Can An Office Suite Be Too Powerful?

The new Microsoft Office 2010 looks like it will have lots of new features and a consistent ribbon interface across the entire product suite. There's better integration with mobile devices, and even a free browser-based subset of the suite. Are these the tools that all users need to do their jobs?For the past 15 years, Microsoft Office has been accumulating features. Some of them, like the AutoSpell feature added in Office 95, have been adopted by dozens of other applications. Others are more esoteric, like numbered lines and paragraphs in a document, but still considered essential by specific groups such as the legal profession. Yet most people who use Office never come anywhere close to using most of its functionality.

In the mid-1990s, I filed my taxes using an Excel 95 spreadsheet similar to this one. It not only looked like the real tax form, it printed out on paper like the real tax form. That inspired me to write my own Excel "application" that implemented the company's expense reporting, and it became popular with dozens of other employees. When it came to writing their own spreadsheets, most Excel users ever do more than a simple table and a graph or two.

That is actually not a bad thing. Users shouldn't be trying to use all the functionality of a product just of the heck of it, and they certainly shouldn't be using features that don't improve their work product. We've all suffered through PowerPoint presentations full of text-heavy Comic Sans bullet points, way-too-cute clipart, and random slide transitions. Instead of encouraging effective communication, those features waste the author's time and actually obscure the points they're trying to make.

With each new release, the Office suite becomes bigger and harder to master. There's nothing wrong with a big powerful tool for an expert, but it's usually not the right tool for a casual user. It's also a waste of money for a company to use a complex tool when a simple one would do the job. Not only is the complex tool more expensive to buy, but the complexity of the tool makes it more difficult and time-consuming to learn, costing employees valuable time.

What I'd really like to see in Office 2010 is the ability for most people to use the simple browser-based versions of the applications, and only burden the experts with the full-blown apps. I don't know if this will really work, though; getting Office 2003 and Office 2007 to share documents has been a hassle in my experience. If the browser-based apps can't effectively use the documents created by the full apps, everyone is back to installing the full Office 2010 suite on each system. It's almost like Microsoft has a disincentive to make the browser versions too good, so I'm very curious to see how good the browser-based versions really are.