The next generation of the Microsoft Office system offers a new look and feel across its applications, with dynamic formatting tools and nimbler files.

The final product is expected to ship late next year, but this initial beta version of Microsoft Office 12 reveals radical interface changes that recall the overly ambitious Office 97 update. The changes apply to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, as Microsoft intends to streamline your work flow, particularly for business users.

The familiar File and Edit drop-down menus will disappear to make way for functions grouped within a ribbon atop each window. This banner's task-specific tabs attempt to anticipate and surface the functions you need according to your current work. Office 12's applications get a new interface, as well as a fresh graphics engine -- similar to that promised in Windows Vista. Visual thumbnail galleries of ready-made layouts suggest formatting options, and templates of your live document are available automatically.

You can see the impending changes in the image gallery on the next page.

We appreciate the ability of the applications within Microsoft Office 12 (beta 1) to display live previews of formatting changes, so you'll never have to guess again what a font looks like. This system promises many ease-of-use interface tweaks, such as a slider bar in the bottom of each window for zooming in and out of page views. We hope that tabbed toolbar browsing will make navigating through tasks and documents easier and eliminate the guesswork, as it attempts to display the tools you need, such as visual galleries of attributes and suggested layouts. To spare you from annoying interruptions, Microsoft has hammered the nail in the coffin of the cheesy paper-clip cartoon, Clippy. Right-clicking a mouse will reveal the same task-specific menu choices as offered in the masthead banner. Developers will get the freedom to add their own tabs, items to tabs and gallery items to Office 12; and companies can build their own toolbars from scratch, if needed. Old, familiar add-ins will also work in the new Office. Users of previous versions of Office will like the fact that Office 12 files are backwards compatible through Office 97.

In the past, Microsoft has sabotaged itself by adding too many new features to Office too fast. We're keeping a lookout for problems -- after all, Office 12 was in its storyboard stages just a few months ago. If you've spent the past two years mastering Office 2003, prepare for a steep learning curve. The Alt keyboard shortcuts will change; luckily, shortcuts using the Ctrl button will stay the same. Although the more visual tabbed layout may reduce mouse clicks, it eats up more screen space and RAM. We're also wary of Office 12's goal to make the ribbon respond to the tasks you're working on. What if, say, options for text formatting that you want to make are hidden because you've clicked on a graphic? Unanticipated consequences could make the ribbon less intuitive than the traditional layout of Office 2003. The new graphics muscle makes icons and charts appear less flat, but our jaws didn't drop at first sight.

We appreciate that Microsoft won't force users to buy the latest, greatest PCs. Office 12 will run on Windows XP SP1 or 2003 and will require a minimum of 256MB of RAM and a 512MHz processor. However, we anticipate that you may want a more powerful system to multitask with the graphics-intensive Office 12.

Microsoft Office 12 looks dramatically different from Office 2003. The task-oriented paradigm common to the separate releases of Vista and Office 12 will be new to everyone. The tabbed command layout of Word, Excel and PowerPoint may be a welcome change if your wrists ache from clicking through the myriad drop-down menus, and Microsoft hopes that the new layout will be more intuitive. But even well-intended software changes that seem graceful at first glance might reveal quirks or hassles during extended use. In the Beta 2 test rollout of Office 12 (expected next spring), Microsoft plans to reveal more about its server work flows for businesses. We also await more details on Microsoft's plans to better integrate multimedia communications, such as email and instant messaging, within Office 12 documents.