The Elements of Office Style

re: The Elements of Office Style

Troy Hepfner — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:05:24 GMT

Very cool. I like the concept!

What if you need to use a third font in your document, or something that doesn't fit into the Office Themes paradigm? I presume Office 2007 still allows this level of editing, but does it mean that it stops using themes? If so, what happens to all of the other theme settings you were using (colors and effects) - are they preserved in your document somehow, or do you lose that information?

re: The Elements of Office Style

Style Schmyle — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:32:51 GMT

I've used styles in Word since Word 5.0 (DOS). It's always been very powerful.

I like a lot of the new formatting and styles in Office 12. And I hope that this will finally bring the benefits of styles to the masses. (Okay, it's probably enough to hope that at least a few more will "get" it...)

So I've played with the styles already in Office 12 and I would just hope for a higher-level of customization. Maybe it's there, but I haven't run across it yet. I would LOVE to be able to set a global style (easily) across all Office applications.

I think it would helpful to see it in the options dialog of the individual applications. Some of the applications (Excel, Access) have had default fonts and font sizes for years.

It would be great to tell Office, "Here's my personality. Here are the colors and fonts I like. Just always use the theme I like and that will make me really happy."

Something like that would make every document I create look the way I want it to look automatically, across applications.

I know with some work I could still make this happen. But if this was *easy* for everyone to do... Oh, it would be soooo much nicer.

re: The Elements of Office Style

s_tec — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:48:58 GMT

I find that I use three fonts in most of my documents. The first two are pair of complmentary fonts used for body text and headings. In a graphic designer's world, these are the two fonts that would go into the document theme. In addition, I use a monospace font for setting source code. In Word, I can define a paragraph style called "Code" for this purpose, but this solution is limited to a single application. What if I want a third font in my cross-application theme?

re: The Elements of Office Style

Christian — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:16:30 GMT

Yeah, it is true that it is a great taste to use only one font.

There is only one exception: What if I need to use many fonts for symbols (e.g. greek) in a scientific text? It would be great if the font-dialogue would have a LRU list of recent fonts.

Also I like to format code (also inside the text) with an antiproportional font. A button for such a style (like <code> in HTML) would be great!

re: The Elements of Office Style

jensenh — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 04:03:34 GMT

Christian,

The font picker still has a recently used fonts section (between the Theme Fonts and All Fonts.)

re: The Elements of Office Style

pli — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:10:24 GMT

Jensen,

So have you (Microsoft) decided to keep the names of the new fonts all starting with 'C'?

re: The Elements of Office Style

jensenh — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:03:18 GMT

pli,

I don't think the creators of the fonts plan on changing the names.

Accents and plots

loki — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 10:03:48 GMT

What happens when a plot requires more colors than the number (6) of defined accents? Do you derive new colors from the existing? Or is there a predefined set of plot colors to tap into?

And what about that PowerPoint blog, Howard?

re: The Elements of Office Style

Phylyp — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 12:34:58 GMT

One word: drool.

The nice trend I see is that you've moved from providing just the tools to create great looking documents, to actually pre-packaging them.

This is good stuff. Really good.

It will be a nice day when we can say goodbye to dorky looking documents.

re: The Elements of Office Style

Martha Jones — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 13:07:31 GMT

Jensen: Who on the font team has a blog where I can tell them that the names are really, _really_ bad? Nobody but the font team will be able to tell them apart. Do even you remember which is which from memory?

re: The Elements of Office Style

Howard Cooperstein — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 13:37:05 GMT

Howard here. Good comments & questions.

Having three (or more) fonts was discussed at length in early design. The monospaced "code" scenario was by far the most common. We felt it OK for code text to remain the same monospaced font after a theme change -- the code text color can still be themed.

Regarding formatting "off theme:" You can always choose non-theme fonts and colors and your overrides are preserved, even if you change theme. You can clear overrides, too, to get back on theme.

As for setting "global" style, there is UI in the PPT and Word Theme gallery for setting the default for new docs. In XL you have to make a default starting template with that theme applied.

Regarding chart data colors: it's the #1 reason we created six accent slots. The Chart team analyzed thousands of customer data plots and found six covers the vast majority. The Chart engine derives new colors from the accents to handle cases of more than six. This very full set of accents turns out to be great for shape, diagram and table styles, too!

Odds, Ends, Shortcuts, and Accelerators

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:00:51 GMT

First of all, due to a glitch in the system, Howard's
article
about the philosophy behind Themes in...

re: The Elements of Office Style

Howard Cooperstein — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 23:24:07 GMT

Loki: on the PPT/OfficeArt blog -- hang in there. Should be able to give you a fresh link soon.

re: The Elements of Office Style

mentas — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 20:20:12 GMT

See my recent projects (http://spaces.msn.com/mentas/), planned and documented using MS Office 2007 :)

I'm using MS Office 2007 to document my school works.

Looks great!

re: The Elements of Office Style

Josh — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 02:49:55 GMT

So on the topic of themes, though somewhat off topic from this specific discussion of themes, Why doesn't Office 12 automatically conform to the look and feel of the user's windows theme? It seems like the point of the windows theme is to provide a consistent, yet customizable appearance to most apps running on the system. So far I haven't found a way to get office 12 to actually use the windows theme, and it certainly doesn't by default. Does it simply not support using the windows theme, and if so, what is the point in even having theming ability for windows when THE major app suites from MS doesn't support it?

More O12 UI from Jensen

Wouter van Vugt — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:27:51 GMT

Variations on a Theme by Office

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:00:58 GMT

Howard Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt group.
This week's post...

Office Themes: The Infinite Variety Generator - Part 1

The PowerPoint & OfficeArt Team Blog — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:29:39 GMT

Today's post is the first of two parts covering a fairly large and important topic for PowerPoint: applying...

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : The Elements of Office Style

Dating — Sat, 31 May 2008 13:33:02 GMT

Howard Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt group. Last week I gave an overview of the new Office Themes capability. Thank you for all the great comments. This week I'd like to show you what's inside an Office Theme an

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : The Elements of Office Style

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