Eight things I’d like to see in Office 2010
It may be a bit late for this, but here’s eight things Microsoft could do NOW that would dramatically make my – and judging by some of the web searches I’ve done, lots of other people’s – experience of Office better.
8. An option to stop Outlook formatting phone numbers
Outlook really is dreadful at formatting phone numbers, but it will insist on doing it. It’s not so much that Outlook doesn’t know what it’s doing – it actually makes a reasonable stab (sort of) – it’s that it uses formats from the mid-1970s that have never been international standards. Either make them compliant with international standards or give us an option to switch it off. And they wonder why I never use Outlook at home…
7. What on earth is Groove actually for?
Yes, we know it’s Ray Ozzie’s brainchild, he’s the billion dollar man behind Lotus Notes, etc etc etc, but seriously – what does it actually do? Everything else is almost obvious (except maybe OneNote or InfoPath), so maybe a little “Introduction to Office” somewhere would be nice. Something I don’t have to hunt around to find – an icon in the “Microsoft Office” group.
6. A better Trust Center
The macro security, built into the Trust Center in most of the Office applications, is approximately slightly less intelligent than a bag of hammers. A very, very stupid bag of hammers.
What would be better would be a subjective list, allowing individual files and/or folders to be added to a trust list, not just digitally signed ones. Who does the digital signing, anyway? Does it cost? And if it costs, what does Microsoft make out of it? Use the security settings to actually keep people secure, not as a cash cow; otherwise people are just going to keep turning the things off!
5. Consistent interfaces
Access is tabbed (if you don’t switch it off), Excel is MDI (very Windows 2000), Outlook is… well, odd, and Word is SDI (very Windows 2.0!). Access is probably the best interface out of them all (for once), adopting the browser-style tab interface; it would be nice to see a tab bar across all applications – or maybe even an integrated suite, Symphony style? UI-wise, it can’t get much worse, with four totally different interfaces to learn across the main four products – another area where OpenOffice et al are light years ahead of MS.
And while we’re on the subject, stop using the Windows Look and Feel guidelines as toilet paper. They’re there for a reason – to give Windows and Windows applications a consistent user interface. If Office weren’t made by Microsoft, it would surely fail the “Designed for Microsoft Windows” logo programme requirements on this one point alone.
4. Better .Net support in Office
If, like me, you’ve had the misfortune to code .Net apps that interact with Office, then you’ll know that the Interop DLLs are woeful, bug-ridden nightmares. If .Net is really important to Microsoft (which, personally, I doubt), then support for it should be a priority, not an afterthought. There’s a lot written about the “dark art” of making Office work in .Net applications, most of it wrong – and most of what’s right is still hit and miss. At times, it feels like the sort of support Windows 3.1 gave to DR-DOS.
Really, seriously, if I’m working on a document, I want help locally. I don’t want to have to be connected to the Internet and have to wait a small ice age just to look up how to format something. In Office 97, help took perhaps two seconds to load (on a slow day). Now it takes nearly a minute. The ability to go online to get updated help and “community answers” is far outweighed by the ability to carry on using Word when I can’t find a wi-fi network I can use for free. And I’m not paying £3.50 an hour just to find out how to create a continuous section break or whether I should be using Lookup, VLookup or HLookup in this particular formula… Come on guys, you got it right ten years ago, you can do it again!
2. Bring back the toolbar
The hideous ribbon – surely one of the worst examples of user interface stupidity in history – is an ugly deformity. You can’t customise it or resize it, it’s not even consistently used Office (Outlook, anyone? Or how about OneNote?), and even now, three years later, many people still swear at, rather than by it. I know perhaps a hundred people that use Microsoft Office on a regular basis, and I can’t think of a single person that actually believes that the ribbon is anything other than an unmitigated usability nightmare, a disaster of epic proportions. You want a business case? It’s costing you users. It’s making people consider OpenOffice, SmasrtSuite, Lotus Symphony – anything to escape the mephitic hogo emitted by the execrable ribbon. Make it die. Now.
1. An option to create or open any Office file from any office application
There used to be the “new office document” and “open office document” shortcuts. Nobody ever used them, so Microsoft abandoned the idea. It wasn’t that the idea was bad, just that nobody used it. And why did nobody use it? Well if I already have Word running, why would I open another program to open Excel? I’ll just open Excel. But here’s a major tip: OpenOffice can do it. Get plagiarising!
Got any better ideas?
Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Office, user interface