Office today has a whole bunch of versions – the traditional, fully featured Win32 desktop applications and their near counterparts on the Mac, along with various simpler versions for the Web, mobile, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Presently, these various incarnations all have similarities in their interfaces, but they’re far from consistent.
That’s set to change. Microsoft is overhauling the interfaces of all the Office versions to bring a much more consistent look and feel across the various platforms that the applications support. This new interface will have three central elements.
I use Office every day, and I just want one thing from Microsoft: the ability to open multiple instances of the UWP Office applications. The UWP version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are faster, smoother, and easier to use than their slow, cumbersome Win32 counterparts. I’m convinced the only reason Microsoft artificially limits the UWP versions to one instance per app is so they won’t tread on the hallowed, sacred Win32 ground.
It’s high time Microsoft removes this purely artificial limitation.
I don’t think that’s it. Remember, UWP came from tablets/phones, where “start app” and “switch to running app” are the same operation. Those devices had no concept of multiple instances of an application. It has since evolved so that an application can have multiple concurrent windows, but the application needs to be written to make it happen. In Win32, applications would need to go out of their way to prevent it happening, since the user can start as many instances of an app as they want.
There was a time when Windows 10 could only run one calculator – see https://www.onmsft.com/news/windows-10-preview-build-10130-allows-yo… .
I’m not saying that the evolution shouldn’t continue and support multiple concurrent windows to Office applications, just that it’s far more likely to be a historical artifact than malicious.
That was over three years ago. Meanwhile Office for Metro has made no effort to get to that point. I don’t think it can be that hard, unless there was a political decision made that Office for Metro has to suck on the desktop.
Office is adopting UWP’s Fluent UI.
“Fluent Design System inside of Microsoft: Office : Build 2018”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKvkRfQD8Yg
Or they could allow tabs in the UWP versions. Some other office software, like WPS Office for example, has tabs support so if you want to open multiple documents, you just open them in tabs inside the window. That’d be a good alternative to multiple instances for the UWP versions of Office.
It depends on the reasoning behind the multiple instances desire. In my use case, for example, tabs are no good because I want to be able to open separate documents, or groups of documents, at the same time on different monitors.
Or bring back the multi document interface (MDI) from the 80s/90s. It’s extremely useful to be able to compare two excel documents at the same time. Tabs wouldn’t allow that to happen.
Not only for spreadsheets is it invaluable. So many applications where you tend to compare two or more documents and do a lot of copy and paste between them are bogged down when you can not see the instances next to eachother. Even for a web browser it would be helpful at times, e.g. when you read an article and can put a map or a dictionary right next to it.
And the age old argument that it is cumbersome for most users does not hold water because you can always make it configurable to switch back to a tabbed view.
I already have a multi document interface, it is called separate windows that play nicely with multiple monitors and behave like the rest of the windows in my system. MDI was, and still is in Excel, horrible to use. Given Windows is now copying macOS in allowing creating tabs from multiple windows of the same application (yes other systems probably did this earlier) then we have both tabs and separate windows available now. Hopefully no one will make the mistake of going backwards to MDI.
You can have various Excel spreadsheets opened but you can’t look at more than one at the same time. It’s a pain in the ass.
Just “adding tabs” to an application that was previously singular is not simple, and I suspect for something the size of Office it would be catastrophically difficult.
I never said it was “simple”, I just posted it as an alternative idea.
It is called Sets and are coming in the upcoming W10 version.
“Developing for Sets on Windows 10 : Build 2018”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZXFkaxVwfI
No, sets is an OS feature and works with multiple windows. I was talking about tabs INSIDE the Office window itself.
I’d be fine with this if the “new” versions implemented all (or even most) of the features of the existing Win32 versions.
Take OneNote for example; the Mac and UWP versions are missing a ton of features and have a UI that practically forces you to run full-screen if you need to switch between notebooks and pages frequently. It’s pretty much the same as the mobile version.
Outlook on Mac (which is presumably using the UWP code base; can’t tell as I haven’t seen UWP Outlook yet) can’t even subscribe to an iCal calendar. The mobile version isn’t even an Exchange client, it’s just a rebranded IMAP/SMTP app (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it would be nice to be able to access Exchange shared mailboxes from it).
Moving to a dumbed-down touch interface for everything is one thing, but also dropping tons of features? Do not want.
– chrish
This is sort of a pet peeve because I really like Win32 OneNote, and I have to access an Exchange server for work.
Unfortunately “remove features” is the modern trend. I suspect it’s really about saving money. Blame Apple, they made it popular!
Let me know when I can use Control-F for find in outlook. So infuriating. And normal copy paste in excel would be nice.(instead of copy-forget)
pretty sure copy/forget is a feature that lends itself to financial analysis activities because it limits the ability to accidentally leave the wrong data on the clipboard.
Maybe a good medium would be to offer a configuration that lets you turn on normal copy/paste.
Does someone know the architecture behind these changes?
What stuff is still using Win32?
Which languages are being used to implement the UI and the backend? Is still C++ king in all versions (or almost all, because web version is other daemon) of Office?
Edited 2018-06-15 17:01 UTC