Office 12 Screenshots

It's a rare day that you'll hear me raving about Microsoft, but with the GUI overhaul they're applying to Office 12, they're doing an incredible job. Jensen Harris, who writes a blog about working on the Office User Interface recently posted a bunch of screenshots of the new interface, and they're great. Seriously.

He's previously discussed the challenges involved in designing for Office. As a program that has grown organically over the years, it now has an incredible number of features, and has become steadily more complicated to use. He talks about the toolbars which pop up the first time you try to do something like insert an image or add a comment, but don't go away afterwards, and how many users were afraid to close them for fear of never finding the feature again. (On a site note, I'm sure that Adobe struggles with this same problem.)

To address this in Office 12, they've come up with a new concept called the "ribbon." It's a super-toolbar, if you will. About twice the height of a normal toolbar, which sounds bad until you realize that it's the ONLY toolbar, and it's contextual. It pays attention to what you're working on and what tools you need, and displays the relevant bits in the ribbon. I'm absolutely amazed that they managed to find an elegant solution to this problem, and I'm even more amazed that it's decent-looking. (And if you don't like the fisher-price blue skin, they've also got a nice-looking black skin available.)