Microsoft Office 2008 screenshots

>I respect Microsoft's innovation...

Whathafa?

I relly think MS has a problem with UI and UI usability in particular: all screens are growing wider and they add this large ribbon stuff which eats _vertical_ space? It must be to promote scroll wheel mice, I do not see another explanation. In addition to being of an ugly blue-ish color (which I guess won't turn into graphite if you change this in your Aqua settings) this is a terrible usability mistake.
Not to mention the use of a new document format which pretends to reinvent a standard which already exists (Open Document Format from OpenOffice.org). This company is really doing everything it can to make the life of computer users more difficult.

To sum up: use OpenOffice/Neooffice! It's not perfect, it's not widespread but it's so much better!

My problem with Word is that MS seem to think you're going to need EVERY available button on the screen at the same time, and it all takes up far too much space. Look at the size of the actual document compared with the "ribbon". It's ridiculous.

"I simply don't like what I see in these screenshots and what I heard about it from people who have actually worked with pre releases of Office: mac 2008."

So? Don't use it.

Andreas,

I've typed up 60 page reports and had no problem with it. I used to get a little perturbed at the lack of commonly used buttons found in word (e.g., bold, italic, justify, etc), but that forced me to adopt the keyboard shortcuts which inadvertently made me more productive.

I still miss some features from Word, but the lack of UB made it rather easy to move to Pages. Pages itself made it rather easy to stick with.

Gosh they just keep on trying their darndest to look Mac-like. A for Effort, no?

I still have high hopes for iWork '07 (actual word processor and ODF support). Whenever it should happen to be released. ;-)

"But why were the screenshots in Latin...?"

Are you serious? Its freakin' filler text.

I guess that little window on the right is the new 'My Day' app. Looks pretty lickable for a MS app, if nothing else.

I like the ribbon concept in general, and am glad they at least superficially gave it an Aqua look.

The ribbon tabs are different than the standard 'write', 'edit', 'page layout', etc. that I've seen in Win Office screenshots, I wonder why. This Mac screenshot seems to be in some sort of publishing type mode, with the templates and all.

"the impressive new 'Ribbon' UI in Office 2007 for Windows" is not impressive to most current Office users. It looks unfamiliar, and takes up an absolute ton of screen space.

Training for the new version takes time and money. Buying the upgrade costs money.

Tell me again why I shouldn't outfit my office with OpenOffice?

None of this means anything to me unless they improve the performance of Entourage as an Exchange client. They're still not adding MAPI support, which means it'll still be inferior to their Outlook 2001 product from OS9, right?