New Office UI in Access 12

At long last, I can show and discuss the new Ribbon UI in Access 12.  There have been a few comments asking about this in the blog, and I haven't been able to show the whole thing yet (anyone that has seen the Beta 1 version of Access will find this layout quite different, although the concepts are the same).  Finally we've gotten the layout mostly nailed and can now talk about it.  At long last, here's how controls will work in Access 12.

Overview of the New UI

As you're probably aware, most of the applications in Office 12 will boast a new control metaphor called the "ribbon" that replaces the old menus and toolbars.  In addition, many of the other controls in the applications have been redesigned as well (e.g. the Options dialogs), so the UI changes actually extend to cover the whole application and not just the "ribbon" itself.  The best source for general information on the new UI is available on Jensen Harris's blog.

The new UI presented a great opportunity for Access to rethink its control structure.  Access has always been more modal than the other Office applications, presenting different UI's for each of its object types and for each views on those objects.  In the menu / toolbar world, we swapped menus & toolbars all the time, which was both confusing and caused the design surface to hop up and down.  The new UI metaphor is more contextual and allowed us to present object & view specific tools in the context of a consistent overall command structure.  In addition, the new UI is more flexible, allowing us to choose from a much broader variety of controls and thus to surface richer functionality more easily.  The upshot is that the application is easier to learn for new users and faster to use for existing users after a short acclimatization period. 

The Access Screen

The first screen that comes up when you start Access is the Getting Started screen, which I discussed a few weeks ago.  A user starting a new blank database is then taken to the Access application to start working.  The basics of starting from scratch were also discussed a few weeks ago, but now we'll look at the UI as a whole and use that scenario to tour the UI.

The first thing users will notice is the ribbon UI itself.  It is hard to miss at the top of the application:

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The is laid out in "tabs", and in the screenshot above, we've selected the "Home" tab.  Changing tabs changes the set of tools presented below.  Each of the tools below is in a "chunk", with the chunk names presented below the controls.  For example, this is the "Font" chunk and it contains the familiar font controls as you'd find on the toolbars today.

In addition to the ribbon UI, though, there are a number of other new controls available.  The first is the Office menu, which is available behind the round puzzle piece in the upper right:

The left hand part contains functionality scoped to the application (similar to what you'd find on the File menu before).  The right hand side contains details for whatever is selected on the left.  In the screenshot above, it contains the MRU list of files, but it is overlaid by fly-outs from some of the items on the right.  For example, clicking SaveAs shows the following version of the menu:

To the right of the Office menu, there is a short row of tools call the "Quick Access Toolbar" or QAT.  These are tools that are useful in any context (e.g. Save, Print, and Undo) and so don't need to be repeated on all the ribbons.  The Quick Access Toolbar looks like this:

The QAT can be easily customized using the new Access Options dialog (more on that below).  Users can simply select which controls to put on the QAT and where through a UI similar to that used for command bar customization.

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Access Ribbons

There are two types of ribbons in Access: 'regular' ribbons that are available all the time, and 'contextual' ribbons that only appear when a particular type of object has been selected.  I'll run through the tabs in Access without discussing each of the controls.  This will give an overview of what is available, but of course won't cover all the controls or all the functionality due to space.  In a sense, that's what the rest of the blog posts are for.

Starting from the left side of the ribbon UI with the 'regular' ribbons, we've seen the home ribbon above, its goal is to be the one sufficient place for database users - anything you can do while running an Access database is available here (and all the other ribbons are for some form of database authoring). 

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The next ribbon to the right is currently called "Create" (this will probably change to "Insert").  It is all about creating new database level objects (and not about inserting controls into those objects). 

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The External Data ribbon is all about importing / linking data, and exporting. 

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"Database Tools" is the last of the 'regular' ribbons, and contains all of the more advanced tools in Access that will mostly be of interest to developers.  In the other new UI apps, this is called the "Developer" tab and is hidden by default.  In Access we believe that developers are a core part of our user community so display the ribbon as a core part of the application. 

