Print - Is Office 2007 Trickier for Users than Originally Expected?

According to Forrester Research, companies migrating to Microsoft Office 2007 are experiencing "more intense" training experiences than they had expected. Microsoft radically changed the user interface in key Office applications such as Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and, to a lesser degree, Outlook, in Office 2007, the first time the Office UI has been changed demonstrably since the suite was first introduced over a decade ago. Microsoft says that the new UI is more intuitive and exposes more functionality in a discoverable way than did older Office UIs.

Office 2007's user interface is based around a context-sensitive visual feature called the Ribbon that exposes functionality that is relevant to the task at hand. For example, when you're editing text in Microsoft Word 2007, the Home tab in the Ribbon displays options for fonts, paragraphs, styles, and editing. But when an image is inserted in the document, a new Picture Tools - Format tab appears, with options related to pictures.

According to Forrester Research, business migration to Office 2007 will be slow, with most enterprises waiting 3 to 5 years to make the switch. Part of the reason is the new UI. Though Office changed little from a usability perspective over the past decade, Office 2007 is a radical shift and will require both in-person and online training time, Forrester says. Most business users will require two to three hours of formal training, according to Forrester analysts, followed by a two to four week period of decreased efficiency while they get used to using the new UI for work.

With over 500 million active Office users worldwide, making a radical UI switch was an aggressive and risky move. But Microsoft says that the old UI, based around a menu and toolbar paradigm first utilized over 20 years ago, was no longer appropriate for an application suite with such a wide range of functionality. Microsoft also believes that the new Office 2007 UI will require little training and that it will ultimately result in fewer help calls, since it makes it easier for users to get work done quickly. Inexperienced users will see the biggest benefits, Microsoft adds, while very experienced Office users will need to relearn some skills.

In my own tests of Office 2007, I've found the new Ribbon-based UI to be intuitive, easy-to-use, and non-disruptive. Arguably, I'm an experienced Office user: As the author of almost 20 books and a decade's worth of experience with the product, I use Office on a daily basis, often for hours at a time. This, of course, contradicts some of the conventional wisdom about this release. It will be interesting to see how users really do react to Office 2007 a year or so from now.

Considering the majority of people didn't use half of the features of Office '03, I'd say its about time they were forced to learn. Yeah ribbon is different, but it's a good type of different. Just calm down when you can't find something and think to yourself, "where ought it be?" and 9/10 it will be there. Of course this traditionally requires reading and comprehension skills, something that oft those who need to be taught how to use an application suite are lacking heavily in.

"Most business users will require two to three hours of formal training, according to Forrester analysts, followed by a two to four week period of decreased efficiency while they get used to using the new UI for work." What a crock. So basically Forrester is saying that business users are dumb. We've started rolling out Office 2007 here and so far everyone loves it. Not one second has been spent on extra training. Office is still Office and the new UI is pretty damn awesome. It's nice not having to hear "Ugh! What menu was that damn feature under??" all the time anymore.

extra training is not hard to get either - get your clients to invest in Software Assurance or purchase via Open Value licensing and training is one of the included benefits, not to mention free upgrades to the next application, 24x7 professional support by a dedicated Microsoft rep, deployment assistance and utilities, the ability to spread payments, home-use licenses, employee purchase discounts, etc, etc, all for the price of about 50% more per license. XP

Does anyone realize how easy it is to teach a class on Office 2007? I am currently teaching a class on it for a small group of family/friends, and it is 100s of times easier to teach Office 2007. My method for teaching the GUI is this: 1. Look at the tabs and determine which tab more closely matches what you feature you want. 2. Click the tab and look at the chunks to narrow your search 3. Find the feature. With Office 2003 and earlier, there would be *no* _way_ I could teach the GUI. Between the hidden items on the toolbars, menus, and dialogs, the previous GUI was a mess. With Office 2007, my _mom_ can actually use the mail merge feature without my help. I read on Jensen's (the PM for the Office UI) that when Office 2007 was in the preliminary stages, their group came together and determined that they would need to add 100 task panes to Office! At that point, they realized the current UI was broken. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it seems to be the trend for these research groups/reviews to bash MS at every opportunity. Between the multiple bad Vista reviews, the poor Zune reviews, and now these Office 2007 reviews, it seems these groups have an issue with MS. I use Vista as my primary desktop and Office 2007, and I *strongly* recommend upgrading to both. Vista (and Office) constantly amazes me by the new functionality I am constantly discovering. One example: I was copying 2+ gigs of files over our wireless network, when the connection dropped. Instead of cancelling the operation, Vista gave me an option to resume the copy operation. The same thing happens with corrupted files. Even in the *very* off chance that Explorer hangs, pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the operation.

