To resolve usability improvements in Word 2007

Although Microsoft says the fundamental change in the Word 2007 interface is designed to expand its usefulness, not everyone thinks it is being achieved. Here, we analyze several reconstruction aspects, and discuss these changes with examples.

The discussion about Office 2007 's new interface is already swirling, and everyone sees the new look of Office 2007. From the time people started using Office to the present, the interface of Office 2007 can be said to be a disruptive change. From Office 2000 to Office 2003, there is almost no significant change except for some of the landscaping user interfaces. So what is Microsoft's thinking behind the new interface?

Office, especially word, has always been a love-hate application, which is no mystery. You may often spend more time and energy in typesetting a piece of text than writing a text. Word is the most-watched application, and Excel is followed. There's a good reason to explain this: everyone uses word and outlook, and many people use Excel, but there are far fewer applications that use Access, Publisher, and so on. Since it is the most commonly used application, the training and experience required by word should be less, because it is just a "simple" word processing program. Instead, access asks users to be more trained and skilled, after all, as a database.

In addition to the applications in Word, Outlook, and Excel,office suites, which are mostly specialized, they need to be used by learning and accumulating experience, regardless of which application the user chooses. Excel is usually less picky because, although there are a lot of people using it as a point-to-point database, people are less likely to take advantage of Excel than Word. And when they need to use advanced features, they think it's too difficult. Outlook is always easy to use, except for word-based e-mail editors and initial configurations, which are no worse than any other e-mail client. So the main thing today is to look at Word 2007 and see what it does and what it does to improve usability.

Changes to Toolbars

Everyone first notices that the things in Word are toolbars. In fact, this is also the most important change. The menu bar disappears completely and replaces it with a structure like a tab that contains the functionality of the toolbar.

To simplify it, Word's user-terminated Cascade menu is flattened and becomes the toolbar for a group of groups. Within each toolbar group, there are some blocks, with buttons for the tools in the form of subdirectories. For example, under the large class of page layouts, you include smaller groups, including themes, page settings, page backgrounds, paragraphs, and permutations. Other items are not like traditional toolbars, and all buttons are not equal in size. Some buttons also have arrows, which means they have more options to choose from than the default actions shown.

One of the most incomprehensible changes is that in addition to the general maximize/Minimize and restore close buttons, there are only six small button items that are displayed on the screen: Office buttons can be used to open, save documents, save, Undo, repeat, and a down arrow to select Toolbar Options. Also is a Help button on the right. (See Figure 2 and Figure 3)

The other big changes

Here are some of the major changes in the other three more significant interfaces. The first is that you hover your mouse over a selected piece of text, and a small toolbar emerges that contains some of the most common items that you can use to make specific edits to selected text (see Figure 4). The second thing is that when the mouse moves to an item on any toolbar, the effect is automatically applied to the selected text, and when you move the mouse away, the effect disappears (see Figure 5).

The third major change is the refactoring of outdated image-editing systems, making it easier for users who need to use external image editors in Word documents to work better. The new Image editor is indeed a valuable improvement, at least since Office 2000.

How do you say that the new version of Office is being refactored for improved usability, the small buttons for the changed toolbars and common items? On the face of it, these design ideas do not seem to be much convincing. After research and use, it is possible to uncover some of these ideas later.