Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Off-Topic Posts

Not Gone

jensenh — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since I last wrote in this space.

Many of you have been kind enough to send me e-mail sometime in the last few months, making sure that I was OK and wondering if I was planning to write here anymore. Was I abducted by aliens? Put into witness protection? Muzzled for something I said?

Nah. The truth is less interesting than any of the theories.

A couple of things, both work-related and personal, have conspired to monopolize my time over the last few months and leave me little time for blogging.

First of all, we shipped Office 2007. A great milestone for the team, but I spent a lot late 2006 and early 2007 talking to people about the UI and the story of how it was created: journalists, customers, marketing folks, etc. This is fun stuff, but time-consuming.

Second, we never rest at Microsoft, and when we finish a product, we're immediately on to the next thing. I stepped up to a new role within the Office User Experience team, and we've been hard at work for the last six months planning the next release of Office. The early stages of a release are both exhausting and exhilarating--going from "anything's possible" to "exactly what code should be written." This is an intensive period of brainstorming and designing, and it has taken time away from the blog. After all, if we don't design a compelling product now, there's not going to be much for me to write about in the future...

That said, I do plan to write (albeit less frequently) between now and the time down the road when we start talking publicly about the next release of Office. I'm going to make good on my promise to show early prototypes of the Office 2007 UI, and I'll continue to write about usability and interaction design as well.

Whether it will be interesting or not, that remains to be seen... but I'm officially Not Gone.

Where Have I Gone?

jensenh — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:00:00 GMT

I know in my last post I said that I'd be gone for a few days… and now those few days have stretched into a few weeks.

One of the reasons I've been off the blog for a while is that we've been extremely busy putting the final touches on Office 2007. Now is the time when every bug needs to be tracked down and squashed with utmost priority. And with Windows Vista also in the home stretch, there's a lot going on around here.

I've also been fortunate to spend much of the last month traveling around the world and here within the United States, talking to customers and the press about Office 2007. Last week I was in Singapore talking to folks from all around Asia; it was fun to show an almost-finished Office 2007 to a group of people to whom the new UI was totally unknown. I always seem to learn something from people who are seeing the new interface for the first time; it's why we put so much of an emphasis throughout the design process in soliciting fresh perspectives.

Now I'm finally back in Seattle for a while, so I will be writing regularly again.

For you developers out there, later in the week I'll post the final Office 2007 schema for Ribbon development which you can use to author solutions which will work with the RTM version. Happily, very little modification will be required to move solutions forward which you author against B2TR.

Turning 30

jensenh — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:00:00 GMT

Today is my 30th birthday.

Ten years ago--with college to finish, legal drinking still in my future, and no idea what I was going to do with my life--30 seemed like a remote, hazy, unfathomably distant milestone. The whole world of possibilities was still ahead of me. If you had asked me on the eve of my twentieth birthday, I probably would have said that I planned to continue on to a music conservatory like Juilliard or Eastman to further my training in music composition. And then onward to become a professional composer, underpaid and unappreciated, but immersed in my art.

Or maybe I'd become a film maker. Or a professional trombonist. Or an historian. Or a novelist and writer of short stories.

(Hey, in a way, I guess I sort of have become a short story author...)

A part of feels incredibly nostalgic (and a little sad) remembering this time in my life when anything was possible and my whole future was ahead of me.

It's a cliché often cited that "I don't know where the time has gone." Or "It feels like just yesterday that I was 20." And part of me feels like that's true, but at the same time I wonder if it's just the novelty every human feels in realizing that a decade has passed by. Most of the memories of ten years ago are cloudy and distant, save the handful of now-romanticized stories and relationships which become the oral history of one's life.