Oh man... if the most "intense" training experience you have to put up with in your life is Office 2007, you've got no reason to whine. Navy seals might be able to comment about how intense their training is. Overweight, 40-something middle managers can just suck it up. Moreover, anyone who's been using Office for a few years shouldn't NEED any training to use Office 2007. They should simply sit down and spend a few awkward hours adapting and then it should quickly become second nature. It boggles my mind that these morons need training just because some icons got moved around. Finally, despite Paul's view on the matter, I'd like to applaud Microsoft for the new UI. The fact that users would have to spend a little time switching to it shouldn't even have factored into the equation. The new system is better - that's all that matters.

"Maw! Where da print button?!" "Its uner th winda" "Wheer?" "Unner the winda!" "Naww, thats the cat!" --- Office 2007. Because lets face it, for some people, everything is hard.

I have been using the ribbon menu in Corel's Paint Shop Pro since version 8. While the ribbon concept was initially foreign and disorienting, it was easily adapted to in about an hour of use. If Microsoft has done the ribbon menu system as well as Corel did theirs, then there should be no substantial problems in using the new Microsoft Office.

@rbaronaz The ribbon menu in Paint Shop Pro is *nothing* like Office 2007's menu. Go to office.microsoft.com and look at the screenshots. There are *0* text menus or toolbars. According to the screenshots I have seen of Paint Shop Pro, they still have toolbars and text menus.

"Considering the majority of people didn't use half of the features of Office '03, I'd say its about time they were forced to learn." Considering that the majority of people who use Word only *need* abut 10 percent of its features, I'd say they shouldn't be "forced to learn" anything. Most modern word processors are bloated and filled with features the average user just doesn't need. "Office is still Office and the new UI is pretty damn awesome." I hope that's true, because Office has been a mess for a very long time, with every new version becoming more and more of a usability disaster. A positive change would be welcome news indeed.

"Considering that the majority of people who use Word only *need* abut 10 percent of its features, I'd say they shouldn't be "forced to learn" anything." I should have elaborated, considering that they use less than half the features _and_ they complained about not having certain functionality that actually was there (they just couldn't find it) they should be forced to learn. That just sounded a bit convoluted to me. I actually have heard the argument in the past, "Well I use lotus because I can make headers in it".

I applaud Microsoft many times over for a phenomenal release with Office 2007. The one annoyance I've had attempting to better educate my relatives (primarily the ones who live in Pendleton Oregon aka the boonies for you out of state folk) is the learning curve Office 2003 required. It wasn't like learning to program, but it was still steep for people who had never had a computer before so they could keep in touch with me. I installed Office 07 for them, I've only received a couple questions a week since upgrading them, most of them are about learning new features they've discovered and what they do, not where to locate certain functionality that they can't find. My cell phone minutes used go down in return, thank you Microsoft! Now just do a good job on Office 2008 for Mac plz =)

Office 2007 is Microsoft's way of generating business for the software training industry. And I'm sure Microsoft Press will make a pretty penny with official Office 2007 training books/DVDs.

Office 2007 will require massive retraining of users, quite possibly beyond the scope of the 3-4 hours indicated by the article. What with the hype about "information workers" , most administrative types tend to use office mostly as a glorified typemachine *** calculator, and that is a fact. Quite a few of these use shortcuts extensively and rarely go via menues. The changed look and feel of Office 2007 will result in resistance and defensiveness in the majority of non-technically minded users. Let's face it, most administrative and non technical types would be well served with Word 6, Excel 2 and Outlook 97, of which they use only 40% of the functionality provided therein. The only reason for any company to switch to a higher version of office is the outside pressure of communicating with external users. since Office 2003 provides compatibility with 2007-formats, there is no real need to switch at all in the next 5-6 years. As a bonus, there is no real need to switch to vista, what with XP being around, alive and well for the next 5-6 years altogether. Quite a few organisations have only recently made the switch to XP/OfficeXP/2003 and experienced quite an upheaval in the process. So the best bet would be to skip Vista/Office 2007 this round and go for the next versions in 5-6 years. Klovis

