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The Future of Task Panes

As I've mentioned before, Task Panes made their first appearance on the scene in March 2001, in Office XP. If you want to get the background on Task Panes, why they were added, and their role in modern Office UI, read this article or, better yet, the entire "Why the UI" series.

Because of our oft-stated design mantra "everything's in the Ribbon" some people have speculated that Task Panes are not a part of Office 12. This is not precisely true, although the content of many Task Panes have moved to the Ribbon and the role of Task Panes in the product has become more focused. There are many fewer of them, and the few which are left are more consistent in their behavior and reason for existing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, let's talk about the mechanics of the Task Pane as it existed in previous versions. The Office XP/2003 UI includes a single, full-height pane docked to the right side of the window. This single pane could show one Task Pane at a time, and you could switch between the available ones using a dropdown menu at the top of the pane.


The Task Pane in action (Click to view full picture)

The Task Pane was used for at least four different kinds of UI.

First, it could act as a place to show secondary document information based on selection. The Styles and Formatting pane in Word, the Office Clipboard, and the Watch Window in Excel are good examples of this type of pane.

Second, the Task Pane was used as a kind of replacement for a wizard when it was deemed important to have access to the document while running the wizard. The Mail Merge pane in Word is an example of this.

Third, the Task Pane was sometimes used as a replacement for what should have probably been a dialog box. The Attachment Options pane in Outlook 2003 WordMail is an example of this.

Fourth, the Task Pane was used to show a set of visual choices, such as the Slide Design pane in PowerPoint 2003. These were mostly items moved out of dialog boxes so that the results of the visual choice could be seen without blocking your document content.

So, it already wasn't totally clear how the Task Pane was to be used. Adding to the confusion was that a number of the Task Panes had automatic launch behavior. This could be frustrating. For example, the Clipboard pane took over that space if you happened to press CTRL+C a few times in succession.

When we designed the Ribbon, we knew we had to reconcile it with the role of Task Panes. We considered removing all of them from the product entirely, but there were a few which did seem to make sense within the new design. So we struck a set of design principles to govern when and how would allow the use of Task Panes:

  • All Task Panes which had content consistent with the Ribbon were removed and integrated into the Ribbon. Slide Design in PowerPoint is an example of this, where it became its own Ribbon tab. This accounts for most of the Task Panes in the product.

  • Task Panes never come up automatically. They are always turned on or off by the user, and always from the Ribbon. This is how we've stayed true to "everything starts with the Ribbon." If you want a Task Pane as part of your document workspace, you can turn it on and we'll never mess with it.

  • Allow people to have multiple Task Panes up at once. To put people in better control of their screen real-estate, we've turned all of the Task Panes into lighter-weight panes that you can arrange as you like. If you want to include both Styles and Formatting and the Research pane as part of your workspace, go for it.

  • No Task Pane will show up at startup. This includes the Getting Started pane, which has been removed from the product.

  • No inter-Task Pane navigation. There's no dropdown list of Task Panes; the UI is organized into one place--the Ribbon. You can open the Clipboard pane from the Clipboard group on the Ribbon but not from some one-off list of panes hanging from Mail Merge.

The goal was to provide a predictable, consistent experience in which you are in control of what windows you see as part of your workspace. The Ribbon remains the one place to browse for functionality--there's no deep well of Task Panes to spelunk into. On the other hand, the panes that some people do love--such as Styles and Formatting--remain a part of the experience that you can turn on if you wish and we won't interfere with it through "auto" behavior.

Finally, to clarify the developer story: we added the ability to use the Task Pane in custom solutions in Office 2003 as part of the Smart Documents developer story. The good news is that this capability still exists and, in fact, has been upgraded pretty substantially in Office 12 as well.

