Office 12 makeover takes on 'feature creep'

For years, Microsoft has been trying to add features to Office without them getting in the way of people who already know their way around the software.

Unfortunately, the company was a little too successful at making its innovations unobtrusive. In user testing, Microsoft found that nine out of every 10 features that customers wanted to see added to Office were already in the program.

"They simply don't know it's there," Chris Capossela, a Microsoft vice president, told a developer crowd last week. "It's just too hard to find it."