You'll Know It When You See It

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Stephen McLaren — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:50:29 GMT

I enjoyed the video of Live Preview loads... one of the many changes that are going to make Office 12 rock!
I'm usually a little bit of a sceptic when it comes to new software, but with the blogging process and all the cool new and improved features I starting to think that I want to buy Office 12 in release week!

Cool, but the whole thing? (re:You'll Know It When...)

ChrisC — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:06:17 GMT

First, thanks for the video; I`ll be showing it to my sis-in-law to explain why I told her she needs a gig of memory instead of 256MB in her new notebook (which she`ll use for 5yrs; she`s having buyers remorse).

Second, uh... you are saying that "Live Preview" changes the whole document, not just what is on the screen?

> Changing the font size is normally extremely fast, but if you have
>thousands of bookmarks in your document, it might be much slower.

If you`re changing more that just the visible area I'm curious why you would take that performance hit.
The user`s ROI for the wait would be terrible - the user can only see that one screen (moving to a different part of the document would prob mean you are no longer hovering over that font name/size, right?) why render the whole thing?

Am I missing something here? You're talking about just Word, right? Perhaps only when there is a TOC or Index in the visible part of the screen? (how else would 1,000's of bookmarks be relevant?) Or maybe a user viewing page 100+ and you think you have to update the page number before rendering the page?

re: You'll Know It When You See It

anon — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:29:32 GMT

"It has been a huge challenge for our engineering team to build Live Preview into the wide variety of Office features; each of the applications has had its own unique set of complications."

Apply; Undo; Apply; Undo; Apply; Undo; Done.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Centaur — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:42:47 GMT

Now, there’s just one more step. Make it so that when the user clicks to apply the font, the font is applied to the *style* of the selected text, not the text itself.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Kawigi — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:12:34 GMT

anon:
And preserve the undo/redo stack the way it was before.

Of course, while office in general is mostly pretty good about this, what if the action isn't trivially undoable? But I also think that in general, there is a better way to do it for any given feature.

Centaur:
While that might be a good idea in *principle*, I think most people might see Word changing formatting on other text in their document and find it obtrusive, and end up spending more time fighting with Word than they already do.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Matt — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:29:01 GMT

Looks great; can you disable it?

re: You'll Know It When You See It

jensenh — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:29:41 GMT

Kawigi:

We were concerned about this as well (people thinking they've applied the formatting.) A lot of testing showed that most of those fears were unfounded, although we did have to change a few of the semantics.

Chris:

A layout engine like Word is very complicated, for better or for worse. One of the downsides of this for Word and Excel is that certain kinds of documents require repagination in order to see how the document would end up. (A document with a lot of bookmarks is one example.) Sure, maybe these features could have been architected differently, but they didn't anticpate that 10 years later someone was going to build Live Preview on top of them.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

jensenh — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:30:29 GMT

Matt:

If you want to disable it, you can. You should give it a try first though. :)

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Chris Parker — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:17:32 GMT

Excellent. KWord, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect all have this and I really like it in all of those programs.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

PatriotB — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:10:48 GMT

A new use for IOleUndoManager :)

re: You'll Know It When You See It

ChrisC — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:21:06 GMT

Ah, existing code; *that* I certainly understand.
Thanks!

One thing I've wondered about, but never enough to test the theory is the following:
Does the layout engine work more efficiently if you add hard page breaks to a doc?
i.e. if I make a change and I'm (pages) below a hard page break will it renumber the whole thing or find a preceeding hard page break and render/renumber from there?

You might not know, but if you do and it does, please spill :-) (it seems to only help sometimes)

PS - one of these days I promis I'll post a 'thanks' without asking another question immediatly after

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Andrew Eberhard — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 01:19:44 GMT

The video certainly makes this philosophy abundantly clear, thanks! Personally, I think it's a great idea. I do have reservations, however. Cancelability, as you mentioned, is very important. Am I going to have to worry when previewing a large formatting operation (by which the entire document might be affected) that every last piece of the previewed changes are actually reverted should I choose not to apply any of the options?

To put it another way is the following an axiom of the preview implementation?
Doc + Preview - Preview = Doc

Find and Replace

David — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:45:05 GMT

Hi Jensen,

Although this is not related specifically to your Live Preview article, one of your statements in this article jogged a request I have wanted in many programs for years now:

"In-ribbon galleries were designed especially to complement Live Preview, because they don't cover up any part of your document."

Have or will there be any changes to the find and replace dialog to adopt a similar approach to not cover the document? Although the dialog moves out of the way if the item being searched for is under the dialog, the constant repositioning of the dialog has been quite distracting for me. Originally seeing a find and replace bar in Lotus' Word Pro back in 1996, I thought this idea made a lot of sense because it would not cover the document area (Inexplicably, text formatting options were moved to a floating, non-modal dialog, generating the same problems that a find and replace dialog had). I have most recently seen the return of this concept with Firefox's find feature implemented as a bar across the bottom of the window.

I'm not exactly sure how this would be implemented (could it be a contextual tab in the ribbon in the same way you click on a chart, or would searching possibly warrant its own tab along side the other major tabs?), however I would appreciate moving this dialog to a region that did not overlap the current document window (I personally have not been very fond of floating toolbars or palettes and usually dock all floating elements).

Ta,
Dave.

ps. Thanks for taking the blog about the Office UI - I certainly appreciate reading your insights into the new UI.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

jensenh — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 09:09:21 GMT

David:

Your suggestion is a good one! In fact we had a good prototype working in Word, but we didn't have quite enough resources to get it done for Office 12.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Nas — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:06:03 GMT

has anyone noticed the bar with the minimize and X and maximize? It looks so weird to me. It is giving me the mac OS goosebumps.

Also, i am trying to right now understand how I am supposed to get used to this thing. everything is different now.

May be office should have done this a little bit slower and taken a few steps at time.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Gabe — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:35:47 GMT

How will this interact with Terminal Services? I would hate to not be able to use Office 12 because it takes 10 seconds to redraw the screen over my dialup connection every time I move over a gallery item.

re: You'll Know It When You See It

Stu Smith — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:23:17 GMT

Will this apply to hovering over the minibar too? Or was that found to be a little too much changing for small movements of the mouse?

It's Gonna Be A Hot Summer

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:00:42 GMT

I spend a lot of time here writing about the new Office 12 UI. And why
not--it's the project I work...