Office 12 – new breath of life?

Microsoft have released a series of press images from their Professional Developers Conference 2005, some of which give shots of the new Office platform — creatively code-named “12″ (yes, 2003 was 11). Whilst there hasn’t been much significant change to Office in recent years (dare I say since 97) aside from UI enhancements (2003 did that properly, with a little bit of groupware stuff thrown in on the side), this version looks as if it’s going to break that pattern. Certainly, Vista’s internal font-rendering engine must have something to do with it, but it seems to me from the released screenshots as though Office has changed, also, in the way it handles graphics and layout. Personally, I’m dying to see what justified text looks like in Word.

So, I’m a sucker for graphics. Hopefully this upcoming release will reflect aesthetic advancement in the documents it produces, as well as the interface that surrounds this. (Alas, there appears no hope of Microsoft natively embracing PDF format, as they seek to make Word documents the ubiquitous format. Even if it doesn’t display properly in other versions of the same application, or have font embedding. Doh.)