One of the stars of the PDC has been Office 12, featured heavily in Bill Gates' opening keynote and again yesterday in Steven Sinofsky's general session. One of the main focuses (or is it foci) of Office 12 is a more intuitive UI. A more "results oriented" UI Microsoft calls it. It is too difficult to find features in Office apps. Word 2003 has close to 300 menu items, more than 30 toobars and close to 20 task panes. Customers ask for things that are already in the product. They didn't know the feature was already in there. So Microsoft wants to simplify the UI and limit the number of choices available to users, while making it easier to find what's already in the product. That's a major goal for Office 12. You will recall that it was also a major goal of Office 2003 and was the rationale for the adaptive menus. "We'll only show the more common menu choices at first and Office will learn over time what menu choices you make most often and hide the rest." Well there is only so much simplification you can do with 300 menu items, so a new approach is coming.

The Ribbon

Menus and toolbars are out. The Ribbon is in. Or more accurately: the technology that no later than Beta 2 will be known as the technology formerly known as the Ribbon. The Ribbon is designed to make it easier to find features and functionality in Office apps. No more wading through menus and toolbars. Less reliance on you finding the right dialog and then finding the right dropdown or button. And of course, a snazzier look and feel. Check out the a screenshot of the Ribbon. At the top are "tabs", such as Write, Insert, Page Layout. Select a tab and you don't get a drowdown list of menu items. Instead you see several groupings of icons. These groupings are currently known as "chunks". A chunk is a collection of related items. So the Font chunk has items related to working with fonts. You can see in the screenshot that a chunk has a much richer (and presumably more intuitive) look to it. Chunks support the usual assortment of rich controls and label them. And you can label them with "super tooltips", which hold more text than today's tooltips.

Apparently, the Ribbon was the source of quite a bit of contention when the Office team presented the new UI to the Regional Directors (RDs) at the show. After seeing the Ribbon in the demos and playing with Office 12 in the Hands On Labs I will say that my first thought was that it looked pretty crowded in there. And having used Office for so many years and having grown accustomed to where on the menus things were, I found myself staring at the Ribbon and trying to learn the new groupings. But within an hour of using it I was growing pretty comfortable with it and starting to anticpate what items would be in what chunks and what chunks were in each tab. So don't judge it until you've used it and also understand that this is pre-Beta 1, so there will be plenty of tweaking and massaging of the UI before ship.

The coolest thing about the Ribbon is how you customize it in code. The CommandBars object model still lives, but the new programming model is a declarative XML model. I will cover that in my next post.