurate, but a point nonetheless.  I have received documents created in Office 2007 (in the so-called Open Office format, a misnomer if ever there was one), and Pages had no troubles with it.  At work however, I have received plenty of Word documents that incorporate forms, which Pages does not support at all. 

My primary reason for waiting for Office 2008 is for enhanced Exchange functionality. 

Either way, your point about having to upgrade is a sad truth.  I have fully switched over to iWork '08 at home, but still have a requirement to use MS Office at work. 

Someday you will start receiving documents, spreadsheets and presentations that were created in the Windows version and can only be edited in MS Office.  When that magic event occurs, you will have to upgrade. 

Partially agreed.  Many of us indeed have to be able to read and deliver Word files.  Apart from the lack of some relevant functions in Pages, it's conversion to and fro Word is simply inadequate. 

Yet NeoOffice (one of the Mac OpenOffice ports) does a fine job in this respect.  Too bad OpenOffice and theire derivates deliver the same crap of a UI as MS does. 

So if you don't need many of the Word functions and don't have to exchange files with Office users, go for Pages, else consider NeoOffice as an alternative to MS Office. 

That remove Office "feature" scares me.  I've had similar problems with Office 2004.  I installed Office 2004 on a new Leopard machine and then tried to use Remove Office to get rid of the demo version that came pre-installed.  Afterwards the new Office 2004 would not run and gave me constant error messages.  I ended up totally removing it and installing from scratch again. 

Either the tool is not quite right or I'm too stupid to use it, however from now on I'll always ditch the old version first and then install the new. 

I might have been 2 years ago, but now I am just resigned to having to buy it. 
I just don't see anything in it that is exciting (I admit that I don't use Entourage nor Exchange). 
I am also sure that the new interface (after 17+ years of using Word) is just going to drive me bonkers. 

1.  The gallery - In this way I think Microsoft have lost sight of what the product is actually for...

2.  I assume that the reason Apple have shied away from making it possible to use iWork as an Office alternative (in particular, by not providing an option to use Office file formats as defaults) is so that Microsoft don't finally walk away from the Mac, although I don't think this really makes sense as an excuse.  Otherwise I don't know why they haven't pursued this approach, as I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to be able to junk Office altogether.  However I can't do this while I have to have both iWork and Office versions of files on my Mac, so I will definitely be buying Office when it comes out, and iWork will sit on my system not being used, irrespective of its (many) merits. 

3.  I think your point about the floppy icon is likely to cause many people to discount your article because it is just TOO anally retentive.  Quite honestly, who cares? 

1.  Microsoft lost sight of what computers are actually for about 10 years ago. 

2a.  Why would Mac make an Office file format as a default?  Does Microsoft make a Mac format as a default? ( I don't know if they do, but I suspect they dont, and why should they?) 

2b.  I have 2000+ documents in xls format on my mac, and I wiped MS Office from my hard disk when I bought iWork 08.  I have not missed it.  In fact, my Excel docs are easier to work with, and fully compatible with any format in which I choose to save them, be it xls or numbers or otherwise.  You should try it. 

3.  Have you ever seen a Mac Pro ?  Name a better looking, slicker computer product on earth.  Anal-retentivity is tantamount to Apple's success.  It should have rubbed off on you by now.  He is poking at it because it's not something you would get from Apple, except that with Apple, we expect that, with Microsoft, you make excuses.  For the amount of money we spend, we should stop making excuses and start making demands.