Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In past years the Reference Guides have been asked to write what they see in the year ahead. This year no one really asked me, least of all Microsoft, but with all of the reaction to the current version of Office, and also to Vista (much of it negative) I thought I might add my two cents.

Interestingly, the current issue of Wired Magazine has an in depth profile of Ray Ozzie, who came over with Groove and developed Lotus Notes to be the current Chief Software Architect, now responsible for future releases. The man who Bill Gates calls “one of the top five programmers in the universe” seems refreshingly candid and aware of the perceptions of the current versions of Office and Vista.

If you read between the lines of the article and Ozzie’s own quotes you may agree with me that he is painfully aware of the limitations of desktop shrink-wrapped software which have only been exacerbated by the need to release new versions — with features that are less necessary to end users than they are to the company releasing the software — and to their bottom line.

What this has resulted in, for example, in Office 2007 is the Ribbon, which while making some excellent new features (conditional formats, effects, galleries) “transparent” also resulted in a massive need for users to reorient their ways of working, sometimes for days and sometimes for months.

For example, a feature I seldom use (Replace Fonts) is nowhere to be found near Fonts, and exists elsewhere on the Ribbon. So when I finally need to use it (months after installing Office) I need to locate it and wonder whether it still exists (see below). Worse, pressing F1 for Help does not seem to provide a quick reminder of where the feature actually is and how to implement it. (I found the answer on Google).

Other features were simply removed, like the Macro Recorder in PowerPoint, or moved to the “Quick Access Toolbar” to be manually installed for presumably quicker access, like the Data Form in Excel. In each case users had to figure this out for themselves, generally while working on an important project.

Similarly in Vista, even after disabling User Account Controls (since I’m the only user I feel entitled), it still may take a multitude of keystrokes just to move a folder from one desktop to a flash drive or another location on the network. There are questions about “File Properties” for example that would take hours of research to answer, but if you click Yes to acknowledge they won’t be moved, you remain mystified as the task finally ends.

Going back to Ozzie, all of this points to his clear understanding that as he aims Office and Windows at the “Cloud”, hosting services online as well as on the desktop, the challenge will not be to change interfaces or add features and complexity, but rather to make everything simpler and easier to use.

Microsoft is not benevolently coming to this realization. The Mac attacks and Google obviously are motivating factors.

The Wired article lists a four prong technological plan from Ray Ozzie which includes an online version of Windows and Office.

But while technologists wonder or anticipate whether the full features set can be accommodated to the “cloud”, and new value added features included as well, the average user and IT professional is surely wondering about the two real gorillas lurking behind the new software: usability and compatibility.

For Office 14 to succeed, in my opinion, it will need to build, of necessity, on the Ribbon. Translating these features to the web will be a daunting task for programmers, particularly since not everyone will want to use only the web services version, but will want to stick with Office 2007 and 2003 on the desktop.

But before we get into compatibility — in terms of usability, will just moving Office into Office Live be enough to make users pay for the service (especially if they own desktop versions)?

Unfortunately the marketing folks may not be convinced, and they may well attempt to add new “features” that confuse rather than streamline work flow. Even the current feature set of Office has made many users opt for Open Source Open Office, Google Apps and Zoho, just for the simplicity, finding the only capability a pleasant value add if not a necessity.

The fact that SlideRocket lets you collaborate and present online is cool, but the fact that you can incorporate web resources seamlessly and create a decent slide show in an hour without opening a gazillion dialog boxes is a major plus as well. (I think that also accounts for the popularity of Keynote and SmartDraw — simplicity and transparency).

In terms of compatibility both Office 2007 and Vista have been a nightmare. Having created digital video for years, the problems I have encountered just in this arena have been enough to make we want to scream. I have had to tout an Add-In — Plays for Certain which of necessity re-encodes my video before I can play it PowerPoint.

The apparent reason is a difference in playback capability between Media Player and the MCI playback in PowerPoint — but who cares?

And, PowerPoint still doesn’t accept Flash video and most of QuickTime, and neither does Media Player.

And that’s just one potential compatibility issue facing Office and Windows when they go fully online. (Where does YouTube not play?)

Accommodating users of previous versions is the other major rub. The “Compatibility Pack” aside, even users of Office 2003 (never mind previous versions) run up against major roadblocks when they try to move their files to 2007, and God help them, back again. I’ve used the PowerPoint masters as an example, but until you really need to do this, you don’t know the iceberg is waiting for the Titanic, so it hits you at the worst possible time – usually when you want to deliver a project.

A great example of this happened to a friend of mine who recently bought a Vista laptop. He was telling me that all of the sudden, for no apparent reason, his audio would be muted. I speculated that it was probably the result of a Vista update; on several of my updates my dual monitors were abruptly disabled and my desktop appeared only on the small low resolution monitor, not on both.

What made my friend’s story poignant was the comment by his girlfriend — “I thought you knew a lot about computers.” We all did — when we learned the vagaries of Windows XP and Office 2002/XP and later 2003. Now we need to unlearn much and figure out more just to do what we always did without any problem.

If the payoff in new features really added value, that would be one thing — but I really don’t see it and in both Vista and Office several features I was used to have simply been eliminated.

Ironically help for these issues is usually found in Google from other users on forums, or in the Microsoft forums — and not in the programs themselves (Help?)

So in a nutshell what do I want from the next web-bound version of Office?

Simplicity, transparency and usability.

I want items to be where I expect them to be, and to work the way I have been conditioned to work for a decade or more. I certainly don’t want new web-related problems to suddenly emerge at critical junctures of my workflow, and if they do, I want them to be anticipated and explained clearly in online documentation.

When I begin a Word document I want to start typing, saving and sending, and not realigning margins, figuring out fonts or why my text is suddenly double spaced. I don’t want to learn a new version of online styles either. I just want to do my work.

More on the Vista side — but it affects Office as well (and in the web version this could be done with cookies, I suppose) — I’d like Explorer to remember where I last saved files and be able to simply (that is the key) set a default for how I view files in Explorer. I prefer Details as my default with Date Modified as one of the categories and after a number of attempts, I’ve given up trying to have Vista remember those preferences, either universally or for folders I have already used and designated.

One more thing — I don’t want any squiggly circles or sliders that never end, popup dialog boxes that have language I don’t understand or a lot of other hurdles or impediments to simple tasks like moving files or burning a disk.

That’s about it. Microsoft can take it from there.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

Vista – Are You Kidding Me?

Compatibility Pack: Challenges of Using Office 2007 Documents in Previous Versions

Books and eBooks

Office 2007: The Missing Manual(Safari Books Online)

Windows Vista Annoyances (Safari Books Online)

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