MSFT Microsoft Corporation

By David Pierce 

No software carries as much baggage as Microsoft Office.

It's nearly 30 years old, which in tech years is about as old as the Himalayas. Every day at work, hundreds of millions of people use Office apps -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and the rest. They know the apps and understand their inner workings. Have you ever watched an Excel mastermind at work? It's like watching a virtuoso violinist. When Microsoft makes changes to Office, the company hopes it isn't turning its Stradivarius into a banjo.

Maybe that's why Office feels so behind the times. While Google, Dropbox and others have built modern, collaborative, web- and mobile-friendly productivity tools, Microsoft has been stuck in old ideas. It built mobile and web apps, but it built them to look and work like desktop apps from a decade ago. Microsoft appears terrified of changing anything and angering anyone.

Still, Office is inching toward the future (or at least toward the present). Microsoft recently announced the biggest Office redesign in years, intended to make the apps cleaner, faster and more collaborative.

The change will come slowly: The new look is coming first to Word and Outlook, and only for a few users. It could be months before you notice anything different. The new design feels like a step in the right direction. But it also feels too small, too slow and maybe too late.

Less is more

When I think of Office, one image always comes to mind: the ribbon at the top of every app, chock-full of every option and feature anyone could possibly need, blocking out a third of the screen.

Microsoft has simplified the space, shrinking the ribbon into something smaller and more legible. The ribbon now displays about a dozen popular actions, relegating everything else to a three-dot button on the right side. You can pin actions you like, and remove ones you don't.

This simple change makes a big difference. There's more room for content; every app looks lighter and more modern. If you love clutter or just miss having all those buttons around, you can always go back to the way things were: Just click the arrow on the right side of the toolbar.

But seriously, don't. It's better this way. I'd prefer Microsoft go even further and condense the menu to a single line. If you really need the footnote tool for your 1,000-page novel, you can search for it.

Search is a big part of the new Office. Microsoft is making use of one of the best features of Outlook Mobile, its clever predictive search, which suggests the messages or files you might be looking for even before you type a query. Carefully filing your documents and emails is an antiquated notion.

Microsoft has been catching up to Google's in-document collaboration tools for a while now. Office allows collaboration between mobile, desktop and web apps, rather than forcing everyone into a browser tab. This redesign organizes sharing and co-working options into a single corner of the app. Google still has better collaboration, though: Office has some lingering issues with saving everyone's work, and doesn't offer handy features like Google's suggestion mode.

Do all these changes sound obvious and overdue? They should. Faster apps, powerful search, and cleaner design have, for a while, been among the reasons Google's service has grown so fast. There's not a lot to tempt Google users back into the Office fold, though Microsoft's moves may help it retain people who haven't left.

Knowing your user

Here's the heart of Microsoft's dilemma: It had two very different users in mind when redesigning Office. There are the billion-plus people who already use and rely on Office, and then there are another billion or more in developing countries who have never used Office, or its competitors.

Both groups want simplicity and intelligence, but existing users tend to hate when things are removed or changed. Jon Friedman, Microsoft's chief designer for Office products, says his team is forever trying to "balance simplicity versus power."

Mr. Friedman acknowledges that power has been tipping the scale for a long time. There are too many options and buttons on every surface in Office. Most people don't need most of them. But even if a tiny percentage of people use a particular one, that's still millions of people.

Allowing more customization on the ribbon and elsewhere is a good start -- users can pick what they want front and center. But most won't. Going forward, Microsoft's goal is to build an Office that automatically orients itself to each user's desires.

What does a personalized Office mean? Beyond the search functions already rolling out, it would mean tweaking the ribbon as you work, surfacing buttons you need, hiding the rest. It means better sharing and collaboration across all devices and platforms. This update includes the beginnings of that, but Microsoft needs to do more. And get it to users faster.

A few years ago, Microsoft changed the way it developed the Windows operating system. Rather than ship huge updates every few years, it treated the software like an app it could improve constantly and incrementally. That's how it treats Office now, too.

Mr. Friedman described the current stage as "an editing exercise," cleaning things up in preparation for more changes to come. Meanwhile, his team is collecting feedback from users and tweaking everything along the way.

At some point, though, Microsoft is going to have to do more than an incremental update. The only way Office can ever be more than a cleaned-up version of decades-old software is for Microsoft to stop preserving outdated workflows and start moving with its users into the future. Office users might fear change, but they'd like apps that launch faster and ribbons that don't crowd the page. New users will want something smarter and more efficient, not so loaded with features that it only lumbers along.

Office could be the cross-device, cross-platform productivity tool kit of everyone's dreams, and Microsoft seems to know what that takes. But it has to stop coddling the users still living in 1995, and start showing them how great 2018 can be.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 17, 2018 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

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