Greetings.
My name is Rod Chisholm and I am the Programming Writer for Excel client VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and Programmability. Our reference material is available in the box, on MSDN, and NOW on Office Online. This gives us the unique opportunity to gather ratings and feedback from our users to help strengthen our topics, and improve the help experience overall. As my manager, David Hale pointed out early this month in Let's Talk about Office VBA Help, Excel is ranked in the top three for hit counts on Office Online. So we are certainly getting traction and visibility. From all those hits approximately 1 out of 100 leaves a rating. Of those, about 1 out of 5 leaves a comment. With comments, there is less guess work as to why a topic gets attention, so the more, the merrier.
Are we listening?
Yes we are! For those who think that comments are dropped into a black hole, let me assure you that I have reviewed all the data and comments since the launch of Office 2007. Although there were a vast number of comments, most could be categorized in five or six areas. The areas of interest to me were the requests for codes samples, and the “how-to”, or “how do I” feedback. Both are key indicators that the reference material in these areas should be where time is invested. So, thank you for participating. You are making a difference.
Here is a breakdown of some trends and areas of focus for content improvement, based on site hits and your comments (special thank you to Mike Stowe, Access Programming Writer for help with data analysis):
Top Object Hits
Huge generators of site hits include Range, Application, Worksheet, Sheets, Workbook and Worksheets to no surprise. These Objects are used most frequently and essential to workbook navigation.
Top Member Hits
To me it looks like a pretty even distribution of hits, but the common denominator here is Range making up 10 of the Top 20. Range will be a primary focus for content ideas moving forward.
Top "How to" Topics
The bottom line is that Range and how to navigate within a worksheet seem to be the heavy favorites when it comes to hit counts and comments. So, look forward to content improvements, more code samples and additional topics around hot areas of Excel. Until next time, please keep the feedback coming. I'm listening.
For more information check out the Excel Developer Portal and the Excel Team Blog.
Please post a comment if you have any questions or concerns.
Cheers.
RdC ~Excel
The Outlook 2007 Developer Reference has been updated on MSDN on November 13, 2007! This Reference contains conceptual, reference, and programming task topics, guiding developers to program Outlook using the Outlook Object Model. This is the first update to the Reference on MSDN in ten months since January. Over the last ten months, more than fifty improvements and fixes involving hundreds of topics have been applied to this set of documentation. The following are some of the areas of improvement:
- Search and Filter – Clarified certain concepts about DASL and Jet queries, added new code snippets and programming task topics, including Filtering Items Using a String Comparison, How to: Search the Calendar for Appointments Within a Date Range that Contain a Specific Word in the Subject, and How to: Search the Calendar for Appointments that Occur Partially or Entirely in a Given Time Period,
- Enumerating, Searching, and Filtering Items in a Folder - Clarified how to obtain a writeable object from a row in a Table that supports read-write operations.
- AdvancedSearch method of the Application object – Clarified the limit of simultaneous searches.
- Address Book – Added a new programming task topic How to: Map a Display Name to an E-mail Address.
- Items, Folders, and Stores – Added a new programming task topic How to: Delete All Items and Subfolders in the Deleted Items Folder.
- NewMailEx event of the Application object – Added precautions to take when obtaining the Entry ID of the new item.
- OlUserPropertyType enumeration – Supplemented the constants in the OlUserPropertyType enumeration with corresponding MAPI type values. For example, the constant olDateTime maps to the MAPI type PT_SYSTIME.
- Automating Outlook from a Visual Basic Application – Clarified the security reason for a VBA application to use the trusted Application object intrinsic to the environment, except when the application intends to automate a separate instance of Outlook. All code samples in the Reference have been scrubbed to reinforce this concept.
I would like to thank Outlook MVP, Sue Mosher, who over the last year helped us improve our documentation by going through a large volume of the topics in the Outlook 2007 Developer Reference and giving us valuable feedback.
In case you are wondering, ten months seem to be a long time to wait for an update, the client applications of 2007 Microsoft Office system are capable of continuously refreshing developer reference content through Help in the product when you select to search and obtain content on Office Online! Through this mechanism, all the improvements and fixes included in this update on MSDN were actually already pushed on Office Online within a day after the corresponding topics had been modified. If this sounds novel to you, stay tuned, I will talk more about this next time.
My name is Angela and I am a programmability writer for Outlook. Outlook 2007 was the first version of Outlook I worked on. The part I like about my work is to describe to people how a feature in an application works. I think, I am probably not the last person to learn about the feature, and if I can channel my passion to document the feature and help someone else interested to learn about it, that’s makes my day more meaningful!
