It's true that many users are holding their breath for Windows Vista, but the same thing goes for MS Office 12.

PDC 2005 is the first time when Office 12 shows its face…interface, to be more precise, in public.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from Gates's speech and from the screenshots available on the Internet: this version will be like nothing we were used to.
First of all, the user interface (UI), will allow the users to focus more on what they have to do rather than on how to achieve the tasks.

The new interface replaces the menus and classic bars with a series of graphical tabs. For example, the Write tab will open a series of functions used to insert text, adjust the dimension and the thickness of the characters.

Chris Capossela, vice President of the Information Worker Group at Microsoft, admitted in his MS Office 12 presentation that Office 2003's interface was suffocated with the 1,500 commands and 35 toolbars; this will not happen to Office 12.

Microsoft Office 12 will offer as many functions as possible to allow the user to preview the results of the changes in a document.
The feature called Galleries is aimed at simplifying the documents' formatting, and combined with Live Preview, it will allow the users to view the results after applying a certain layout.

Microsoft plans to introduce the Super Tooltips, a function which will offer comprehensive information about the available buttons and commands.

MS Office is one of Microsoft's key products, last year the suite brought revenues of $11 billion of the $40 billion recorded by the company.