Ugly...

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>the words "page layout" were used quite often while emphasizing many of Word's new features...

More good news.

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I have always respected the office team over at MS. They do good work. Its not easy to take the diversity and daunting complexity of heavy duty office programs and make them manageable as well as usable.

Aesthetically, they did a great job on the new Office Suite. The ribbon is a step in the right direction. It still needs refinement but it came from MS and that speaks volumes (we all know the slapdash nature MS takes in almost everything they do). The new Office does indeed look refined and doesn't have that "the night before" feel to it that nearly everything they slap their name on does.

Its going to take a lot to win me over from Pages, but I really impressed so far. I hope it only gets better on Mac OS when they port it and that they don't go and ruin it.

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Word Art? Give me a break.

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Well yes,
I do respect the Mac BU as an important and dedicated developer for the Mac OS and I do actually admire the Office (for Windows) team's effort to unclutter the interface and actually come up with decent interface guidlines for their new Ribbon.

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

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looks like a different Ribbon UI than the windows one

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I like it :)

But why were the screenshots in Latin...? :P

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Really ugly...

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I was actually contemplating getting Office when 2008 was released, but looking at these screenshots, I'm pretty sure that iWork will well and truely suit my needs, even if it doesn't come with a Spreadsheet.
Microsoft Products are Reactive, they've obviously borrowed heavily from Pages here, inhereting it's good aspects, but also its bad aspects.
These screenshots remind me of a dog in a Tennis Ball Factory- It doesn't know which way to run...

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Lokheed:

"Its going to take a lot to win me over from Pages"

Try typing a 10+ pages document and you will hate Pages for sure.

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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?

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After looking at some screenshots, I have to say that I really like the design approach here. Powerpoint has black transparent Windows like Shiira 2.x Beta or CSSEdit. On the other hand, the tasks/todo list really looks out of place.

Here's the slideshow: http://www.eweek.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=&s=25986&a=198271,00.asp

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"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?

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So now they've made it eyecandy-ish, but confusing as hell? We cannot find a balance, it appears.

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

Are you serious? Its freakin' filler text.

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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.

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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. ;-)

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"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.

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The 1990 version of MSWord gave me everything I needed. Everything since then (other than easier columns) has been a step backward or sideways. I could even get by with the 1987 version. The day they got rid of the right-hand keyboard navigation was a big victory for stupid. It was incredibly rad for the time. You just typed the decimal key, and then the menu number and then the first letter of the command, so that point-five-s brought up 'Section' where you could set columns. After awhile it was faster than lightning, and you never needed the mouse. The 'equals' key was 'find again,' which I don't think works anymore at all on the Mac. Hmm, now I wonder if this functionality is something that still exists but is hidden, because I hardly use Word anymore since my heady days as a writer.

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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.

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