September 2005 - Posts
A number of programs and services make up what is now called the Microsoft Office System . Not all of them will include the new user interface I've been blogging about in Office 12. The programs which do get the new user interface: Word Excel PowerPoint
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Early in our work designing Ribbon content, we had little data to go on in terms of how different content layouts within the Ribbon would affect the usability of the features being laid out. Being a new control, there wasn't any direct information we
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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
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A common question I hear: "Are there dialog boxes in Office 12?" The answer is a definite "yes." Dialog boxes remain a part of the Office 12 user interface, and many of the "tried-and-true" dialog boxes from past versions of Office remain untouched in
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This is the first in a series of Monday entries I'm going to publish over the upcoming weeks in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 12. Any discussion about the user interface of computers today has
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Today was the Microsoft Company Meeting at Safeco Field in downtown Seattle. Last year instead of the traditional "everyone takes a school bus to the stadium" meeting, they tried a webcast so that we could "watch from the convenience of our desk." I didn't
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Here's a Word trick you can use to entertain and amuse your family and friends. OK, I'm overstating a bit; unless your family and friends are exceeding geeky, they're not going to be impressed. But if you haven't seen it before, it might just surprise
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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
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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--not
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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
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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
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Right-click contextual menus were first introduced in Office 4.x (which included Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0) and went on to become a ubiquitous part of using software starting with Windows 95. The basic idea behind context menus was to give power users a
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Although the amount of attention being paid to the new UI in news reports and especially the blogosphere has amazed even us, the quality and depth of the commentary varies widely. (Not surprising, considering very few people will have a build to play
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One of the core components of the new user experience is something we call the "Ribbon." The Ribbon is a strip across the top of the window that exposes what the program can do. Here's an example of what a Ribbon looks like: (click to enlarge) (Note:
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I had a blast presenting today at PDC. Thanks so much for all you I met in person for the kind words and feedback! I'm very much enjoying the glut of blog entries and press articles about the announcment of new UI. As expected, there are many opinions
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As you may have seen by now in many news articles as well as http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview , in this morning's keynote at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, we demonstrated a new user interface that will debut in
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Where it all started...
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