MS Office Beta Notes

This is a side-blog where I intend to keep all of my notes from Beta testing new versions of Office. This will keep them all in one place for future reference. I started this with Office 2003, and am bringing it back for the 2007 version. This is not an official Microsoft site, this is just the ramblings of one IT guy.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Popular options

Jensen Harris does a pretty good job explaining the Popular tab under Options for Office 2007, explaining what is listed there and why. He says:

We know that although most people don't change options, to the extent that they do, user interface tweaks are the most popular kind of option to change.


Which I find interesting, because it shows how important the look and feel of the interface is when you're trying to do something, and I imagine it also gives us a hint as to how high a hurdle the new interface of Office 2007 is going to be to all those users who are just used to seeing what they see now. I know just a small change like the difference between Track Changes being a sub menu from the Tools menu in Word 2000 or part of the reviewing toolbar to being only available on the reviewing toolbar can cause serious consternation levels in users, I can't imagine what this completely new interface is going to do!