Office 12 has new UI and cool RSS Support

Michael Gartenberg | September 13, 2005, 01:01 PM

This seems to be the month for bold moves. Microsoft has tossed out the old Office UI and replaced the pull down menus and toolbars with a series of visual tabs. IT certainly doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. I’m not sure I totally love the new Office “12” UI. There’s a lot to like about it in terms of how nice it looks and simplifies core functions but the whole design seems a little cluttered for a typical XGA resolution. It looks like to really use this stuff, you’ll need a pretty high res monitor. I’ll have a better sense once I install and get a chance to use it for a bit.

RSS support in Office is nice. Not only does the system track RSS via subscriptions in IE 7 (and has an RSS gadget built into the new Vista Sidebar) but Office supports RSS as well. Outlook finally adds integrated RSS support (which is my preferred way to read RSS). In general, it looks like RSS aggregators are indeed a commodity.