Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

Today is my 30th birthday. Ten years ago--with college to finish, legal drinking still in my future, and no idea what I was going to do with my life--30 seemed like a remote, hazy, unfathomably distant milestone. The whole world of possibilities was...

One topic that has come up frequently in our private beta newsgroups as well as here in blog comments from time to time is the issue of customization. As with every component of the Office 2007 user interface redesign, we put a lot of thought into...

Over the last month, you've sent us thousands and thousands of comments about Office 2007 Beta 2 using the Send a Smile tool . For taking the time to install our beta and writing down your thoughts (positive and negative) I am very grateful. A few...

Yesterday morning we were sitting in the office of one of our usability researchers watching some DVCAM tapes from tests conducted a few weeks ago. We had a discussion that got me thinking about a set of tests we ran several years ago to determine the...

Yesterday I talked about the command well which exposes all of the features in the Office 2007 programs. Today, a few tips and tricks for using the new command well. First, check out this picture of Word's command well to give you some grounding in...

There have always been certain commands in Office which aren't available as part of the default user interface. Sometimes, these commands are seldom-used alternatives to features that are part of the common UI. For instance, there are many commands that...

One last thought about spell checking. I mentioned a few days ago how much I depend on red-squiggle on-the-fly spelling and grammar checking, especially in Word. From time to time, though, I have to admit that I've typed a word I thought might be...

Yesterday, I mentioned the new contextual spelling feature that is part of Office 2007. Writing the post reminded me of a story from years past... One of the things we've tried to do from time to time is reduce the number of modal alerts that pop up...

One of the most amazingly useful features designed into Office is the red-squiggle underlined spell checking introduced in Word 95. Spell checking before that was a rather modal process: type some words, hit the spell check button, wait for a dialog...

Earlier this week , I somewhat humorously referred to people who close windows on the left side as "Windows 3.1 lovers." What did I mean by that? The now-ubiquitous close button in the upper-right hand corner of windows was only added to the operating...

People have speculated rampantly about how closely Office 2007 Beta 2 will reflect the final product. I've read everything from "nothing will change between now and the final release" all the way to "a lot will likely change between now and general availability...

It's been a long time since I wrote off-topic, but I have 30 minutes to kill in Copenhagen airport, so here's a quick weekend send-off. This week I've been in London on business. I had a few minutes free on my way to a meeting on Wednesday, so I decided...

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. Now that you've got Beta 2, you can download and open RxDemo.xlsm , a new file format...