Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 02/20/06 issue

Inside the Next Microsoft Office

By Greg Crowe, GCN Staff

The GCN Lab pores over the new beta version and likes the suite’s ease of use, workflow features

When Microsoft Corp. says it’s releasing a new version of something, it usually means, at best, a dressing-up of the old version with minor enhancements (see Office 2000), or at worst, something with no improvements that actually makes life harder (see Windows ME).

But occasionally, Microsoft puts out a new version that is an improvement on every level. That looks to be the case with the new Office suite, known for now as Microsoft Office 12. The GCN Lab got its hands on the limited release Beta 1 of Office 12. The Beta 2 is due out soon and the final product is scheduled for release around the time Windows Vista ships, toward the end of 2006.

Rather than cosmetic improvements, the new Office sports upgrades at the most basic levels, and they’re changes for the better. One area of improvement over earlier editions is the increased integration of its component parts. Microsoft accomplishes this in many ways, but the most important is the implementation of new Office Extensible Markup Language formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Having a basic standard for these documents presents several advantages. First, the standard format allows for increased reliability in data recovery. Also, Office XML formats use compression technologies so files tend to take up much less disk space. Finally, interoperability between these three programs improves drastically because, in many ways, a Word document is an Excel document is a PowerPoint document. And since XML is a popular standard for many Web and computer applications, compatibility with external data sources is sure to be better.

The user interface is a vast improvement. The primary element is the ‘ribbon,’ which is a hybrid of the menus and toolbars of older versions. There are several tabs across the top of the document window. Each opens a different bar that has all of the functions pertinent to one area, such as text editing or object insertion. For more complex functions, clicking on the ribbon will produce a drop-down gallery with the necessary choices.

More news on related topics: Software Applications



GCN Popup