Microsoft has announced the release of Office 12 Win Vista

Microsoft has announced the release of the first Technical Beta of "Office 12" on November 16. The version will be available to a limited number of customers and partners.

The Redmond company has made considerable investment over the user changing significatamente. Office 12 will include applications comeMicrosoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher, Project, and Visio.

Jeff Raikes, president of the Business Division, said that Office 12 will offer many examples of "transparent integration between applications and functions. Worthy of note are the new features for easy creation and data sharing between their employees through other servers (Jeff Raikes from an interview on IDG News Service).

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How much of a departure? Here are some of the new elements in the suite upgrade, due next year and codenamed Office 12 (actual product name TBD--wonder if it'll be "Office Vista?").

The "Ribbon." With one fell swoop, this all-encompassing UI conceit mostly replaces drop-down menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and task panes as we know them. The Ribbon is an oversized area at the top of the screen that holds formatting tools for an array of Office options. It's broken down into multiple panels, and the tools change both at your command and in context as you work with different elements in a document.

In general, Microsoft says, it's trying to revamp the Office interface so it's less about commands and more about results. So in the Ribbon and elsewhere, you often get What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get thumbnails of the results you'll get if you choose an option. (For instance, Excel has various cell formatting effects which you can view right in the Ribbon.)

The Ribbon looks awfully large, and the logical reaction is to grow suspicious that it's stealing screen space that would otherwise go to displaying your document. It is big, but Microsoft describes its effect as a "Flat Tax" on screen real estate. Which means that the Ribbon stays the same size at all times, incorporating functions which would in the past have been accomplished through multiple toolbars and other elements which would have hogged additional space.

Real-time previews. When you select an item for formatting and run through options in the Ribbon (say, various fonts), your document will change to show how it would be affected by that formatting. (If this notion sounds familiar, you're probably a WordPerfect user--Corel's suite has had this for years.)

"Floaties." I'm guessing these will get a more serious-sounding name, but they're already useful-looking: In some places in Office, you'll get a pop-up menu of formatting options that appear right next to the document element that can be formatted. These look like a hybrid of today's right-click menus and Office's SmartTags...the former of which will also survive in the Office 12 interface, and the latter of which may also remain.

The whole goal of these changes, the company says, is to get more of the power of the applications into users' hands, putting features at your fingertips which are currently buried in menus. The new interface elements supercede the current interface in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. In Outlook, they appear in the window in which you compose e-mail, but not elsewhere. (Microsoft says the new interface is tweaked for document creation, and isn't necessarily optimal for other types of work.)

Other apps that are nominally part of the Office family, such as Publisher and Visio, won't use the new interface at first, according to Microsoft, but may pick it up eventually.

One of the first questions out of my mouth at our demo was, "Is there a 'Go Back to the Old Office look and feel' mode?" The answer is...no, absolutely not. Microsoft's so confident in this new approach that it'll be the only interface option in Office 12.

Microsoft hasn't released a beta version of Office 12 yet, so all I can show you are some sample images that the company is distributing. Here's a closeup of part of the Word interface (click on it, and the other screen images below, to see the whole screen in question):

A couple of things of note about the above screen:

Those items such as "References" and "Mailings" don't lead to drop-down menus. Click on one, and the Ribbon changes, revealing a different set of tools. (There's still a File drop-down menu, but it leads to a more visual, interactive menu than we're used to.)

Unlike the current Office, a lot of the tools in Office 12 involve showing canned formatting effects and letting you apply them with a click. Such as the type effects in the above screen's "Quick Formatting" section. (Tools for manually formatting documents are still there in the new suite, but it looks like they'll be played down.)

Here's a bit of a PowerPoint screen showing the Ribbon in that application, complete with drawing and formatting tools:

And here's a taste of the new Access interface:

What to make of all this? I suspect that a lot of the initial reaction to this change will be really negative. Microsoft, after all, has a history of tweaking the Office interface in ways which end up being either reviled or ignored by most of the world at large. (I was present at the reviewer's workshop in 1996 or thereabouts at which the company unveiled "Clippy"--the shortly-to-be-infamous talking paperclip--and explained how its research showed he'd be loved by newbies and IT pros alike.)

It is natural to approach this makeover with a healthy dash of skepticism. But my initial reaction based on an hour of demo is this: "Microsoft is doing something really ambitious, in reaction to real problems with today's bloatware--it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off." That's lot more hopeful than my initial reaction upon learning about Clippy all those years ago, which was "Is this some sort of perverse practical joke?"

Until we can try the software for ourselves--and let you know what we think--we've got more questions than answers. Such as these...

Will people be willing to give the new look a shot? If you commit to Office 12, you're going to commit to this new interface and the learning curve it requires...no looking back. It'll be fascinating to learn how many people are willing to make the leap, and how quickly they do it.

Will the new interface break anything? Microsoft says that most macros, Visual Basic customizations, and other third-party tweaks to the Office apps should still work in Office 12. I'm guessing that there will be at least some high-profile problems. (It's unclear to me, for instance, how an add-in that adds items to menus will work if Office doesn't have menus as we know them.)

Is inconsistency going to be a problem? The new Office isn't even going to appear throughout the core Office apps, let alone in other Microsoft office programs or third-party mainstays such as Photoshop and Quicken. Even once you're comfortable with the new Office, leaping back and forth between old-school apps and new-school ones will take some getting used to.

Will it be a trendsetter? I'm guessing that this new look will either start to influence other applications very quickly--or it'll turn out to be a dead end. I don't see a scenario in which the Microsoft apps behave completely different from every other program on the market.

Will it feel dumbed down? Interfaces that try to make things simpler for the masses have a way of getting in the way of savvy, experienced users. And many folks tend to look at highly visual, colorful interfaces as being childish. (As the Microsoft program manager who demoed the software mentioned herself, DOS fanatics sneered at Windows itself for years.)

Based on Microsoft's demo, I think there's a chance, at least, that it's found a way to streamline the applications' designs without unduly irritating old pros--at least old pros with an open mind--but we won't know for sure until we've had the opportunity to bang away at beta versions of the apps for awhile. Which we will as soon as we can. Stay tuned...

Will it get richer over time? With maybe a year to go until Office 12 shows up, Microsoft still has time to polish up its interface. But it looks like this pass at the new UI will be less customizable than the Office interface we know today. (The Ribbon will have a "Quick Launch" section that lets you store favorite features, but you apparently won't have much ability to rearrange the Ribbon's elements.) Assuming this new interface sticks around in Office 13 and beyond, it'll be intriguing to see how it develops.

What happens to the competition? I've written recently of how Microsoft Office-like OpenOffice.org, the free office suite, is looking these days. When Office 12 ships, OpenOffice.org will suddenly sport the "old" interface. The same holds true for WordPerfect, which has lately been following a "We're a lot like Microsoft Office, only more affordable" strategy. That's not necessarily a knock on those products--actually, it might turn out to be a major point in their favor, since they'll presumably still sport the look and feel which the world is familiar with, while Office 12 will be an unknown quantity. But at the very least, the question "From a typical user's standpoint, how are Microsoft Office and cheaper alternatives different?" will have a number of strikingly clear new answers.

In most ways that matter, Office 97 was the last Microsoft upgrade that presented a significantly different experience for end users. That'll change when Office 12 ships; it's too early to tell whether it'll change for better or worse, but at least it's going to change.

So what sort of features would you find irresistable in a Microsoft Office upgrade?