I’m sitting in the Microsoft Blogger Lounge on the MacWorld show floor as I write this. I missed the SteveNote today as I was somewhere around 35,000 feet over Oregon as the show was going on, but it sounds like some neat gadgets were revealed today. Too bad I don’t use Cingular as my cell phone provider… 🙂
Anyway, the big news for MacBU today was our announcement of Mac Office 2008. (Finally, I can stop calling it “the next version of Office” all the time!)
There’s a couple of screenshots over on Ars Technica (along with some good old Charles Jade commentary — I see he had fun tlaking to Geoff) and MacFixit has a short writeup as well.
Please let us know what you think. There’s still more to come; we’ve got converters coming out in beta in a few months, as well as more information on new Office 2008 features in the months leading up to our release in the 2nd half of this year.
I spent a little while at the main Microsoft booth today. One person asked me about VB and another about file converters, but most of the questions were about things that users didn’t know they could do in Office 2004. It’s always nice to be able to show someone how to solve their problem on the spot!
3 replies on “Live from MacWorld, it's Tuesday afternoon!”
I browsed the screenshots of the new UI changes. I’m sort of concerned how they look on my 13″ widescreen MacBook. can the ribbon go horizontal to allow more vertical space on the widescreen display? That was my biggest problem with the ribbon on Office 2007, it worked great in 4:3, but takes up too much space on the 16:9.
Joshua
the Elements Gallery (it isn’t the same as the ribbon in Office 2007 for Windows, so we’re not calling it that) is collapsable — it doesn’t need to be fully expanded all the time. However, it does not change orientation — it is always horizontal near the top of the window.
Interesting that you’d select a horizontal orientation for the EG — in all those screenshots, you have a ton of wasted space on the sides of the document, whereas the vertical space is packed. Most documents tend to be taller than they are wide, so vertical space is precious for displaying what we should be most interested in: content.