Microsoft Office and the new wave
Microsoft Office 12 gets a makeover and gives application trainers something new
The user interface change in Office 12 will make some people crazy. That assumes it and Vista get most recent announced release dates, which keep retreating into the future. Here’s the latest from various sources.
Network World reported on April 10 that:
Sharepoint Portal Server will be part of Office. This puts Microsoft and Office at the heart of collaboration, workflow, document routing and approval, and a host of other collaborative tools. This looks like a direct challenge to Adobe and another run against Notes. And Microsoft is planning on including templates for wikis, blogs, and instant messaging in addition to the web-based spaces of Sharepoint.
In a February 20, 2006 article, Network World reported that FrontPage goes away, to be replaced with “Sharepoint Designer 2007.” This would seem to indicate that Microsoft has decided to make Sharepoint and its self-service web site creation model the centerpoint of Office. Now, whether FrontPage will be promoted as a web page editor as well is not clear.
And Microsoft has a great deal of information available:
User Interface demo
System Preview
Pricing
Get the beta
All of the versions, explained
The “Ribbon” in 30 minutes. Office 2007 Beta required.
Changes in Word, and how to use the “Ribbon”. This also requires the beta. I may be real tired of hearing about the “Ribbon” real soon now.
Excel changes in the new version. Microsoft has changed things in Excel, so this may be helpful for us “old” users.
I use Microsoft Office when I need to, mainly because most all of my clients and customers use it. For better or worse, we’ll have to deal with .doc files and .ppt material as we work on their web applications. As a trainer, I get questions about Word and Excel simply because that is what most everyone uses. From a business standpoint, my income is enhanced when Microsoft changes things.
And Office 2007 looks to be a nice enhancement.