I installed Office 2007 (the new one with the ribbon menu system) on my Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbook. Netbooks are made to be small and light by sacrificing power, speed, and storage space. It runs Word surprisingly well, but when I opened it for the first time, I was kind of shocked.

Netbooks have a small screen – my 9″ screen has a resolution of 1024×600. I am sure that Microsoft did not plan on Office being used at such a small resolution; after all, big LCD monitors are the norm. So it’s not a huge usability knock against Microsoft. But nonetheless, here is what I saw (minus the pixel measurements, of course):

The ribbon takes up a HUGE amount of screen real estate! Combined with the Taskbar that I keep at the top of my screen (I’m a Mac user at heart), 170 vertical pixels (out of 600) are gone. The default New Document screen shows a small border and the headers as well, so the point at which you actually start typing is nearly 290 pixels down screen. This leaves you with about another 290 pixels to work with! Only half the screen.

Now, of course, you can scroll up to hide the header, change the document view to see just the text, hide the ribbon menu, and implement a host of other strategies to make the text your main focus. I plan on doing that and I credit Microsoft for allowing the flexibility of doing that. Still, it was shocking nonetheless to open Word 2007 for the first time and barely see any document at all.

By the way, in case anyone is curious, here is PowerPoint. Since you often need to see the entire slide to do your work… well, this is pretty darn small – about 330 pixels! This is definitely more of a problem.