Chris Johnston

I don’t usually write about Microsoft products, but there was a post on digg.com about the interface for Office 2007 that sparked my interest. I have been mildly following the development of Office ever since I saw a video of a very early version. The video showcased the new UI and the live preview feature, both looked very cool.

I am usually the first person to state that one thing Microsoft is not is innovative, however, with Office 2007, this seems to be changing. It seems that the Office team has decided to try something new, they have decided to remove all menus and use command tabs instead. The tabs allow the user to see all available options and commands associated with an action that the user may wish to do, such as Page Layout. I am not sure how this experiment will pan out, but I have to admire their courage.

Based on the screenshots and video that I have seen, this looks to be a very cool idea. As a user works, the command tabs at the top change depending on what is being done. So if you are editing content in a table, the tabs would show you actions relevant to tables, if you are editing body text, then it would show you, once again, relevant actions. The idea is that instead of having to hunt through menus, the commands you need are directly available when you need them.

Personally, I think this is a very cool idea. It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off.