Now we’ve been told about the fantastic Ribbon for so long… somehow I expected to find it everywhere (and I actually like it, but that’s a different topic). Outlook doesn’t have it though – are there not enough menu entries and toolbar buttons in Outlook to warrant the Ribbon? Then again, one look at the Outlook Options dialog tells me that the UI improvement team skipped this application… it’s as ugly and confusing as ever.

Outlook at least recognizes the theming setting I made in another Office application and comes up in sexy Vista grey, even though I’m on Windows XP. OneNote, on the other hand, doesn’t have a Ribbon either – although it’s got a menu bar, 9 toolbars with around 130 buttons in total – and it doesn’t even do theming. So we have at least (I’m sure I’m missing something) three different looks throughout Office 2007.

If you ask me, this has always been one big problem for Office: the fact that the various components were so horribly different, in many ways. They looked different, they felt different… it’s always been like that, unless you stayed with Word and Excel. I think it would be a really good move for MS to work over the UIs of all the Office applications. I would assume that somewhere in a four year development cycle there should be room for this.

Update: Hehe… I hadn’t even noticed yet, but actually most of the windows in Outlook do have Ribbons – just the main window doesn’t. Now if that’s not intuitive :-)

So here’s Microsoft being themselves again… hundreds of people are complaining about the fact that Office 2007 can’t be activated right now, at least since this morning apparently. It’s nice that I can run “the software” 50 times without activation, but as “the software” includes all the single applications in the Office Professional package, this isn’t very much. After having a look at each app just once and getting Outlook to the point where it now synchronizes with my Exchange server, I’m down to about 30 starts left.

I’m not saying Microsoft shouldn’t have problems… I’m saying they could try communicating with their users, especially those who are trying to take time out of their own busy days to help MS test their software. So far there must be tens of threads about the activation problem in the forum linked above, and I have yet to find a single reply from somebody at MS, or any other information about the problem or its solution.

Go here to get it. Mind you, I don’t know if there are any restrictions – I had registered on a similar page a while ago, in the hope of being on the beta at some point. You have to login with your passport and enter a bit of additional information, but once you’ve done that, the download starts immediately. Have fun!