At the same time, I feel incredibly lucky to have had the past decade. I graduated college, despite my terrible grasp of the German language nearly causing me to flunk the foreign language fluency requirement. I've experienced the grown-up pride of having my own apartment and then, later, of buying my first house. I've been fortunate to be able to travel to interesting places around the world, both as part of my job and outside of work. I bought a car, and then eight years later, another one! Yet, surprisingly, I've survived my first thirty years without getting a speeding ticket, moving violation, or being summoned for jury duty. (Crossing my fingers for another thirty years of that!)

Nothing says celebration like a well-crafted piece of Clip Art

I'm fortunate to have ended up working at Microsoft doing a job that I love. I have been accused of being a workaholic, but it's not because I love working in general--it's because I love the work that I do. It's surreal to me now that I'm here helping to reinvent the user interface of programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook of which I myself was a user early in my life. The most fun part of working on Office is that you impact so many people; while it does mean that because of my blog I've been called "stupid" and "an idiot" on the Internet in a number of languages, it also has meant opportunities to meet and correspond with fascinating people around the world who use our software to do amazing things. That reach is immensely satisfying to me.

I spent my sophomore year in college working in the Yale Law Library for $6.15/hour. I reported at 7:30am each morning and drove a manually-operated elevator down six stories into the below-ground subbasement. It was about 120 degrees down there, and my job was to open cardboard boxes of dirty, dusty, parched legal briefs and to shelve them somewhere in the dark, hot, grimy underground stacks. If I finished early, my reward was to come upstairs to photocopy books a page at a time for law professors who wanted to read them without buying them.

Despite the meager income from this terrible job, I remember being ticked off at the Shawmut Bank ATM because the minimum you could withdraw was $10 and I had a total balance of like $5.83. Needless to say, I understand the value of having a job worth getting up and doing.

The best part of my 20's: I was so fortunate to find a beautiful, caring, amazing woman who became my wife. She also happens to be the smartest person I know (and one of the best trombonists as well!) As important to me as the great companionship and the love that we have for one another is that she inspires me to be a better person in every facet of my life and work. I am so lucky to have found her.

So, while I've done many things and had many experiences I'm proud of in my 20's, I'm feeling melancholy thinking about everything I didn't do and won't have a chance to do again. I think I've started to internalize only recently how finite our time on Earth is, even if you're lucky enough to live a long life. There's so much more I want to accomplish in my life and in my career, and it feels like I'm already behind.

I remember a decade ago thinking 30 was old. Now I'm 30. Am I now on the inevitable downslope towards oblivion?

My grandma, in her beautiful, eternal optimism used to say "you're only as old as you think." I didn't understand what she was saying when I was a kid but the words are finally starting to have meaning for me. Back in elementary school, when I complained about homework and having to mow the lawn, my dad used to say "I wish I could be your age again." That didn't make any sense to me at the time--he had the freedom to do what he wanted with no one to tell him what to do. But while I truly don't think I would want to be 13 again, I do for the first time understand and feel the impulse of wishing I could turn back the clock.

Still, life stands still for no one, and trillions of people have successfully and gracefully turned 30 before me. So "ever forward," as they say. No regrets about my 20's, but I'm ready to hit my 30's full-throttle.

The World's Longest Escalator!

jensenh — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:00:00 GMT

It's been a long time since I wrote off-topic, but I have 30 minutes to kill in Copenhagen airport, so here's a quick weekend send-off.

This week I've been in London on business. I had a few minutes free on my way to a meeting on Wednesday, so I decided to take in some of the historic London sites.

Where did I go, you might ask.The British Museum? Buckingham Palace? The London Eye? (er, I mean the British Airways London Eye...)

Not me. I took a short trip on the tube to visit what is allegedly the longest escalator in Western Europe. Located in the Angel station on the Northern Line, this escalating marvel rises over nine stories high.

London not in your immediate travel plans? Don't worry, I brought the experience of this majestic escalator directly to your desktop through the magic of my video phone.

Click here to watch possibly the world's most boring video: me descending Western Europe's longest escalator.

(Yes, I know the title of the post is misleading. I thought "The World's" made it sound more exciting...)

