Office 12 Developer Release: Screenshots and Review

Contributed by AlexTheBeast

November 1, 2005

Tagged: Windows

As an office developer, I grabbed a copy of the recent office 12 leak as soon as I could. Here are some screenshots and early thoughts.

As some of my previous posts may suggest, I have been a Microsoft developer for many years. Some of my recent tools involve integration into Office, so I always grab the latest build that I can find.

Hopefully, the tech-recipes guys will host these images for me.

Word–

You can see that Microsoft has introduced this new metallic theme throughout the suite. The old menu system is gone and is replaced by toolbars that replace toolbars upon selections. You can see in these two selections how the toolbars change.

The drop down menus attempt to keep everything in place. Although this is a more eye-pleasing method, people who are used to navigating the menus system will really be slowed down by this new format.

I have not figured out the new default format for saved files. By default, word 2003 does not read this new default format. The saved document has references to XML and stylesheets contained within it.

Outlook–

Outlook has not changed as much. You can see the new email editor has the new word-like toolbars built-in.