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One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

A few weeks ago I posted a series of articles about great-looking documents.  I have had a few questions about shapes since I wrote those posts, so I thought I would write a quick post on changes to shapes in Excel 2007 (and Office 2007 really – anything I write here applies to all the apps).

Much the same way that charts were improved (new great-looking visuals, results-oriented ribbon UI), shapes have been improved as well.  Here is a summary of the changes, which fall into a number of categories.

1. New graphics effects and options – like charts, shapes will look a lot better in Excel 2007 … in fact, charts are built using shapes in Excel 2007, so the improvements in shapes and charts in this area are identical.  Specifically,

  • Better shadows
  • Better gradients
  • True 3D effects
  • Glow
  • Soft Edges
  • Reflections
  • Picture recoloring
  • New shapes

Here is a shot of some shapes to give you an idea.  I have amped up the visual effects intentionally to show off what is possible.  Note – you can see the Shapes gallery on the Insert tab that lets you pick from the shapes


(Click to enlarge)

2. Use interface improvements – shapes now get their own contextual tab and a number of galleries, which makes it easier and faster to get the result you want.  Specifically,

  • Integration into the Ribbon makes formatting of shapes faster and easier
  • Integration with “live previews” makes it easier to see the result of formatting before it is applied (see here for more info on live preview)
  • New Formatting Dialogs expose detailed options more clearly and consistently, and which allows modeless application of changes

Here is a shot of the ribbon and one of the modeless dialogs to give you an idea as to what all that looks like.


(Click to enlarge)

3. Shape styles – in the same way that cells, Tables, charts, and PivotTables now support styles that pull their colour, font, and effects information from a document theme, meaning it is easy to have your shapes match the rest of your document content.

Here is a shot of the “Shape Styles” gallery.


(Click to enlarge)

4. Improved text – treatment of text in shapes (and WordArt) has also been improved in a number of ways.  Specifically, better text metrics (things like Kerning, character spacing, all caps, underline style, better support for international text directions) and better text formatting  (things like all shape text is now as fully featured as WordArt, new WordArt effects and styles, inline editing of WordArt).

Published Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:56 PM by David Gainer

Comments

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 5:37 PM by AD
This is a nice post, but are we done with Charts?  How can you say this is a new charting engine with no new charts?

Other than the eye candy has nothing changed?  Are the same quirks still in the charting engine?

Where can I get some more detailed techinical information on what has changed?

AD

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 12:05 AM by David Gainer
Hi AD - we are done, at least with the blog posts for now, as I have covered the major changes.  We have improved a number of other smaller items (see examples below), but we wont have a full well-documented list for another few months.  I will put something together when we have something.  And believe me - we are well aware of the demand for other features, so we will be looking at this area next time out again.

Some examples of other things we fixed:

In Excel 2003-, you couldn't resize a chart below 4 cells tall.  This is important for creating small multiples of charts such as in a dashboard.  In Excel 2007, you can resize the chart as small as you want.

In Excel 2003- it was very difficult to align and resize multiple charts in a uniform way.  Again - very important for reports and dashboards. This has been significantly improved in Excel 2007.

In Excel 2003-, PivotCharts lost their formatting when performing pivot operations.  This has been fixed in Excel 2007.

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 3:32 AM by Mike

Drawing is hardware accelerated? What happens when you scroll a spreadsheet? What happens when you do a save as Excel 97/2003 for all those effects?

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 6:56 AM by mkp
Will it be any easier to automate shapes with vba?

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 8:14 AM by Gary McGill
Great-looking documents they might be, but I hope that modeless dialog is a work-in-progress... It looks awful!

I can't quite figure out why such a dialog is required, since I thought the idea of the ribbon (which is also "modeless") was that it offered everything that was relevant to the selected object? Doesn't this go back to the bad old days of hidden functionality? What happened to "there's only one place to look"?

The fact that it's modeless is good, but it does mean its going to hide some of your document. People are going to want to dock it, ... it'll end up being just like a toolbar!

I think this is the first time I've seen an Office dialog with the property-group layout much used in other apps. I don't particularly dislike that model, but it seems so different to the direction that the ribbon is heading in. Why have two different models? Can't a dialog have a ribbon - or at least something that looks a bit more consistent with the ribbon?

In terms of functionality, it's no different from the tabbed dialogs of old. At least the tabs won't jump around unpredictably, which I guess is why you ditched those.

I'm still disappointed about the way it looks, though - it's so "early 90's"! The ribbon is all about letting you see how things will look - yet this dialog shows no visual cues at all... What the heck is "Cap Type" & "Join Type"?

The rest of the UI looks so polished... this lets it down.

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 10:26 AM by AD
David, thank you for your responding.  I look forward to the fix list.

And hopefully you can sneak in the ability to resize the data label textboxes.
AD

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 4:07 PM by DP
Agree with AD. Very sorry to see there are no significant changes to charting abilities. I was very much hoping to see real 3D scatter/contour plots, perhaps even values mapped on a 3D surface by color contours, in this version of Excel. I guess I'll have to wait another 4-5 years to see if it happens then and continue using other software in the meantime.

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Thursday, April 27, 2006 12:52 AM by danny
Great looking documents.Charts were improved with great looking visuals, result oriented ribbon UI. Shapes have imroved as well. Everything has improved from text to shape to graphic effects and options. Thank u David for such great blog and looking forward to the fix list.

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Thursday, April 27, 2006 1:25 PM by Francis
Will charts in Excel 2007 have the ability to handle with gaps in data (either by interpolating or not plotting the area in question and applying corresponding formatting?)

With the notable exception of the scattergraph, missing data/unevenly spaced points foul up a lot of Excel charts.

