One of the features we built into the Outlook 2003 user interface is called Quick Flags. You can single-click next to any mail item to color it so that you can find it again later. Or, you can right-click to apply one of six colors to help you categorize...

Back in the article " Set In Our Ways? " I talked about one of the design issues we were thinking about at the time--namely, whether or not it was OK sometimes to break commands out of a set. In particular, we were thinking about the Mini Toolbar which...

For some reason (entirely unintentional) I've spent a bunch of this week babbling about keyboard issues. I guess you can tell where my mind is right now. So, I knew there was no better way to end the week than making sure you saw what's become...

First of all, due to a glitch in the system, Howard's article about the philosophy behind Themes in Office 2007 got posted very late yesterday. It's well worth the read, so if you didn't catch it yesterday, you might consider checking it out...

Howard Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt group. Last week I gave an overview of the new Office Themes capability. Thank you for all the great comments. This week I'd like to show you what's inside an Office...

I mentioned a few days ago that the team has been immersed lately in improving the Office 2007 keyboard model . We got a lot of constructive feedback around the model from Beta 1 and so we're hard at work addressing it for Beta 2. Today, I want to...

A couple of weeks ago when I talked about The Feature Bob Invented , I mentioned that we use PowerPoint as an easy way to prototype UI, especially in the early stages of design. A number of people have asked me for more details, and so today I thought...

As we continue to work on the visual design of the 2007 Office apps, we've been very conscious of looking for ways to slim down the overall UI of the apps. Early on (especially before people learned more about how it worked) some people were saying...

Today, the product I've been blogging about for the last six months as Office "12" officially became the 2007 Microsoft Office system . Along with the naming announcement, pricing and packaging information has been revealed, and...

Today I present the first of what I hope are many guest articles on Office user interface issues written by other folks from the product team. This first series of articles describes the new themes capabilities of Office 12 and how they integrate...

We've been working a lot lately on improving the Office 12 keyboard model, so my mind is trapped in a keyboard shortcut frame of mind. I don't have anything to share on this subject yet (we're still working on the design), and when I do I'll certainly...

As I've mentioned before, Task Panes made their first appearance on the scene in March 2001, in Office XP. If you want to get the background on Task Panes, why they were added, and their role in modern Office UI, read this article or, better yet,...

I spend a lot of time here writing about the new Office 12 UI. And why not--it's the project I work on and I'm proud of the work our team is doing. But in reality, the purpose of any UI framework is to support the programs using it--and ultimately...

Today, just thinking aloud... A minor design conundrum we face is as follows: based on the data we collect , we can see that within certain sets of related features, some of them are used much more frequently than others. Should we ever act on this...

Speaking of options , did you know you can show two time zones at once in the Outlook calendar? This tip works in all versions of Outlook. Go into Tools.Options and click the Calendar Options button and then the Time Zone button. Alternatively...

It may seem based on my writing that the ideas behind the Office 12 user interface kind of popped out of the sky and or that we went with the first things that came to mind. In reality, many people contribute creative ideas, and deciding which...

You may remember that last week I described the textual separators that we use in Office 12 menus to improve a few specific scenarios. Another way we've enhanced menus is a design we call "rich menus." The idea is simple: include...

One of the key design tenets of the Office 12 user interface is making sure that the set of features you need to look through is as small as possible. Communicating the relevant features makes the program feel smaller and simpler and saves you time in...

A couple of weeks ago , I wrote about holding down the Alt key while selecting text in Word to draw a box around it. I received a lot of mail thanking me for the tip, which was nice. But three of the mails had something in common—they asked me to pass...

Today marks the start of February, the " month of love ." In commemoration, I want to ask you a question: What software do you love, and why? Some members of the high-tech illuminati start and end their discussions of design in terms of RAZR phones...