At last Office 12 has arrived on reality radar screens. But only in a Technical Beta version.

Microsoft, true to form, sizzles with fulsome self-praise. This productivity suite is aimed at nothing less than “redefining the Office experience”.

But, does it? Well, if they get round to sending a copy to yours truly, I’ll be able to tell you. The answer, though, is, pound to a penny, yes and no.

The Channel Register tells us: “Recent versions of Office – Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003 – have lacked the features required to persuade 30 per cent of the Office user base to move off of the eight-year-old Office 97. Customers have eschewed tighter integration and splashy features, believing Office 97 to be ‘good enough’. Just 15 per cent of PCs are running Office 2003.”

Office 12 will share Windows Vista’s WinFX XML mark-up interface. File formats are also in XML. The suite will feature improved business intelligence (BI). “Excel spreadsheets will be able to access corporate data held in SQL Server while a server-based set of Excel Services will allow customers to secure and share data.”

A big improvement will be the use of “Ribbon” icons replacing dropdown menus. The idea is to make many “hidden” features more accessible.

Office will also come in various Editions “with a ‘premium’ edition of Office due. It is not yet clear what features [it] will carry or what the price will be. The current ‘high-end’ edition of Office is Office Professional Edition, priced $380 per copy.

Microsoft is to comply with part of the European Union’s requirement that the company submit its XML formats to a standards body and remove non-XML formatted components from WordML. In May 2004 the EU also told Microsoft to supply filters supporting the OASIS OpenDocument format.

The submission to the standards office begins with an application to Ecma International, the Geneva-based computer manufacturer standards group, says the New York Times. Ecma may fast-track the submission, perhaps as soon as its December 8 meeting, a Microsoft International spokesman said.

Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Monitor makes the point that, “In theory, the standards committee would take responsibility for Microsoft’s XML-based formats and any advances made to them. Microsoft’s major concern, and it’s reasonable : that future changes to the formats don’t compromise backward compatibility. From a customer perspective, backward compatibility would be important for their mountains of content in older Office formats.”

Microsoft said the application was being supported by several partners and customers, including Apple Computer, Intel, Toshiba, Barclays Bank and the British Library. If approved by the standardization office, the standard would allow documents created under previous Microsoft Office versions (at least as early as Office 2000) to work equally well with the Open XML standard, the NYT said.

The new font (typeface) for both Windows Vista and Office 12 is called Segoe UI (see image). Jensen Harris’s Microsoft blog has a description of the font by one of its developers:

“Segoe UI is a four member typeface family included with Windows Vista and Office 12 for User Interface use. Its used widely by Windows Vista components but can also be specified by third party apps running on Windows Vista that may wish to take advantage of it in order to have the Windows Vista look and feel. Efforts are underway to enable third party apps running on Windows XP to access the fonts too.

“Each Segoe UI font includes well over 2,200 characters, supporting Unicode 4.1 coverage of Latin, Cyrillic and Greek based languages and includes support for IPA (international phonetic alphabet) and combining diacritics.

“The Segoe fonts are provided as TrueType flavor OpenType fonts, and as such can be used to author regular documents or create graphics, but the fonts themselves have been tuned for use as UI fonts at 8pt, 9pt, and 10pt under the ClearType rendering environment.

“Although the fonts have been optimized for ClearType (the Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Framework default experience), concessions have been made for regular bi-level (black and white or aliased) rendering, or for regular grayscale antialiasing.

“Segoe UI was drawn in the humanist sans-serif style evoking natural, almost hand drawn letter shapes. As a humanist sans design it shares characteristics with Adobe Myriad, Verdana, Corbel, Lucida Sans and the father of the humanist sans movement Frutiger. Unlike Verdana and Frutiger the typeface has a lively true italic, not based on an obliqued or slanted regular style. Also unlike the humanist sans faces designed primarily for print-use the fonts include distinctive letter shapes that help the user distinguish between easily confused characters like lowercase l and uppercase I.

“Finally, Segoe UI is just one part of the extended Segoe family of typefaces. This family also includes contextual cursive handwriting fonts (Segoe Script), a hand drawn non-cursive font (Segoe Print), special fonts for TV use (Segoe TV), a symbol font for hardware decals (Segoe HW) and a fourteen member set used for branding and corporate communications.

“One final note: The original Segoe fonts were not created for or by Microsoft. It was an existing Monotype design which we licensed and extensively extended and customized to meet the requirements of different processes, apps and devices.”

A big welcome to Vista Office, Syntagma Media’s 9th and newest blog. This blog will be dedicated to news, reviews, snippets and op-eds on Windows Vista and Office 12, due for release late 2006.

We’ll be going live on December 28, so stay tuned for further information.

John Evans
Syntagma Media
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