Having Activation Problems?

jensenh — Thu, 25 May 2006 03:10:00 GMT

Many people have reported here on the blog or through e-mail that they are having problems activating their copy of Office 2007 Beta 2.

I’m really sorry this isn’t working well, but that’s kind of to be expected with beta software sometimes. The activation servers are just slammed with people trying to activate their software—I know that the team that owns this is aware of the problem and are working hard on resolving it.

Microsoft launched the two biggest betas in its history yesterday but I don’t think anyone expected the sheer number of downloads and attempted activations of Vista and Office 2007.

Testing the activation servers is an important part of making sure that the product is ready to ship so, in a way, some good has come of this in that team has learned a lot about improving the process for RTM.

So, thanks for your patience and give it a try during off-peak times or in a few days when things have cooled off a bit.

The Suggestion Box

jensenh — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:00:00 GMT

This week I'm out of town on a bicostal business trip (currently overlooking Union Square in San Francisco) and unfortunately I won't be able to post any more articles this week.

So instead I want to take the opportunity to ask you: what would you like to see me write about? What questions would you like answered? For what parts of the Office 2007 user interface would you like more detail?

Use the Comments link below to post your suggestions, and I'll use them to help plan future content. Please keep the suggestions about the blog itself, not feature suggestions for Office in general. If you have a product suggestion, posting it on the Office Online web site (link) will get it to the right product team.

Comments go directly to me and will not appear on the public page, so don't be afraid to write down your thoughts.

See you next week!

I'm Like Dave Barry Except Not Funny or Famous

jensenh — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:00:00 GMT

It has been said that nothing is as boring as blogging about blogging.

Which makes this article among the most boring I've ever written. Even just typing "boring" three times made me yawn. (Are yawns contagious?)

Anyway, when people start blogs, particularly technology- or politics-related blogs, it's because they have something to say. Experience on the MSDN blog site shows that about half of all people seem to have exactly one post worth of stuff to say. Some folks peter out before posting a single article! On the other hand (much to my dismay) I seem to be in no eminent danger of running out of topics.

Here's the blog paradox: you start a blog because you want to talk about something. So, presumably, you write some of your most passionate, important ideas down first--exactly when no one is reading your blog because they don't know it exists. Ouch! Into the lonely canyon your voice echoes but there's no one to hear your screams.

This is but one of the many flaws of this medium--to me, I've been hosting a very long party, but the reality is that the vast majority of you showed up mid-event. Looking at the site statistics only confirms this.

So, I'm going to emulate a syndicated newspaper columnist on vacation for a few days and republish probably the most fundamental series of articles I've written: the "Why the UI?" series. This 8-part series takes you through the thinking behind why we decided to create a new user interface for Office 2007, with a good dose of history thrown in. I've gone through and updated, corrected, and expanded these articles in spots, so even if you've read them before, you might find them worth your time again. Think of it as Why the UI: Special Edition.

And for newcomers to the blog and to the Office 2007 UI effort, I hope that reading these articles will give you a better background in why we decided to pursue a new direction for Office 2007.

Oh, and don't forget to watch the video.

A Note From the Author

jensenh — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 11:00:00 GMT

I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but after six months of relatively civil discourse, a few people have decided to flood the blog with obscene and otherwise off-topic comments. I had to remove over sixty comments just yesterday.

Although I reserve the right to delete or edit any comment for any reason, in general here are the guidelines I follow:

No obscene language
No personal insults towards me, my co-workers, or other commenters
No spam or blatant advertising
No totally off-topic comments

As I hope you have seen, I do welcome thoughtful criticism and have been enjoying the dialog we've had over the last six months.

But this needs to remain a respectful forum, one which people feel comfortable reading from work and one which continues to have a high signal to noise ratio.

And for the vast majority of you who have been following the rules, I do humbly apologize for any inconvenience.

What software do you love?

jensenh — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 18:00:00 GMT

Today marks the start of February, the "month of love." In commemoration, I want to ask you a question:

What software do you love, and why?

