Training users on Office 12

Living as I do in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I've been observing the dialog regarding its decision to require all state documents to be in either Adobe PDF or OpenDocument formats by 2007. That all sounds reasonable, except that Microsoft is not planning to support OpenDocument formats with its forthcoming Office 12 suite. Instead, Redmond is choosing to support its own document formats and claiming that they are a standard instead.

One of the arguments Microsoft has been making is that moving to software that supports OpenDocument formats will cost the Commonwealth millions of dollars in retraining costs for its users. Well, as it turns out, InfoWorld notes that Office 12 has its own retraining costs. In the article, Oliver Rist writes:

As stated in my preview, the new suite is packed with new features, both big and small. The graphical ribbon menu is the one that’s sure to wrinkle the brows of new users the most. Gone are the File/Edit/View drop-downs with which they’ve become familiar. Instead, they are confronted with a fat, gray morass of options and icons that are actually more efficient after users are trained how to use them, but the change can be nerve-racking for non-techie users the first time they encounter it.

Further, there are underlying features that could cause many problems. A big one is the powerful new file format. Based on XML and Zip technology, it allows users to save metadata into a document and even store multiple versions of the same document in a single file.

If you have users take advantage of this feature, you need to train them to process each document with the Finish menu option, consolidating all changes and clearing the document of unwanted comments and such. Without that, you could wind up having someone send a client every copy of a proposal from draft to final -- with markups. And because the new file format has its own menu option under Save As, it’s easy to hit it by accident.

So while moving users to OpenOffice won't be any picnic, the irony is that it may actually be more familiar (it retains those old-fashioned drop-down menus that users are familiar with) and cost less to the state to use than going with shiny new Office 12. And that's a real marketing issue for Microsoft that will replay itself in installation after installation once Office 12 is released. Massachusetts is just providing a heads up of that battle to come.

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