Earlier today, Microsoft gave a public preview of Office 12 at the PDC in Los Angeles. You can read a press release disguised as an interview with an Office product manager here. It includes a couple of screen shots and a fairly high-tech/low-hype explanation of the principles behind the redesign. I liked this:
The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted. As such, we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented”
And from the perspective of someone who will be writing a book on this application, I really liked this:
No, we don’t have a “classic mode.” We surveyed customers to find out what would help people transition, and they told us they really wanted us to help them move forward, rather than doing any kind of classic mode. In addition to redesigning the UI, we’ve added a lot more functionality in Office “12.” Faced with the same challenge of making all this new functionality available in the old UI, we couldn’t keep the old command-oriented model and make it easier for users to find new features, so we decided to make a bolder move.
Michael Gartenberg made an initial comment that intrigued me:
I’m not sure I totally love the new Office “12” UI. There’s a lot to like about it in terms of how nice it looks and simplifies core functions but the whole design seems a little cluttered for a typical XGA resolution. It looks like to really use this stuff, you’ll need a pretty high res monitor.
That was my first reaction too, until I checked the properties of the screen shot I copied above and saw that it’s actually 1024 x 768!
I’m not going to write a whole bunch more about Office 12 until I actually get my hands on it. Any relationship between a fabulous demo and a great product is purely coincidental. But the reworking that’s gone into this revision is impressive, and I’m looking forward to working with it.
Ed Bott 
All I want to know is, can I hide that monstrosity of a toolbar? I’m sure it can be recessed or turned off, but it’s ugly. If it has to be THAT big, it will have to be docked on the side of the screen rather than on top for me.
The good thing is that for people who refuse to read a manual (most office workers) and know that you can actually “copy” and “paste,” then Office just got easier. I do like the expanded menu options.
Hi Ed!
Zaine, the size of the ribbon is about the same as two rows of toolbars. Although the default setup for Office 2003 is one row, because we have so many “popup” toolbars (and docked ones like the drawing tools) and other floating ones (and the task panes) our instrumented studies show that almost no one has the default setup. As such the ribbon is actually more economical than the current experience 99.44% of customers experience. Think of it like a “flat tax” on screen real estate. All your interactions take place in a fixed location. THe design goal was to have more of your content on the screen and make it so you do not have to do battle with our UI to get to your work.
If you want to hid the ribbon you can double click on it. And for things like Reading Mode in Word, the ribbon will automatically hide. We showed this in the demonstration today.
There’s more on channe9 in the interview with Julie who led the design efforts. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720
It took me a moment, as I have only looked at the screenshots rather than the press release, but it appears that the only menu on there is the file menu – all the other things that look like menus actually change what is in the ribbon. Certainly an interesting choice.
Thanks for the info, Steven!
Finally!
The new office looks fresh and different.
I don’t understand how people rush into conclusions right after 1 minute looking ?!
Exactly the same happened to the “most-secure” browser – Firefox – all the hype and publicity screwed people’s minds.
And what’s now – the same security issues in firefox as in IE.