2 examples:

1. Column chart, x data range from 1980 to 1999 (years.) Data collected every 5th year in the 1980s but every year in the 90s. Measurement errors rendered data from 1997 unuseable. Thus 14 points in total.

Current plot behavior: all data points are plotted, with columns equidistant along the X axis (despite the varying distance that a scattergraph would show.)

It would be helpful if Excel could plot the columns such that the distance of a column from the Y axis depends on the value of the data label. Furthermore, there should be an option to interpolate in the missing points(the columns would appear grayed-out or dashed, say) or not graph the columns where data is missing.

As it is, I have to use a formula to interpolate odd years in the 1981-84, 1986-1989, and 1997 or add those points as non-plotting (cells set to =NA()), respectively.

2. Scattergraph
When plotting, often I need to vary how lines are depicted. Between normal data points (no missing points, e.g. 1990-1996, 1998-2000), the line should be solid. Where points are missing, the line should be dashed (possibly with dimmed, interpolated points for the missing points but full-intensity points for those present.)

The only way to do this in Excel nowadays is to select individual points and segments and reformat them. It would be nice if Excel could apply this formatting automatically.

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Thursday, April 27, 2006 1:29 PM by Francis
P.S. Will charts in Excel also enjoy conditional formatting? (What I described above--the dimming, graying out, dashing of interpolated data--would be an application of that.)

# Formatting Dialogs

Thursday, April 27, 2006 7:50 PM by Chris Dickens
Gary,

I’m one of the owners for of the new Format Shape modeless dialog and I wanted to address some of your concerns.

To start out, we do still need dialogs. The ribbon is a great tool, and we believe it makes a ton of features much more discoverable, but it doesn’t have some of the more granular formatting features on it. In general you’ll find that the top level ribbon features should cover most things you need, drop down menu’s on the ribbon will take you a lot further, but if you want the very finest level of control over all the settings you’ll need to use a dialog. This is a consistent theme across all the ribbon enabled office applications.

The ribbon is still the first and only place to look, but sometimes the ribbon will take you to a dialog instead of having the feature you want right there on the ribbon.  For example, if you’re in a shape outline gallery on the ribbon (like say, width) the last option in the gallery is “More lines…” If one of the options you want isn’t in the ribbon gallery that option will take you to the screenshot that David showed, where you can change all the available line settings for the shape.

Inside the dialog we’ve worked hard to provide visual cues of what all the options mean, but some things were just tricky to visualize in a meaningful way. For example, Cap Type and Join Type have to do with how lines end and intersect with each other - like I said, these are pretty granular features. Those two features don’t offer visual cues but you can see that all the other options on that part of the dialog have pictures on the buttons, and when you drop those buttons down it gives a visual cue of what the options mean.  It’s not perfect, but I’m happy with the solution we came up with.

We’ve made a ton of changes to the formatting dialogs (there are very similar dialogs for detailed chart and word art formatting) between Beta 1 and the upcoming Beta 2. There are still some bugs in them, but we think we’ve gotten them to their final state from a functionality and look and feel standpoint. Beta 2 will be their first public exposure and we’re hopeful that people will like the changes we’ve made.

I’d ask you to spend some time playing around with them in Beta 2 when you get your hands on it. Get a feel for how the dialog works in when you’re using it for formatting tasks and please feel free to send me any feedback you have.

Thanks for your input!

Chris
CDickens at Microsoft

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Thursday, April 27, 2006 11:13 PM by Vic Eldridge
"in fact, charts are built using shapes in Excel 2007"

I mentioned this in a previous post, and I'll mention it again. If VBA programmers had a way of positioning shapes on a chart using the same coordinate system that is used to plot the data, this would *greatly* increase what could be done with Excel's charts.
Currently, we have to use the mouse plus hand-eye coordination to place shapes relative to the plotted data. This rules out any form of automation and relegates shapes on charts to "once-off" manual creations.

Obviously your people already have a way of doing it. Please consider exposing this functionality. We would then be free to add our data responsive bells & whistles until we're blue in the face !


Regards,
Vic Eldridge

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Friday, April 28, 2006 1:23 AM by David Gainer
Mike – Drawing is not hardware accelerated.  With respect to saving to earlier file formats, the basic design is that we map as closely as possible to what was possible in Excel 2003.  If the shapes/charts are not edited in Excel 2003, when the file is re-opened in Excel 2007, no detail is lost.  If the file is edited in an earlier version, the edits will be seen when the file is opened in Excel 2007.

MKP – I am not sure exactly what you mean.  Can you give me a bit more detail?

Gary – Thanks for the feedback.  I think a member of the team provided some comments.

AD, DP, Francis – unfortunately not this version.

Danny, Vic – thanks for the comments.

# re: Pivot Table Number Formats

Saturday, April 29, 2006 5:55 PM by Jeff I.
I just finished reading through some of the many improvements of Pivot Tables....I'm salivating!  

I apologize if this has already been addressed.  One aggravation I've always had with Pivot Tables is that there is no way to quickly format multiple Data fields.  For instance, I often have several Data fields that I want to apply specific number formatting to.  Currently I have to access the field properties for each Data field and format them separatly.  This takes several mouse clicks and is fairly tedious.  It would be great if there was a way to apply number formatting to multiple Data fields at once.  For instance, I would like to select all my currency fields and format them together as currency, etc.   Is this something that has been addressed with Excel 2007?

# re: One More Great-Looking Documents Post – Shapes

Monday, May 01, 2006 9:08 PM by Igor K.
I have to say I agree with Gary on format dialogs. These things don't feel like they are a part of the new UI.

Also, can someone comment on Proclarity purchase and what does it mean for future versions of Excel?

David: great blog. Thanks.
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