Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Why the new face to Office 2007?

In a 3 part post in Network World's Security Strategies Alert Column, M. E. Kabay explores why Microsoft changed the User Interface (UI) with Office 2007 and did not provide a classic view for users happy with the old UI.

As most readers know, the Office 2007 suite has a radically different user interface, called the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface (UI), in which familiar functions are grouped in new ways.
  • Some functions have disappeared entirely.
  • The limited user-definable toolbar is restricted to a single roll of symbols.
  • Icons in the user definable toolbar cannot be customized.
  • There is no way to revert to the more familiar Office 2003 (or older) interface.

The new UI has been a source of user frustration and has slowed adoption of the new version of Office at our institution.

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