This is interesting! mostly I don’t agree with it.

Office 12 is an upgrade I wouldn’t mind paying for, that is, assuming that work didn’t let us get free copies. Those are big words for me, considering my “I Hate Microsoft” series of blog entries. I can imagine making documents faster with Office 12, or at least I can imagine making better looking documents in the same amount of time. Excel, which has been less functional for me than the spreadsheet program I used on my Apple IIe, looks like it will be come a useful tool for data analysis.

As far as I’m aware Excels ability to analyse data has stayed the same, there are about 10 new functions, and no new chart types. POPPER 3-D charts are still not supported.

… the UI revamp, that it’s more than a marketing trick. The conventional wisdom out there is “Everything I need was in office [95, 97, 2000].” (For me it was Word 95). They collected a ton of data (including over a billion Office sessions) that told a different story. On a list of the top ten most requested features for Office: four of them were already in Office.

The new IU looks good, but i bet it was throw up a host of problems, It will also mean a load of new coding for controlling menu bars - if they still work in the same way, which I doubt they will now, could balls up my dictor app’s.

Another observation from the data was that the average user spends more time with Office (2.6 hrs/day) than they do with their spouse (2.4 hrs/day). When you take 400 million users * 2.6 hrs/day, it seems worth improving that experience.

Well, it’s about time that changed, nice looking software or not!