The Ribbon takes the place of menus and tool bars. You used to have menus that dropped down and tool bars that stacked up on top of each other. Now, the Ribbon is one strip of icons and galleries that you can choose from to author your documents. The vast majority of people -- something like 85% of our beta users -- said they were going to be far more productive with [Office] 2007 than [Office] 2003.

The other thing we set out to do was to not put the training burden on the shoulders of the IT staff. We wanted to build the training right into the product and connect that to the Web, where we have really rich training materials. ...IT doesn't have to roll anything out. If you hit Help within Office, you get access to that training material.

You don't think IT departments need to build in any training, period? They can just rely on your Web site?

Absolutely. The best thing for them to do is just take a set of users and do a pilot. Obviously, do it with a small enough group that IT is going to feel comfortable supporting it, and see what kind of support they need for the new user interface. I think people will be very surprised that it's far less jarring than you might think.

So the fears of IT pros about the need for more extensive training are unfounded?