Here's a categorized Table of Contents to help you discover posts you might find interesting or relevant. If you're new here, I'd recommend that you start reading at the top. Why a New UI for Office 2007? The Why of the New UI (Part 1) Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past (Why the UI, Part 2...

I was reading through commentary from people who attended last week's MIX conference in Las Vegas. Running across Miguel de Icaza's kind words reminded me that I hadn't posted a follow-up about my MIX talk yet. Last week, I presented a session at MIX called "The Story of the Ribbon." I talked a bit...

Just a short note to let you know that I'll be presenting a new session during MIX in Las Vegas on Friday, March 7 at 10:00 entitled "The Story of the Ribbon." In this session, I'm going to present the story of the Ribbon--the customer problems that we were aiming to solve by designing a new user interface...

Today's Guest Writer: Eric Faller Eric is a Software Design Engineer on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers. Another source of frequently-asked RibbonX questions is around the complexity of writing an add-in in C++. Compared to the ease...

Today is the official business launch of Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007. This means that as of today, businesses can get these products and start deploying them within their organization. The consumer launch is scheduled for January 30—that's when you'll...

For the last year or so, one of the questions I've been asked again and again has been: "Can I use the new Office user interface in my own product?" On one hand, it's an immensely satisfying question to hear, because it means that others in the industry believe in the value of what we've built and...

Now that we've released Office 2007 to manufacturing, developers can get started modifying their solutions so that they're ready to test with the released version of Office. Final versions of the RibbonX schema and Control ID list will be published on MSDN soon, but that can take a while—so I'll continue...

I've published over 200 posts on this blog since I started it last September. With all of those posts, it can be hard to remember what you've read and what you haven't… and it can be hard for new people to jump in and figure out where to start reading. I've been meaning to sit down and create...

I'm proud to announce that last Friday, November 3 at approximately 2:30 PM, we signed off on build 4518.1014 as the 2007 Microsoft Office system and released it to manufacturing. This was followed by a ship party for everyone in Office including a few minutes of speeches, the traditional sounding...

You may have noticed that I haven't posted for the last week. I wish I could say that I've been on a fabulous vacation, but in reality, I spent two weeks on the road, talking to people about the Office 2007 UI. That trip, combined with an extremely busy time trying to help finish up Office and getting...

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. As you may have discovered, we made a few tweaks to the UI developer story in Beta 2 Technical Refresh. The biggest change is the updated...

This morning, the Beta 2 Technical Refresh of the 2007 Microsoft Office system became available for download. You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center . (The download link above is the main download link. You also view the list of all available Beta 2 Technical Refresh updates...

This morning, we announced that starting tomorrow (Thursday, Septemeber 14) you'll be able to download the Beta 2 Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 (build 4407.1005). Note: There's a newer post now with the download link . You can keep reading, though, to see a list of what's new in the Technical...

One of the new features in the upcoming Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh that I haven't written about yet is something we call the Quick Customize Menu. As you may know, the Quick Access Toolbar is a customizable part of the UI in which you can add features for quick access. Simply right-click...

One of our goals for the Office 2007 user interface was to make it easier to create beautiful output. In many circumstances, you are judged by the quality of the output you create. And software that helps you create beautiful output makes you look smart and feel good. Many of the features of the...

It was with a bit of surprise that I read a flurry of stories on Friday with breathless headlines like "Microsoft backs off the Ribbon in Office 2007!" and "Microsoft Cuts Office 2007 Ribbon!" Part of working at a company like Microsoft is that people are interested in what we do. This means that...

One of the most well-understood and salient principles underlying the ergonomics of graphical user interface design is Fitts' Law . Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control which predicts how long it takes to move from...

One of the efficiency affordances added to Office over a decade ago is the Recent Documents list. At the bottom of the File menu in Office 2003, you'll see your four most recently-opened documents listed; you can click one of them to open the file directly. Looking at customer data from Office 2003...

On Thursday, I wrote about how Office 2003 renders the user interface using a table of several thousand colors . Some of you commented that we're crazy to do so much work. Perhaps, but keep in mind that I'm not just talking about the menus and toolbars; every color used in the interface of every program...

As you probably know by now, each of the Office 2007 programs (both classic UI and new UI) have the ability to render themselves in several different color schemes. What determines which color scheme is used when, and what are the defaults? Before discussing Office 2007, let's jump back and talk...

Some of you have noted that recently I've been writing a little less frequently than in the months before. For a long time, I did five articles a week; recently, I've been doing three or four most weeks. One reason for this is that I've been trying to write longer, more detailed articles rather than...

I've written in the past about the approach we took to organizing options in Office 2007 , including a misguided detour in creating an "expert mode." Today I want to start a discussion of some of the options available in Word 2007 by sharing those settings you'll see on the first page as soon as you...

A few months ago, I made an attempt to give you a sense of the kinds of changes to the user interface you'd be likely to see between Beta 2 and the final product. In particular, I guessed that we had made over a thousand individual tweaks to the contents of the Ribbon, although now I think that was...

It's the age-old question of presenters everywhere: "Which PowerPoint slide design should I use?" I know the feeling so well of booting PowerPoint and looking through the same old 15 tired slide designs that everyone uses, knowing full well that I would only consider using three of them. So when...

One of the projects our design team has been working on for the last year or so has been the development of a new suite of product icons for Office 2007. Here are the 32x32 versions of the icons which will appear in the final product: The design team has been working on these icons for quite...