@spamklo Uhhh... Have you actually *used* Vista RTM/Office 2007? Or are you forming an opinion on something you have never used? My mom fits in your category, yet I constantly had to help her find a certain feature (like mail merge, tables, etc.) in earlier versions. Plus, she kept forgetting how to perform basic functions in Word. I switched her to Office 2007, and I *rarely* need to help her at all. In fact, she can now find and use features by herself without my assistance. She can even find/use the confusing (to her) mail merge feature without me. My story is nearly *universal* with those who switch to Office 2007. Regarding Vista, have you actually *used* it? I have been testing it from before Beta 2, and it is *invaluable.* I do a lot of CPU-consuming tasks, like video rendering, and 3D-animation/simulation, and Vista handles it like a charm. At one point, I was rendering 2 videos at once, listening to music, and browsing the web on a *single core* laptop Centrino 2 Ghz CPU, and the UI remained responsive and the music continued to play smoothly. I could go on and on about the mind-boggling amount of features included in Vista that make my life *so* much easier. Needless to say, when I use XP, it is cringe-inducing experience. Think of your biggest annoyance of XP, and chances are it is eliminated/reduced in Vista.

Comments so far have missed an important issue. Customizing Ribbons in Office 2007 is messy and not a native feature. You must use tools outside Office/VBA. There is no native interface for visually building or customizing a RibbonBar inside Office applications. A minimum tool-set would be an XML editor and a list of Office 2007 Control ID's currently available only as an Excel spreadsheet. Debugging is a nightmare. When CommandBars were launched in Office 95 over a decade ago, at least there was a way for even non-developers to visually build CommandBars with full drag'n'drop functionality. If the Ribbon is so great, why does the Office 2007 VBA Editor still use the menubar/toolbar paradigm?

@NateB2 >Uhhh... Have you actually *used* Vista RTM/Office >2007? Or are you forming an opinion on something >you have never used? We have evaluated them. I'm certainly no that gushy about it. You are still assuming a level of feature use that is quite beyond the needs and skills of any "normal" office user. Most "normal" users have problems using proper formats even after a day or two of training. Most of those rely on proper templates to produce anything. This is the user base you have to think about. If they waste 5-10% of their time and that of their coworkers for a couple of of months or so, you are talking serious productivity issues, let alone apprehension and resistance. Assume an organisation of 1000 "normal" users, say an organisation that has nothing to do with IT. I'll bet serious parts of my anatomy that such a paradigm shift as Office 2007 represents will cause a distinct efficiency drop without some training and coaching. Assume a drop in efficency of 10% over 3 months, which is quite a bit more than Forrester estimates. We're talking taking a hit of 25 FTE office worker for the switch, not counting 1st level support during that time. Now assume a day or one and a half retraining, and still a productivity drop of 5% over two months or so, while the users become proficient with the features. We're still talking about a 17.5 FTE hit for the organisation, without 1st level support. That is better, albeit not much. Most organisations have switched to XP/2002/2003 in the recent years and had their share of concomittant birthing pains, including productivity issues. I know of organisations that are talking switching to 2003 this year in order to avoid 2007, given that quite few features of 2007 would require mucking about with the server infrastrukture. The most cringe-worthy features of XP can be dealt with adequately with classic mode and TweakUI, btw. That tends to be the rule, btw., in large installations. Klovis

"Most "normal" users have problems using proper formats even after a day or two of training." Again, are you talking about Office 2003 or 2007? With 2007, the styles and formats are in plain view on the "home" tab. Anyone can easily create documents with good styles. With 2003 and earlier, it was a major pain to use a style in a document. Also, what do you mean by "evaluate"? Do you mean having your IT group try it out for a month or two? Reading reviews online? Having a small group of users evaluated it over a course of a month, monitoring their productivity? I have taught a number of people with little or no Office experience how to use Office 2007 in just a couple of hours, most of which lost little or no productivity. Most things those people want to do anyway are on the "home" tab. MS did a *ton* of user research, and they found that people could adjust and be at full productivity, even if those people had *0* Office experience, in a couple of hours. @tdambra MS did a *ton* of research, and discovered that customizing Office was (1) only done by power users and (2) the rest didn't care, or mistakenly cluttered up Office with toolbars they accidentally enabled. Customization for the average user is a *bad* thing. With Office 2007, you will *always* know where a certain feature is, no matter what computer you use. It will also make my job easier when someone asks me how to perform a certain action; I will know right where it is. With Office 2003, adjusting to everyone's individualized Office is a *pain.* MS therefore created a way for power users to customize Office (using XML), and kept consistancy and dependability the top priority for the rest of its users. For instance, my mom has accidentally moved the menu toolbar off-screen and screwed up other parts of Office inadvertantly. With 2007, she no longer has that problem.

