Microsoft Office 12 Preview

In advance of the availability of Office beta code, Microsoft made available a video demonstration of the new user-interface features included in most Office 12 applications. This slide show is taken from that video. You are looking at Microsoft Word 1

This is the ribbon for the Insert tab, showing elements that a user might want to insert into this page. Notice the combined use of text and graphics. There are 23 possible selections on the ribbon bar.

This is the ribbon associated with the Page Layout tab. Microsofts stated goal is to provide easier access to the features people use most often, as determined by the anonymous data collected from users that participate in the Customer Experience Improve

This is the ribbon associated with the References tab, which supports embedded references, footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, and other features common to longer or more formal documents.

The Mailings ribbon supports mail-merge functions. Does that button really say, Japanese Greetings? Of course it does, Gates-san, but why?

Review is the last of the six tabs in Word 12 and supports familiar document markup features.

The View menu has gone away, its buttons now appearing in the bottom toolbar on the right side of the screen. On the left side, not shown, is a constantly updated word count, just like the one Word for Mac has had, well, forever. Finally, easy word counti

Some user interface elements are context-sensitive. Click inside a table and the table ribbon appears. It offers formatting features including a Gallery of table formats that the user may select from.

Galleries also appear for other chores, such as this set of options for formatting footnotes. If you dont like the gallery selections, full control remains available, in this case by selecting Edit Footer at the bottom of the gallery menu.

Live Preview allows the user to see the effect of a font change by simply rolling the cursor over the font to be previewed, without actually committing to the change.

In Excel, Live Preview also works with other formatting and Gallery choices.

Admitting that the help system often isnt all that helpful, Microsoft as expanded the existing Tooltips into Super Tooltips, intended to provide a higher degree of just-in-time assistance to users. You have now seen the most significant user-interface