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To the right of the "Database Tools" tab is an area reserved for contextual ribbons.  These are only available when the focus is on a particular type of object in the database, and in a particular view.  For example in the screenshot above, you can see the "Datasheet" tab available.  This is available when the focus is on a Table in Datasheet view.  The contextual tab (e.g. Datasheet) has another tab above it, naming the context.  For Tables, this shows "Table Tools":

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Tables have multiple views, and each view has its own contextual ribbon.  Taking the same table into Design view results in the following tab:

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Tables can also be viewed as Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, which each have their own contextual ribbons as well:

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Finally, each of the "contexts" for the contextual ribbons can have multiple tabs, so for example, when editing a report in layout view, you are presented with three ribbons all in the context of "Report Tools": 

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Ribbon Contents

When laid out that way, it looks like there is a whole lot of UI in Access.  The reason for this is of course that there's lots of UI in Access.  Before most of it was buried in dialogs and the ribbon UI allows us to surface more things more easily.  It does this by being much more flexible about control types than the old toolbars, and thus allowing us to present more tools more of the time.  There are 2 key benefits here.  First things are easier to find, since they're presented to the user, at the right time, in the right context.  Second, the application is actually quicker to use, since most controls don't require the user to enter a modal dialog to use them - you simple choose what you want to do from the ribbon.  This is similar to the benefit provided by toolbars, but extended to cover much more of the product.

I'll run through a few of the more interesting controls on the ribbons just to show what we can do.  First, each of the controls on the ribbon is grouped into a "chunk".  The chunks group related controls, and have a "chunk name" at the bottom to help make sense of them.  The idea here is to make it easier to parse all the controls on the ribbons.  For example, here's the Font chunk we saw above.  It appears on the Home tab, and on several of the Formatting contextual tabs:

The Font chunk contains familiar controls from the toolbars, but also has a new control for managing gridlines called a "gallery".  The gridlines gallery presents a graphical selection of the gridline styles available:

This is similar to something that we could do before, but more graphical and more flexible.  Galleries can have multiple columns and are used for things like autoformats, and so on.  One of the key things we're able to do with the new controls is to make the UI more descriptive.  The More External Data Sources control from the External Data tab shows how we can take advantage of the extra flexibility to give more guidance without getting in the way of knowledgeable users. 

Finally, the new controls can have "super tooltips" to help users understand what is available.  Where the old tooltips were often a single word, now we've got space for a sentence or two.  The Delete Control control shows this - although the behavior is simple, we can use the tooltip to give the shortcut key and a brief description:

The View Chunk

One of the most core tasks in Access is switching views and we're finally happy with our view switching tools.  This is one of the things that held us up locking down the UI design, and we just got there (as in "this was first drawn on a whiteboard 2 weeks ago").  Each of the core ribbons, and the default tab for each contextual ribbon has a "view chunk" on the left hand side.  The view chunk is a split button and looks like this:

Clicking on the top part of the button (above the little line) will toggle you between the current view and the last selected view.  So, for example, if you're switching between Report Design View and Report View, it is just one click away.  If you'd like to move to a third view, you can drop down the split portion of the button, and choose from any of the other views:

This is only the most obvious way to switch views, but we've found in using the product that it is generally just right.  If you'd like to right-click we've got you covered.  You can also use small controls in the lower right, customize the QAT toolbar to include view switching, and probably several more ways.  Usually we don't provide multiple ways to do the same thing, but view switching is so frequent and so important, it is everywhere.  The view chunk, however, rocks. 

Beyond the Ribbon

As I mentioned at the beginning, the ribbon UI is only the most obvious part of the interface redesign.  I'll show just a couple, since this post is getting awfully long.  First, we've redone the way alerting works in the apps with WAY fewer modal alerts.  When you get security alert in Access 2003 (e.g. you open a database with unsigned code), you get a modal alert that forces you to say yes to open the file.  Access 12 now just opens the file, but turns off the ability to execute code, so the file opens safely.  This is common functionality across Office 12, and there is similar UI across all the products:

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The final thing that I'll show is the new Options dialog.  We've been happily adding options to Office apps for many years, and have extended the tabbed-dialog metaphor well beyond its comfort zone with many rows of tabs in some of the apps.  This has been replaced by a split dialog in Office 12, with navigation on the left and a new larger dialog space on the right.  The Options dialog for Access now looks something like this (this is likely NOT yet final, so expect controls to move around):

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This is the same dialog you saw above for customizing the QAT, and it is also used for managing security through the "Trust Center" which we'll cover later.  The upshot is we've now got the space to keep adding required options, it is easier to find the ones that already exist, and we've been able to incorporate a bunch of option or setting controls that used to be spread around the product into a single place. 

Next Time

Next time we'll take a deeper look at the new report designer, which we believe will both make new users more successful, and existing users more productive.