Office 2007 for Mac will have an all-new UI that borrows from the Ribbon concept in Office 2007 for Windows, along with XML file formats and of course Universal Binary code. The bad news? It's not due for another year.
Microsoft's next-gen Office suite for the Mac is being given a top-to-toe refit in readiness for its debut in the third quarter of 2007.
On the surface is a revised interface which borrows ideas from the Office 2007 for Windows 'ribbon' and has already been radically changed due to user feedback. The new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will all adopt the native XML file formats of their Windows siblings.
And, the program is of course being rebuilt as an Intel-friendly Universal Binary application.
As is convention for the Office family, at this early stage the product is known only by its version number as 'Office 12'. "That won't be the name it goes to market with -- we'll have something brilliant, like the year it launches, as the name!" laughs Mary Starman, group product manager for Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU).
"Typically we release about 6-8 months after Windows Office, and they've announced general availability in the January timeframe, so we would be 6-8 months after that." If her timetable holds firm, the program that will likely be christened as 'Office 2007' will touch down between July and September of 2007 -- around three and a half years since the arrival of Office 2004 in March of that year.
Microsoft's 130-odd Mac developers have already reached the halfway mark in their marathon march, Last month, they completed the transition to Apple's Xcode, which forms the basis for the Universal binaries that are compatible with new Intel-based Macs as well as older PowerPC machines.
"This was a huge milestone for us" Starman says with equal parts pride and relief. "We had to move from the CodeWare compiler, we were dealing with millions of lines of code and we still had old code that was written in Assembly, so it's been a long process to switch everything over and for our developers to learn the new tools. Everyone has been working very hard on the transition, it's been literally all hands on deck".
Being able to sidestep the Rosetta translation layer which enables Power PC applications to run under the Intel architecture should in itself deliver a significant speed boost to Office 12. "We haven't been able to do any benchmark tests because we're not at code complete, so it's pretty hard to do performance tuning yet, but it should end up being quite a bit faster" Starman predicts.
The next milestone in the road to Office 12 will be when the new UI and features are finally baked into the suite and it's declared 'code complete', which Starman says is "normally about six months before release".
While Office 12 will likely see three major beta releases there are currently no plans for a widespread public beta program as has been done with Office 2007 for Windows.
"Being such a small group we tend to do a smaller beta program with just a handful of corporate customers around the world. We'll usually refresh the build they have about three times, but it's not likely for this release that we'll do a broad public beta where everyone can go and muck around."
Of course, Mac users are already having their say about the next version of Office. "We get a lot of people asking 'Are you going to do that ribbon thing?'" says Starman, in relation to the innovative yet controversial ribbon interface of Office 2007 for Windows, which was aimed at removing the reliance on deeply-nested menus and making existing features more 'discoverable'.
"We will be doing a UI refresh" Starman confirms, "but it won't be exactly like you see in Office 2007. It just wouldn't make sense. Apple has got their own very specific set of user interface guidelines and we try to first and foremost to follow those guidelines. If we can innovate on top of that and do some interesting things to make sure that the interface is really discoverable for the Mac user, then we'll look at doing that. We can get some ideas (from the ribbon) but it still has to fit within Apple's UI guideline, that's what a Mac user wants to see" Starman says.
"There's also a lot of speculation in the Apple developer community about the UI changes that will come in Leopard, too, and what are we all going to have do when we see those changes."
Design and usability testing on the Office 12 interface is already underway in the MacBU labs at Redmond and Cupertino, and the team has already made one trip back to the drawing board based on user feedback.
"We have usability experts and usability labs at both of our campuses, and we're spending a lot of time bringing people through for each iteration of the UI. That's part of why it's changing so much right now" explains Starman.
"We had what we thought was going to be this perfect UI solution, and the first time we put it in the labs, no-one understood it! It was so different they were completely confused! We just finished up another round of usability testing on the new UI yesterday, and the program manager said the difference is like night and day".
Perhaps the most vital issue for any version of Office is compatibility with previous editions. This holds doubly true on the Mac platform, where people sharing files with Windows users expect total fidelity in formatting, formula and other document deal-breakers.
"One of the big things we're working on for the next version of Office is picking up the new XML file formats of Office 2007 for windows" says Starman. "As (the Office for Windows team) get through chunks we port things over, but we won't be able to do our final testing on file formats and compatibility until they release office 2007" she offers to account in part for the long wait to the next Mac release of Office.
However, the Mac team isn't concerned that the ability of Intel-based Macs to run Windows, and thus the Windows version of Office, might eat into their market. "Mac customers would prefer to run a native version of Office on their Mac" says Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing Manager for the MacBU "We don't expect and I don't think Apple expects lots of their customers and our customers to be running the Windows version of Office on their Mac."
"But BootCamp and Parallels open up a lot of opportunities for people to run some of the applications that we're not able to port over, if they need Access or Project for example."
David Flynn met with the MacBU team during his visit to Seattle for Microsoft's 2006 Hardware Launch as a guest of Microsoft.