That's how PC World's Harry McCracken described Office 12 in his blog, Microsoft Office 12's Radical New Look.

His article provides the most comprehensive public description I've seen about Office 12. It describes:

  The Ribbon. "[T]his all-encompassing UI conceit mostly replaces drop-down menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and task panes as we know them."

  Real-Time Previews. "When you select an item for formatting and run through options in the Ribbon (say, various fonts), your document will change to show how it would be affected by that formatting."

  User Customization. "[T]he new UI will be less customizable than the Office interface we know today. (The Ribbon will have a "Quick Launch" section that lets you store favorite features, but you apparently won't have much ability to rearrange the Ribbon's elements.)"

Courtesy of Microsoft, here's a close-up view of the Excel 12 user interface.

Why did Microsoft make such a radical change in the user interface? The company offers an answer in Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office “12” Core Applications.

"[O]ver time, as we’ve added more and more features, it’s gotten harder for users to find the things they want to do with the product. Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands, and you could go through the menus and see everything you could do. But Word 2003 has over 1,500 commands, many of which are harder to find. That’s one of the key issues the new UI addresses."

According to the article, the new user interface is designed to satisfy these design goals:

1. Make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they want.
    
2. Streamline the UI to maximize the user’s workspace.
    
3. Make it easier for people to discover the capabilities that achieve a desired result by "contextualizing the workspace."
    
4. Designing for the full document life cycle. This includes improved support for collaboration, work flow, and document management.

Jensen Harris, in An Office User Interface Blog, describes Microsoft's reasons from an insider's point of view. In The Why of the New UI (Part 1) and Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past (Why the UI, Part 2) Harris describes the history of computer graphical user interfaces -- beginning with Xerox PARC -- and explains what lead Microsoft to its new design.

What should you make of these changes? Gartner Research offers several opinions.

  Office 12 Interface May Up Productivity, Migration Complexity "While the new UI will excite many users, those who have trouble accepting change — and advanced users who know where to find all the commands they need — will likely have the most difficulty adapting to the new UI."

  Consider Microsoft's Office 12 Plans, but With Caution "Despite many potentially powerful enhancements, most enterprises will find it hard to justify upgrading during 2007 and 2008."

  Office 12 File Format Will Bring XML Benefits, Migration Pain "Microsoft announced that Office 12 will have an XML format as the new default for saving files in the Office 12 versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint...The new file formats allow Office to be more open and may meet the demands of some customers that require XML to meet regulatory requirements."

In short, Gartner describes good news and bad news about Office 12. The good news is that Office 12 offers "powerful enhancements" and improved ease-of-use for new users of Office. The bad news is that advanced users likely will have difficulty adapting to the new user interface.

So which way should the scales tip? Should you plan to move to Office 12 sooner? Later? Or not at all?

Suppose that Gartner is correct. Suppose that Office 12 offers many new features along with a steep learning curve for experienced users. In this case, two conclusions are obvious.

First, experienced users will flock to Office 12. They might not like the new interface, but they'll be attracted by the new features. 

Second, book stores and the Web will overflow with books and other advice designed to help current users adapt to Office 12. Keep in mind that none of that material is available today. This causes beta testers to work very hard to learn the product. But when Office 12 ships, a large and growing support structure already will exist.

You don't have to decide now. Beta 2, the public beta, probably will be available during the first quarter of 2006. I'll let you know how to get a copy when the time comes. When you can do so, get a copy of the beta and then decide for yourself.

Using MS Query With Excel Data

About six weeks ago I received a message from a reader, Marty Ryerson. He said he'd like to write an article about MS Query, a somewhat obscure and seldom-updated feature of Excel. I asked what he wanted to say.

Marty responded that he's been using Crystal Reports for quite some time against an Oracle database. But more and more, he's been using MS Query instead. Because only a small percentage of Excel users work with Oracle on a regular basis, I suggested that his article use some other source of data. Excel, perhaps. Or text files.

Within weeks, Marty sent me an article that describes how to use MS Query with Excel databases. About a week after that, he sent me an article about using the program with text files.

His first article is Use MS Query to Treat Excel As a Relational Data Source. I'm editing the second one now, and will post it within several weeks.

Both articles rely heavily on a new book, Excel Advanced Report Development, by Timothy Zapawa. Tim offered several excellent suggestions for Marty's article. And I hope to convince him to submit an article of his own.

The Wide World of Excel

Perhaps I just have a one-track mind, but I'm fascinated by the many ways that people use Excel. Here are some examples posted recently...

  ManufacturingTalk.com, reports that Orbimatic, a UK manufacturer of welding equipment, has introduced weld data-logging software. Weld logs can be opened in Excel, of course.

  TechWhack.com tells us about a "nifty utility for cataloguing one’s movie collection." As one would expect, the catalog can be exported to Excel.

  BuildingOnline.com reports that Esti-Mate, Inc., offers "worksheets for complete residential job costing using your subcontractors labor and your local lumber and building material dealer supplier costs."

  The FortWayne News Sentinel posts a column that begins, "Rats. I screwed up my redistricting map.

"After spending the better part of a day recently slaving over an Excel file, moving precincts here and there, tallying and re-tallying populations – my first effort failed."

  Techspot.com describes an MSN Sniffer Monitor that logs MSN chat conversations for IT managers. Of course, all those intercepted messages can be read in Excel.

One of the reasons I find items like this so interesting is that Excel probably is saving each group of users a significant amount of money. Often, Excel can do about 80% of the work of special-purpose software for about zero percent of the incremental cost.