I’d like to talk about a feature that I recently documented in the Outlook 2007 Auxiliary Reference: meeting requests as informational updates and full updates. Even though this feature already exists in the user interface, I was able to learn about the complete picture from our own Outlook Product Team.
In Outlook 20007, meeting organizers can send updates to prior meeting requests. Recipients receive these updates in the form of full updates or informational updates. The significance is that a full update requires the recipient to explicitly respond to it, because Outlook ignores any previous responses, whereas an informational update does not require the recipient to respond to it.
So when does a recipient receive an update as a full update? Outlook uses the reason for the update to decide what type it should be: any changes related to time information, such as the date, time, time zones, or recurrence will generate a full update. But if a recipient has not responded to an initial meeting request, and if the organizer sends a subsequent update for any reason, such as changing the location of the meeting, on that recipient’s computer, Outlook will consider the initial meeting request as out-of-date, and the update is a full update, regardless of the cause of the update.
A recipient receives an update as an informational update in each of the following scenarios. This assumes that the recipient has already responded to the initial meeting request.
Programmatically, how does one identify the update status of a meeting request item in Outlook? There is a named property, dispidMeetingType, that is exposed on meeting request items. When Outlook receives a meeting request item, Outlook creates and sets that property for the item. Possible values for the property are:
Value
Description
mtgNone
Outlook has not set this property for the message.
mtgRequest
Message is a new meeting request.
mtgFullUpdate
Message is a full update of a prior meeting request.
mtgInfoUpdate
Message is an informational update of a prior meeting request.
mtgOutofDate
Message is out-of-date and a more recent update has been sent to the recipient.
mtgDelegated
Message is a copy of a meeting request, or a copy of an update of a prior meeting request received by the principal recipient. The original meeting request or the update has been sent to a delegate of the principal.
You might have a question about the delegated status of a meeting request item. To drive you to discover more about the Outlook 2007 Auxiliary Reference, I am suggesting you to continue reading here: About Meeting Requests as Informational Updates and Full Updates and the dispidMeetingType property.
[Ed. note: The data analysis in this posting was made possible by the work of JP Bagel, Rod Chisholm (Excel Programming Writer), and Mike Stowe (Access Programming Writer). All I've done here is copy and paste their work. -dgh]
In the 2007 Microsoft Office System, the developer content for VBA-enabled applications was moved to Office Online. This enabled a connection which never existed before, and increased our insight into which help topics are most important (from a raw usage as well as verbatim comments point of view). Our theory is that people who are looking at this content are obviously using those sections of the Object Models, so it gives us a good indication of what areas/features are the most used as well.
Last week I joined my boss, Jean Philippe Bagel (Developer Content Group Manager) aka "JP", as he led a talk with Office Developer MVP's who are interested in the developer help content on MSDN. JP shared what the data has been revealing to us and what we would like to do about it. This was the first time the Office Developer User Assistance team has ever shared so much data, and the opportunities to collaborate with us have never been greater.
Over the next few posts, I'm hoping to post some of the detailed analysis for a few of the applications for which we have numbers. As I post this data, I would welcome anyone, MVP or otherwise, who might have something to contribute to improving the VBA docs: code samples, articles, or ideas.
To get things started, here is a graph that shows the growth in page views of the entire VBA help content collection since RTM in November of 2006. We cannot share the specific numbers of page views, but this does give you a since of the steadily increasing number of developers reading the content.
Within that content set, here is the breakdown of which applications/areas are getting the most views:
So, you can see that, by far, Excel, Access, and the Visual Basic Core Reference topics receive the most views. Finally, here is a drill down on the percentage of views the various sections of the Access reference receive.
So, what can we learn from this? For one thing, it suggests that we should emphasize our content creation efforts around the Access Dev Reference and the ACE Errors topics. In a future post, I'll show more detailed data, such as the top 20 objects, member, and How-To topics for several references. I'll also provide insight into our analysis of the comments that we receive from readers.
Finally, other members of the Office Client Applications Developer Doc team hope to post listings of the top "How Do I?" requests from our readers. I invite you to contact me if you would like contribute to beefing up these areas and we can discuss the details. Also, please feel free to use this blog to suggest areas you’d want us to cover in more depth.
-David
There are some quick and easy things you can do to make sure you are getting the optimal VBA Developer Help experience when working with the 2007 Office System. Watch this three minute video to learn more.
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