Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

Often people ask us "how did you come up with the ideas for the Office 12 user interface?" That's a big question. And the answer isn't simple. What is easier to describe is the process by which we work to validate the design choices...

Yesterday, I walked you through some of the history of the status bar. Today, I'm going to write about what we've done in Office 12. It's not a radical departure from previous versions, but there are some nice improvements. I mentioned yesterday...

The status bar. A ubiquitous piece of the modern user interface, hardly anyone seems to pay it mind. That attitude often extends to interaction designers as well. The status bar, if you are new to the world of computers, is the (usually) gray strip...

It's a new year! Happy 2006! I hope you were able to enjoy some time off with family, friends, or maybe just catching up on some reading, video games, woodworking, cooking, football... If you're back in the office for the first time today and finding...

Due to the holidays here in the United States and elsewhere, many people are taking time off of work, away from their computers, and away from blogs. I am no exception, and my blog will be on hiatus for two weeks. If you're new to the blog and...

A comment we've heard again and again about the Office 12 interface after people use it or see it demoed live is: "wow, it's so much better than I imagined just by seeing the screenshots." Several people made that comment to me once again after my...

A big thanks to everyone who came to hear me speak last night at the BayCHI monthly program at PARC . I enjoyed meeting so many of you in person and hearing your feedback and ideas. Thanks especially to Rashmi, Deanna, Suzanne, Steve, and everyone...

Tonight I'll be in Palo Alto, CA, speaking at the monthly meeting of BayCHI in PARC's George E. Pake Auditorium . I'll be discussing the ideas behind the redesign of Office and showing demos of Office 12 Beta 1. The full description of the talk is...

Here's a neat time-saver in Excel 12. Let's say that you have some numbers somewhere in the Excel grid, in this case monthly sales figures for the branches of a store: Sales data in the Excel grid Now, let's say I wanted to quickly find out the...

One of the major engineering feats associated with shipping Office is making sure it runs fast enough. This effort, which we classify under the broad heading of "performance" includes responsiveness (how quickly a button responds when you click...

One of the features I always wished Word had was the ability to alphabetize a list of words. I always copied my words into Excel, fixed them up one per row, sorted them there, and then pasted back into Word. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that...

Last month, I introduced Segoe UI , the new user interface font for Office 12 and Windows Vista. Of course, you spend most of your time in Office not looking at the user interface, but working with documents. Times New Roman has been Word's...