Microsoft has released the first beta version of Office 12, which will introduce the biggest changes to the world’s most-used applications for a decade. The ‘technical’ beta will be available only to certain big customers, but a general release is expected early in 2006.

The interface on the new Office has been completely revamped, replacing the old drop-down menus with context sensitive toolbars that Microsoft believes will make it easier for users to access the full power of the product.

Most people currently use only a tiny fraction of the features of a product like Word, and the company believes this is due to the fact they are hidden away in the complex menu system. If you are using a table with the new interface, for instance, you get a strip of icons offering you all the things you can do with a table.

Office 12, due for release next year at the same time as the next-generation Vista version of Windows, also includes a range of new features for allowing people in disparate locations to collaborate on projects. Microsoft believes this will be useful to smaller companies with branch offices as well as large dispersed enterprises and teleworkers.

The release is also designed to streamline and enrich the flow of information to the desktop, and this has entailed a complete rewrite of what are far and away the world’s most-used file formats. The new and undoubtedly improved ones are based on XML, which allows documents to contain new levels of information.

Microsoft engineers at the company’s IT Forum in Barcelona this week admitted that this means two sets of Office formats will be in operation. Jeff Raikes, vice-president of Microsoft’s information-worker business group, said: ‘We are confident that people will move quickly on to the new formats.’

However Microsoft has so far said filters to allow legacy software to use the new formats will be available only for more recent versions. It seems that this does not include Word 97, for instance. This could cause confusion in organisations with thousands of computers, some of them IT antiques.

A more long-term, and fundamental, question about the new formats is whether they can or should qualify as a standard for cross-platform information exchange. There are calls, including one from the EC, for international agreement on standard formats that are not controlled by one company.

You can read more about this, and Microsoft’s reaction, in the next edition of PCW.

See also: Microsoft to phase out 32bit for servers