Yesterday, a few of us spent the day until almost 10pm locked in a conference room meticulously reviewing all the tabs in the Ribbon. We've done these all-day marathon sessions a few times during the product cycle, and I find them to be extremely draining...

Perhaps because I was never the kid who had the super sized 128-pack of crayons, I never developed much of an artistic eye, especially for colors. Having only the 16-pack, with nary even the free crayon sharpener is something I obviously rue to this day...

An important element of the new user interface in Office 12 is a feature we call "Live Preview." The basic idea behind Live Preview is simple: whenever you hover over a formatting option with your mouse cursor, Office shows you what your document...

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...