Much has been written about the forthcoming Office 2007 since Microsoft released Beta 2 on an unsuspecting public, but until a week or so ago my hectic schedule hadn’t allowed me to try out this allegedly productivity-enhancing gift from Redmond. I’d seen screenshots of it in action and even commissioned a feature about it for Personal Computer World, but none of this really prepared me for the shock of actually trying to use it.

Most of my work is done using Word and Excel, so these were the applications I homed in on first. I don’t class myself as a power user – my text editing could be done just as well in WordPad if we didn’t need Word format documents for our internal systems. But I do know my way around many of the more obscure menu items.

Imagine my embarrassment when I couldn’t work out how to create a new document from an existing template in Word 2007. Eventually I realised that the pretty round button in the top corner of the new “ribbon” interface was not actually just for decoration.

I’m all in favour of improving usability, and it’s certainly true that the new interface exposes a lot more “features” to users rather than hiding them in a menu tree. Whether you think that’s good or not depends very much on the type of user you are.

“Office has evolved” is plastered all over the advertising billboards, yet Microsoft seems to have ignored a basic fact of evolution: in general, new species don’t get created by drastic sudden changes; successful evolution proceeds in small, imperceptible increments.

Microsoft has spent many years getting us used to the File/Edit style of menus plus icon toolbars, and we’ve grown so accustomed to them that any application that deviates tends to get shot down in flames. For a free program written by an aspiring developer, that wouldn’t be a big problem. For a productivity suite used by millions of people, it certainly is.

I’m not saying that the new Office interface is bad or even unusable, but companies need to be aware that it will require staff retraining, no matter what Microsoft’s “real world” trials suggest. In the beta versions there isn’t even an option to revert to “classic” menus, in contrast to Windows Vista or Internet Explorer 7, which still let you display old-style Windows Explorer menu bars.

I heard from a company recently that is looking at alternative suites such as StarOffice and OpenOffice. And if it decides it likes what open source can offer, who knows – it might even consider alternatives to Windows, as well.

Microsoft needs to tread very carefully. Training budgets are always kept tight even in times of plenty, and those companies that invested a lot in Windows XP training aren’t going to relish forking out yet again, particularly when they can see the prospect of Windows Vista lurking just ahead.