Office UI

So, I've been looking over the new AppleInsider series about Microsoft Office 2008, and I have a couple of things to say:

1. First, Office 2004 seemed more Mac-Like. Too many unnecessary gradients and the whole "glass" theme is too much like Vista and not enough like Mac OS X. I do realize that Office is written in Carbon, but I sense the distinct touch of the Vista UI designers here, with the glossiness. Also, who's bright idea was it to make the gallery bar transparent? It matches the Leopard menu bar, but the menu bar makes sense, mainly because it is not in the center of a window. Also, it now takes up more space than the old toolbars used to. Moral of this bullet: the Mac OS does not take its cues from the Windows UI.
2. Some of the things are just clunky. For example, the themes in PowerPoint seem like a developer threw together a gradient and some rectangles, and the fact that the toolbars copy the windows toolbar is deeply disapointing. And while I'm on the subject of toolbars, who puts Open and Save items in their toolbars? Menus are there for a reason, you can't make them go away like you did in Vista.

All in all, if you need all of the features (which 95% of us do not), get OpenOffice or Office, otherwise iWork works better, and is cheaper. Since the OpenOffice.org developers intend to work on the Mac UI after they get it ported to Cocoa, we should see some progress on that front, interface wise. Hopefully they do not make the same mistakes Microsoft did.