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...

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...

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 list. More than a simple diagramming tool or...

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 to enable them to provide awesome user experiences...

Another in my series of posts on personal favorite improvements in Office 12 ... Did you know there are a variety of underline styles available in Word? Ever want to double underline some text? Or put a dotted underline under certain words? Or a wavy underline? All of these styles are frequently...

Because Office 12 represents the first time we've ever introduced a new user interface for Office, it is understandably garnering a lot of attention. Add to that the powerful new open XML file formats for Office 12 documents , and it's tempting to focus the discussion of Office 12 on just those areas...

In every phase of my life in which I've been required to create documents, a different set of symbols has been important to me. For instance, in high school, I studied Spanish, which meant figuring out how to type ñ and ¿. In college, as I repeatedly flirted with flunking German, I inserted...

Here's a neat time-saver in Excel 12. Let's say that you have some numbers somewhere in the Excel grid, in this case monthly sales figures for the branches of a store: Sales data in the Excel grid Now, let's say I wanted to quickly find out the average or total sales for some or all of my store...

One of the features I always wished Word had was the ability to alphabetize a list of words. I always copied my words into Excel, fixed them up one per row, sorted them there, and then pasted back into Word. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Word has had this feature since version 2.0...

Last week I started a new series of some of my favorite new features in Office 12. If you're curious what criteria I'm using to select them, read Part 1 . Today's episode: You're standing up on stage in front of a thousand people who have come to watch you talk. The house dims, and the bright...

Today, I'm starting an ongoing series on some of my favorite things in Office 12. Maybe you'll hear marketing talk about some of these features down the road and maybe you won't; I'm not really concerned about that. The only criteria I'm using for inclusion in my list are: 1) It...

There are a number of other Microsoft Office employee blogs you can check out if you're interested in learning more about Office 12. Here are a few of them to get you started: Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk . Steven is the Senior Vice President of Office and his blog is primarily focused...