Nate: re: Microsoft research Microsoft ALWAYS does a ton of research, and they are very open about it. first off, they have in-house study groups similar to how law offices conduct mock trials to predict jury outcomes. second, they recruit family homes to try out products, just like how they did with the Windows Vista Family Study Group Program (or whatever it's called). they also recruit businesses for study groups for their business line of products including, but not limited to, Windows Server and Office product lines. third, (and this is the biggest one), they collect anonymous information via the Customer Experience Improvement Program, which is completely optional, yet is included in very a-many Microsoft software applications now, including Windows Vista. whether or not you believe this is some kind of invasion of privacy, i still believe that it's a good way of collecting usage information to improve Microsoft's programs. it was already stated that they collected a huge amount of information that directly translated into the creation of what we see as the Office 2007 Ribbon UI today. as i stated, it IS completely optional, so privacy-wacko's and unibombers-alike can just opt-out. ;) i, for one, will keep clicking "i agree" to it, since day-to-day operations with released software is just one way i can passively improve the software UI without joining a beta program. XP

The ribbon is too fat I lost over three rows of Excel spreadsheet visibility and several lines of text in Word. My work is done in the documents not by the icons. Screen real estate is my biggest concern. Training hundreds of users will take a bite out of productivity short term, long term no difference, so what's the payback on an upgrade? Outlook seems fine so far. Access really changed but I am no expert there but do need it a couple times a month.

Outlook update: All of our organization's forms designed in Outlook 2000 & 2003 have broken. More research time for me.

you're still using Office 2000 though? i mean really? you do know that it's not even 100% compatible with Windows XP SP2 right? (try uninstalling it on upgraded systems - you'll see what i mean) free support ended for Office 2000 before XP SP2 came out, so Microsoft won't be fixing many problems for free. anyway, it's another opportunity to charge your org a lot to tell them it's time to upgrade! ;) XP

@NateB2 >Also, what do you mean by "evaluate"? Do you mean >having your IT group try it out for a month or two? yup. >Reading reviews online? That, too. > Having a small group of users >evaluated it over a course of a month, monitoring their >productivity? Having normal users try to use the GUI for their normal work in middling to complex documents that they were working on at that time. While they were impressed by individual features, the change over was nontrivial. Even after some tutoring, a lot of time was wasted looking for functionalities they used to have at their fingertips. Most were quite happy to return to Office 2000/Office XP. That was my point. Changing to 2007 will require a lot of training and coaching, more than a change to 2003 would. Actually, most people would be still be best served by Office 97 when it comes to the used functionalities. Klovis

@Waethorn >you're still using Office 2000 though? i mean really? There are still organisations that use Office 97. The only reason for them to upgrade are growing incompatibilities communicating externally. >you do know that it's not even 100% compatible with >Windows XP SP2 right? (try uninstalling it on upgraded >systems - you'll see what i mean) What Windows XP? >free support ended for Office 2000 before XP SP2 >came out, so Microsoft won't be fixing many problems >for free. >anyway, it's another opportunity to charge your org >a lot to tell them it's time to upgrade! ;) A nontrivial investment in software that has 75 % funcitionalities that they don't need or use. And in the same process having to validate/ redo a heap of Cd forms and templates that break/ work funny under said software and retraining the users to a GUI that is as foreign as the OpenOffice Gui. After having gone through the same process for Office XP or 2003 just year or two ago? I surely think not. My advice would be: Wait at least a year of two and see how the market adopts. Chances are that Office 2007 sees an adoption that is similarly slow as Office 2003 that had only 15% market penetration end of 2005. Wait for SR1. If there is a real need, migrate. If not, wait for Office 2010. If you got a working XP-Environment, skip Vista . Klovis

"The ribbon is too fat I lost over three rows of Excel spreadsheet visibility and several lines of text in Word. My work is done in the documents not by the icons. Screen real estate is my biggest concern." Buy a bigger monitor. Ribbon takes up almost no space on a 1920x1200. ---- People also need to stop complaining about problems in unsupported software. Either (a) your company is too cheap, or (b) the software doesn't impact your company enough for people with influence to care, or (c) you are in charge of getting people to care and you are too cynical for people to give a crap as to what you have to say. Regardless of which, the problem isn't in the software, it's your organization.