Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

One of the questions people ask about the new user interface is "how much training is required to get up to speed?" Well, our design goal was to require no training at all. From the earliest prototypes, we were trying to design an experience so that...

No matter how good of a job we did organizing features in the new UI, there's always the chance that you might run into a feature you're having trouble finding for the first time in the new UI. To help with exactly this scenario, we created a few security...

We're two days into the public beta 2 of Office 2007, and so far 500,000 people have downloaded the beta. I have to say I'm a bit astounded that we're at a number that high after only two days... it's scary but awesome to think about so many people out...

Today's Guest Writer: Savraj Dhanjal Savraj is a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers. Yesterday Jensen linked to the Ribbon developer center . It's where we are bringing together...

Many people have reported here on the blog or through e-mail that they are having problems activating their copy of Office 2007 Beta 2. I’m really sorry this isn’t working well, but that’s kind of to be expected with beta software sometimes. The activation...

So you started downloading Office 2007 Beta 2 yesterday but it hasn’t finished yet. Or you had an error during the download or installing the build. Or maybe you’re not quite ready to take the leap and install beta software yet. No problem! There are...

Today’s the big day--I'm so pleased to announce that as of right now, you can download Office 2007 Beta 2 from the Office preview site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ . Click the button marked “Try it!” and enter a few pieces of information...

One of the most challenging aspects of developing the new UI has been making sure that everything ends up loaded into the airplane before it takes off. Confused? Let me explain. Sometimes I think about shipping Office like an airplane taking off. Our...

When you receive Office 2007 Beta 2, you might look up at the Quick Access Toolbar and wonder why there's a lightning bolt overlaying the Print icon. First thing to know: there have always been two versions of the Print command in Office. "Print" is...

Today I wanted to mention two cool Office 2007 features that you might not have heard much about. SmartArt The first one is called SmartArt. Think of it as a way to represent information graphically with about as much work as typing a simple bulleted...

One of the indispensable but esoteric features of the Word user interface is called "Click and Type." Click and Type was a feature added to Word 2000 to help make it easier to position text at specific points on the page without needing to hit Enter...

This question was posed to me in a comment earlier this week: how many icons does Office contain? The answer: it depends on how you're counting. The most common icon size in Office is 16 pixels high by 16 pixels wide, but we also have 32x32 and a...

Tonight we spent a few hours finalizing the contextual tab colors for Office 2007. As you may have seen in pictures of the new UI, each set of contextual tabs has a color associated with it. This helps to uniquely identify each tab set for familiarity...

Wow! So I take a few days off and open up the suggestion box and boy was I surprised to find over 400 comments! Suffice it to say that it's going to take me a long time to get through all of these. And thanks to everyone who took a minute to drop a...

This week I'm out of town on a bicostal business trip (currently overlooking Union Square in San Francisco) and unfortunately I won't be able to post any more articles this week. So instead I want to take the opportunity to ask you: what would you...

It was asked last week: "With the Help menu not present in Office 2007, where do I get to the version information from the About box?" Good question. In thinking through the design, we decided that it made sense for the version information to be integrated...

A couple of months ago, I posted screenshots of the visual appearance of the Office 2007 Beta 1 Technical Refresh . At the time, a number of you asked for pictures of what Office 2007 looks like on Windows Vista with glass enabled. Your wish, my command...