Don’t we all love it when things go right? And things seem to have gone right for the Office development team, who is now shipping the new Office UI to at least some Insiders.
While this user interface change was slated to make it to users running the test builds of the productivity suite last week, the firm encountered a slight delay in rollout. It promised to bring it to Insiders this week, and has done so.
This major redesign of the Office productivity suite was announced last month, with the refresh giving Office applications almost the same user interface update that Windows 11 users have received.
As spotted by the folks over at Petri, the Fluent Design inspired UI refresh has begun rolling out to some Office Insiders. The release seems to be staggered at the moment, and is showing up for a subset of users. Others likely have to wait a bit to get their digits on it.
When the new UI does become available for everyone, the feature should be automatically enabled, and can be manually disabled via the Coming Soon pane at the top of the applications.
That said, certain applications like Access, Project, Publisher, and Visio do not have this pane, and these programs will adapt as per the other Office apps like Outlook.
As for the UI itself, one of the biggest changes is the suite now embracing rounded corners. Programs now have angular edges to the ribbon, and the rounded corners also apply to the window borders, in line with the design changes that are coming to the Windows 11 operating system.
To give it a try, you must be part of the Office Insider Program, and enrolled in the beta channel.
This early version is still in its early days, and Microsoft is clearly in no rush to bring it to everyone with proper testing and ensuring the overall stability and reliability of this major design change. There is also the small matter of taking user feedback on board here.
End of the year be a solid bet for its general availability.
