When Office 12 comes down the pike in a year or so, it will have a new look and feel aimed at exposing a user's favorite features. Specifically, Microsoft is working on a "ribbon" concept in which the user would get a different strip or ribbon of icons depending on the task at hand—whether it's a simple note, a fancy document, a graphical presentation, multimedia or a spreadsheet, said a source familiar with the plans. That ribbon would expose only the tools relevant to the current job.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates alluded to this work, without using the "R word," at the company's CEO Summit in May. To ease the creation of professional-looking documents, he said: "We're making some changes in our user interface in Office to expose, make it easy to find the functionality, make it far more visual, [so] that you get all the power that's there in the tool."
News source: CRN | News
