Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

A few weeks ago I showed you a neat trick that you can use in Word to quickly fill up a document with sample text. Not to be outdone by its sibling, Excel also features a few ways to swiftly fill up a worksheet with sample data. We use these...

There are three ways to use the keyboard to get work done in the new Office 12 UI. Type 1: Keyboard Shortcuts Let's start with the simplest and most direct form of keyboard access: keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are single key combinations...

Tomorrow, I'm going to introduce the keyboard model for the Office 12 user interface. But before I do that, I would feel remiss starting the conversation about keyboards without introducing my unappreciated friend, the Dvorak keyboard. I...

One of the tenets of the Office 12 user interface is that we don't want people to have to look "under rocks." I don't know why we say "under rocks." Maybe I made it up, maybe I heard it somewhere, who knows. The picture I get in my head is an...

This is the third part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read the last installments here: Part 1 Part 2 . Last week we started a walk...

Because you can never predict what name will end up sticking. Back when my team was working on the UI redesign of Outlook 2003 , one of the areas we were designing was what marketing later named the " Navigation Pane ." But official feature naming...

Yesterday, I talked about "command loops," in which commands not available at the same time in a modal user interface can cause frustration or reduced efficiency due the mode switch required to access both of them. When we looked closely at the...

The Ribbon is an example of what's called in academic circles "modal" design. Broadly, this means a design which is split into "modes", only one of which is active at a time. In the Ribbon's case, this means that the features are grouped together...

Last week, Microsoft hosted the MVP Global Summit here on campus in Redmond. After a summer of beautiful weather, it turned nasty and rained on the MVPs most of the time they were here. Luckily, we don't normally do technical sessions outdoors...

(Note: I didn't intend to publish this entry for a few weeks, but due to a mistake on my part it ended up in the RSS feed for a lot of people yesterday. As a result, I'll just post it now. My apologies if you see it twice in your RSS client.) OK...

This is the second part in my weekly series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. You can read last week's installment here: Part 1 . Today, I want to take you on a journey. A journey...

A number of programs and services make up what is now called the Microsoft Office System . Not all of them will include the new user interface I've been blogging about in Office 12. The programs which do get the new user interface: Word...

Early in our work designing Ribbon content, we had little data to go on in terms of how different content layouts within the Ribbon would affect the usability of the features being laid out. Being a new control, there wasn't any direct information...

There are a number of other Microsoft Office employee blogs you can check out if you're interested in learning more about Office 12. Here are a few of them to get you started: Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk . Steven is the Senior Vice President...

A common question I hear: "Are there dialog boxes in Office 12?" The answer is a definite "yes." Dialog boxes remain a part of the Office 12 user interface, and many of the "tried-and-true" dialog boxes from past versions of Office remain untouched...

This is the first in a series of Monday entries I'm going to publish over the upcoming weeks in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. Any discussion about the user interface of computers today...

Today was the Microsoft Company Meeting at Safeco Field in downtown Seattle. Last year instead of the traditional "everyone takes a school bus to the stadium" meeting, they tried a webcast so that we could "watch from the convenience of our desk...

Here's a Word trick you can use to entertain and amuse your family and friends. OK, I'm overstating a bit; unless your family and friends are exceeding geeky, they're not going to be impressed. But if you haven't seen it before, it might just surprise...

One challenge that some people have raised against a gallery-based approach to formatting is that "all of the documents are going to look the same." In today's episode, I'll explain why I'm not overly concerned about this and in the process share with...

Over the last few days, I've explained some of the major capabilities of the gallery control in Office 12 and shown how we use it to make formatting objects easy. Today, I want to write about how we use galleries in Office 12 to make the entire product...

Yesterday, I started discussing the "gallery", which is a new control that appears throughout the Office 12 user interface. Today, I want to discuss the most obvious use of galleries in Office 12: choosing visual styles. The underlying graphics engine...

As I mentioned last week , the Office 12 Ribbon was designed to host a variety of control types. Most of these control types have been around as common controls in Windows for over a decade: push buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, edit controls, combo...

Right-click contextual menus were first introduced in Office 4.x (which included Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0) and went on to become a ubiquitous part of using software starting with Windows 95. The basic idea behind context menus was to give power users a...

Although the amount of attention being paid to the new UI in news reports and especially the blogosphere has amazed even us, the quality and depth of the commentary varies widely. (Not surprising, considering very few people will have a build to play...