Not All Of Office 2007 Is 'Ribbonized'

While the superstar Office apps -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint -- flaunt the new Ribbon user interface, several of the lesser-known applications do not.

There is no Ribbon in Publisher, OneNote, Visio, Project or Office SharePoint Designer, , Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Business Division, told CRN.

As for Outlook, the shell has the old user interface, but "when you're authoring or reading mail, you'll have the Ribbon," Capossela said.

Capossela said Microsoft will listen to feedback on the Ribbon and expand its use as required. "If we had known how well it would do, we might have put it everywhere this time around. It's a huge bet for us," he said.

Whether the successor, Office 14, will be festooned with Ribbons everywhere will depend on that user feedback, Capossela said in an interview at the official Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch late last month.

A sales executive with a major software reseller is bullish on the Ribbon, although he acknowledged that it will take some getting used to.

"You raise an interesting point that the Ribbon UI isn't in all of the 2007 products," he said via e-mail. "However, where they did use it is where information workers are going to see amazing results. Features that are now so simple to use with the Ribbon were buried in earlier versions of Office. Ever wanted to put a watermark across a Word doc? Good luck finding it in Office 2003 without consulting the help menu."

The reseller executive, who requested anonymity, said users should watch Ribbon tutorials on the Office Web site to get to the "oh, I get it" moment.

"It is a great innovation in desktop productivity that is going to help information workers output more professional documents and presentations and analyze data with greater ease," he said.