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Video Killed the Screenshot Star

This morning, new information was published on the Office 2007 Preview web site, including a new video of the UI in action and updated links to sign up to receive information about Beta 2.

The build used in the video is a little old (it was shot in early January), but it still looks more or less like Beta 1 Technical Refresh.

Check the site out.

And no mean comments about my acting ability, please! :)
Posted: Monday, March 27, 2006 9:00 AM by jensenh

Comments

ej said:

Very nice!  Brief, yet comprehensive demo of the new capabilities.  

I look forward to everything except the "little circle" Office menu.
# March 27, 2006 12:48 PM

s_tec said:

You did forget one thing, though. The video makes it look as though dialog boxes have gone away completely, limiting the user's formatting choices to the few designs offered in the galleries. This will turn a lot of people off, I think. Even a few quick sentences could have avoided this problem:

Julie: But don't worry. If you still want to access the old dialog boxes, they are still there.
Jensen: Simply click the small arrow in the lower right corner of a ribbon group to bring up a dialog for that feature. [Demonstrates]

It's a little late to change that now, though.
# March 27, 2006 1:38 PM

Georg said:

Can you put that on for download as well. Cause streaming with 2 Mbit/s doesn't seam to be the best way of spreading this content.

Greetings from Austria
Georg
# March 27, 2006 4:02 PM

Aaron M. Hall said:

Jensen,

This looks great! I agree about the dialogs thing, but aside from that, this offers a much better view of the new UI, and certainly clears up a lot of miscommunication that can occur from the screenshots!

Great job to you, Julie, and the rest of the team!
# March 27, 2006 6:06 PM

gary keramidas said:

i hope we can turn off the delay when you mouse over the tabs. i want the fastest possible interface, i don't need a delay when i put the mouse on insert or page layout or whatever. it's the same in vista, i don't care how many redraws it takes to close a window with animation, when i choose to close or minimize a window, i want it out of the way right now.
# March 28, 2006 1:38 AM

Roy said:

Very nice and informative video, we get a much better idea than just looking at the nice screenshots.

I have a question though, I'm not sure if it's been answered on the blog before: with all the new stuff going on in the UI, won't Office 2007 consume a lot more system memory? Especially with the Live Preview...it seems to me that such a feature would be quite slow on older machines (I don't know the expected system reqts either :p) Can the Live Preview be disabled?
# March 28, 2006 8:54 AM

Bettina Hans said:

Jensen,

that really is a cool video and I agree those are lots of cool features.  I also think the design is innovative and has many very strong aspects.  One of my main thoughts while watching the video though, was "Wow, that's a lot of emphasis on 'cool' and 'great-looking'."

No, my primary goal while using Word is not to create a great-looking document; that's only a small part of the task of documentation.  My primary goal is to put my thoughts into words in a simple and clear way.  Cool things, like bullet lists that turn into graphs, can always be added at the end.

What makes me lose huge amounts of time, for instance, is the way that Word manages styles (for headers, etc.) - and as you surely know, styles are necessary in just about every 3+ page-long document.  Styles become almost catastrophical in a multi-user, multi-lingual environment, where identical styles have different names and vice versa.  Or making sure that pictures stay with the text that describes them, i.e. truly controlling the layout, rather than things hopping around in unexpected ways.

I just hope these 'boring' improvements aren't forgotten among the flashy ones - or that they're being implemented without you talking about them much.

Great blog, thanks,

Bettina
# March 28, 2006 9:53 AM

Siim Karus said:

How does the ribbon work with shortcut keys? And are keyboard commands responsive?

It is really annoying when shortcuts are not responsive. For example Alt+F followed closely (with delay less than 1/10 s) by A should open "Save as..." dialog not type 'a' into your document or cause audio message to be played.

Slow UI is extremely annoying in Windows Explorer where it is almost impossible (and extremely irritating) to turn file compression on by typing: "Context Menu Key", R, D, C, Enter, A or Enter.
# March 28, 2006 1:03 PM

jensenh said:

Bettina,

The capabilities to make better-looking documents are of course but one of the many advantages of the UI.

For this video, we wanted to play up those capabilities in particular--but you're right, it's only a a small part of the overall picture.
# March 28, 2006 1:38 PM

Matt Ryall said:

Both the preview links are now dead (404). Can you get them back? I'd like to refer a few more people to this.
# March 28, 2006 7:52 PM

Nathan Weinberg said:

Gary, there is no delay when selecting a tab.  The video shows the interface moving much slower than it does in real life, and features appear and dissapear depending on which feature is being discussed on screen (for example, Live Previews only works in some scenes, but not others, using the exact same buttons).  I suspect they tweaked the UI for the video to make it slower and more obvious.
# March 29, 2006 2:37 AM

» Office 2007 In Action  InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel said:

PingBack from http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/03/29/office-2007-in-action/
# March 29, 2006 2:39 AM

flying sparks - Funkenflug-Themen: Interaktionsdesign, Kommunkationsdesign, Soziales » Office-UI-Video said:

PingBack from http://flyingsparks.wwwfiles.de/2006-03-29/office-ui-video/
# March 29, 2006 11:19 AM

Spencer said:

By the way, your acting was great.
# March 29, 2006 1:50 PM

Dave said:

Wow, you guys even copy Apple with your videos. Your video (with designers discussing the design)  is a total rip-off of the Jonathan Ive videos whenever Apple would introduce a new piece of hardware.
# March 29, 2006 4:26 PM

phuong said:

Xin chao, Minh den tu HL, minh mong muon duoc lam quen voi tat ca cac ban. Thanks you
# March 31, 2006 12:16 AM

phuong said:

Xin chao, Minh den tu HL, minh mong muon duoc lam quen voi tat ca cac ban. Thanks you
# March 31, 2006 3:10 AM

phuong said:

Xin chao, Minh den tu HL, minh mong muon duoc lam quen voi tat ca cac ban. Thanks you
# March 31, 2006 3:27 AM

DevUser said:

Great blog.
A lot of my customers are using Terminal Server. I hope that the effects of the new UI are not critical in these environments.
# April 2, 2006 12:01 PM

Guess Who said:

I noticed that when you had your mouse over the Office button a normal tooltip popped up that said 'File', but the tooltip was all the way at the bottom of the ribbon, I think that if you don't want people to get confused you should put the tooltip next to the button (just a little nit-picking)
# April 12, 2006 12:05 AM

MS 오피스 2007의 새로운 사용자 인터페이스 투어 비디오 - dobiho on HCI said:

PingBack from http://dobiho.hci.or.kr/?p=297

# October 22, 2006 1:25 AM

Love's Brother, 2004 said:

PingBack from http://moviesberry.com/vids/vid_love_s_brother.html

# May 2, 2009 8:41 PM
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