Hi James,
As with many things, someones 'great' is someone else's 'what were they thinking'
There's nothing wrong with a tabbed interface
(basically that's what the ribbon is g) and who knows, at this point, what the next generation might look like. Office for mac
2008 appears to have both a Ribbon and traditional toolbar and it has a tabbed 'Notebook Layout view' that you can see on the brief
silent movie at
http://microsoft.com/mac/products/word2008
One of the reasons given by people for not liking OneNote is that it's interface is 'all over the place' (i.e. the interface is way
too busy for them
)
Issues folks bring up for Word 2007 is that it has tabs instead of menus, and that the ribbon/UI already takes up too much space,
so that they don't want to give up even more of their screen to document tabs (document writers tend to be looking at more of a
document at a time than folks in Excel, when editing, as an example), others would gladly make space for tabs for documents or for
sections.
IBM/Lotus Wordpro had a tabbed interface and IBM has resurrected the Symphony name for an Office product suite you can try from
http://symphony.lotus.com
that IBM has said that with coming out with a product to 'add their weight' to using ODF (Oasys Open Document Format) in office
files
There isn't one 'Microsoft' team. It's more like General Motors products, similar base with unique features to each product to meet
different perceived market needs.
This is an interesting Microsoft download on using the Office 2007 application interfaces
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/te...572621033.aspx
for folks that have Office 2007 with One Note installed, but who may not have used it or done much with it (that interface can feel
'foreign' to many folks too g).
For earlier versions of Word there have been tab interface add-ins available.
If you have a fast connection you can watch the presentation here on how the Office/Word 2007 interface came about and various desig
ns that were rejected for this version (one of which looks a lot like the Office for Mac 2008 one g)
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archiv...he-ribbon.aspx (you can also download the 'Story of the Ribbon'
(146mb g)
============
"James Woodward - Brisbane Australia" oft.com wrote in message
...
Hi Tony Jollans [I assume that you are a Microsoft employee [are you?]] - In
reply to your comments:
- If Microsoft think that 'document part tabs' are a great idea in One Note
and Excel why do you not think that they would be a great addition to Word?
- The document navigation facilities in Word that you refer to [Document
Map, Outline View, Browse by Section, etc.] are not easy to use - simple tabs
[like in One Note and Excel] would be much better [these could be toggles on
and off and user defined].
James Woodward - Brisbane Australia
--
Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP
*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*