Posted: Monday, February 13, 2006 4:00 AM by jensenh

Comments

Centaur said:

Oh! The Office Clipboard. It drives me nuts. In Office XP, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to disable its popping up on double Ctrl+C. I know there is an option in Office 2003, but in XP I seem to be stuck…
# February 13, 2006 11:34 AM

Mark Sowul said:

Hmm, I do think that PowerPoint was one of the few areas where the task panes made sense (slide design, templates, and animation settings).  Of course if it duplicates the ribbons, I could see why you'd take it out.
# February 13, 2006 11:36 AM

Matt Lacey said:

Woo Hoo!
Research Pane is still around.  This means I'll get to keep some of my most productive personal tools.
# February 13, 2006 11:59 AM

ChrisC said:

Centaur:
>The Office Clipboard... drives me nuts... I know
>there is an option in 2003, but in XP I seem to be stuck

There is an option, it just isn't where you'd expect to find it (IMHO).
hit [CTRL]+[C] a few times until it shows up in the tray
right-click on the clipboard icon in the tray.
move mouse over "options"
un-check "Show clipboard automatically"

  -Chris C.
# February 13, 2006 11:59 AM

CS said:

Thank you for letting the user decide where to put the panes.

On automatic popping up panes: what about an option to disable the "Research" pane? It still comes up when I <ALT> and left-click, which messes with the "Magic Box".

Especially when you try to use the box in tables the only thing you get is the Research pane, which (in my mind) is far less usefull.
# February 13, 2006 12:13 PM

Michael Zuschlag said:

This sounds like a substantial improvement for task panes, but I'm still left wondering, what do you need them for? Or maybe the question is, when should a feature use a task pane and when should it use a modeless dialog box?  
# February 13, 2006 1:03 PM

Michael Zuschlag said:

Centaur:
>>The Office Clipboard... drives me nuts... I know
>>there is an option in 2003, but in XP I seem to be stuck
ChrisC:
>...right-click on the clipboard icon in the tray...
There's also an Options button/dropdown menu at the bottom of the Clipboard Task Pane that accesses this setting. After unchecking the autoshow checkbox(es), I recommend you *check* Collect Without Showing Clipboard. That way you can still call up the Clipboard Task Pane to save your butt if you ever do the dreaded two-Ctrl-X's before Ctrl-V mistake.
# February 13, 2006 1:11 PM

Andrew Eberhard said:

"No Task Pane will show up at startup. This includes the Getting Started pane, which has been removed from the product."

Hallelujah!

I'd really like to see the UI process for associating an Office 12 doc (particularly Word) with an XML schema.  Brian Jones has done a great job explaining the 2003 UI and the forthcoming XML file formats, but the Office 12 UI remains a bit of a mystery.
# February 13, 2006 4:24 PM

Hazz said:

Without getting into the rules governing when and why there should be task panes, I have to say that in O2003 the only one I consistantly use, is the Styles and Formatting pane in Word. In fact I turn it on in almost every session of Word I open. I appreciated its layout and the options it gives me right next to my active document. So I am glad to hear that it is still available. Also working on portrait documents on a 19" screen gives me some spare real estate to the sides. FYI I use the other side for the document map which I also have open in every session of Word I open. On that note, is the document map feature still in 12 and has its behaviour changed?

Thanks for your excellent Blog and sharing insights into interface design that are both fascinating and useful.

--
Hazz
Business Analyst
# February 13, 2006 9:30 PM

Stephen Bullen said:

Michael, from playing with it, the only differences between a custom task pane and a modeless userform is that task panes are sizable, dockable and can't be created with VBA.
# February 14, 2006 1:20 PM

Helen said:

I wholeheartedly second the halleluias. The choices you've made sound very sensible - the auto-launching Research pane just drives me nuts, but the Styles and Formatting pane is truly useful.

I long to see Office 12 in action!

I'm not sure if this has been asked already, but how much control will developers (VBA or .NET) have over task panes?
# February 15, 2006 4:24 AM

Mike Gallagher said:

I always thought that one of the coolest things about task panes was using them to display information from other back-office apps using the Information Bridge Framework.
# February 15, 2006 10:30 AM

C. Shamis said:

I have disabled the office clipboard from automatically opening 50 times. Yet every time I restart Word, the office clipboard will automatically launch.  This is infuriating!  I applaud MS's efforts in making the auto-opening feature user-configurable, but if word won't remember the settings... what's the point?  
# February 16, 2006 9:01 AM
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