Some members of the high-tech illuminati start and end their discussions of design in terms of RAZR phones, iPods, and other cool gadgets. That's clearly where technology and coolness and the mainstream have all converged right now, and so I think it's only natural that people gravitate towards those topics.

But for my own curiosity more than anything else, I'm interested in shifting the conversation about desirability in design over into the computer software realm, at least for today. And I'm interested in hearing from you.

What's your favorite piece of software, modern or ancient? What makes it great? Is it something fun or something useful?

Can software provoke the same sense of "gotta have it" that a tech gadget can? What does it take to get you excited about software?

How much does a great user experience factor in to your feelings about a software product? Or is it all about the utility? Or about the people who make it? Or about attractive visuals? Speedy performance? Extensibility? Some combination of all of these factors?

What exemplifies a great software experience for you?

Use the Comments link below to tell me your thoughts.

On Hiatus

jensenh — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Due to the holidays here in the United States and elsewhere, many people are taking time off of work, away from their computers, and away from blogs.

I am no exception, and my blog will be on hiatus for two weeks. If you're new to the blog and looking for reading material in the meantime, I recommend starting with this list of thirty top articles about the Office 12 user interface.

I'll be back with brand new episodes starting Tuesday, January 3, 2006.

Have a safe and happy holiday season, and I'll see you again in the new year!

Breaking the Code

jensenh — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 18:00:00 GMT

I received a mail this weekend responding to my Friday post on Super Tooltips asking a simple question: "It seems like you introduce every new feature in Office 12 with a code name. Why not use the 'real' name?"

The short answer is: "Because we don't have 'real' names yet."

Where do code names come from? They kind of just get invented. We make them up. As I explained a few months ago in my post about why we call it the "Ribbon", code names for features often pop up organically as part of designing the feature. In some cases, code-names are dropped soon after the "official" name is available. For instance, OneNote was code-named "Scribbler", but I haven't heard that used in a few years now. In another case, the original code name for the OfficeArt drawing engine back in Office 97 was "Escher." It has stuck around long enough that objects derived from the new graphics engine in Office 12 are called "E2Os" (or "Escher 2 Objects")

The normal process is that code names exist through most of the development cycle. Marketing and legal work together (with input from the product team) to generate "official" names for features which are then rolled up into the product and used to talk about it. In Office, this generally happens between the end of coding and Beta 2. (In other words, now.)

Code names for features are just temporary

Back to the original question. Why are you seeing so many code names exposed in Office 12? Just because we're out here blogging about the product in detail way sooner than ever before. In past releases, most of the features would be under wraps until later in the product cycle. By the time marketing started talking about the product, all of the official names for features were ready.

A more open discussion about the product means that more of our internal processes are exposed. I really believe that this openness benefits our customers, but it does mean that you have to put up with more code names.

As "official" marketing names are available, I'll certainly start using them and let you know how they relate to the code names I've been writing about.

And remember, Office "12" itself is a code name...

The Best Outlook Feature Ever

jensenh — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Here's an Outlook party trick suitable for cruise ships, family reunions, and kids birthday parties.

Up until now this secret trick has been known only to Outlook insiders--a kind of "secret handshake" passed through the generations of Outlook team members. Every few years ago someone files a bug on it and it is quickly closed by an elder.

Today, I pass it along to you to enjoy. I believe it works in all versions of Outlook. Do all of these steps in a row; don't ever click away from the sticky note once you do the first step or it won't work.

Create a new sticky note (File | New | Note or Ctrl+Shift+N will do the trick.)
Type some text in the note (anything will do, it doesn't have to be long.)
Drag the note around the screen for a while (you can move it via the title bar just like a normal window.)
Now, for the big trick: Press CTRL+Z.
Sit back and enjoy the show.
You can keep pressing CTRL+Z again and again to reverse the process.

For extra bonus points, along with moving the window around, try resizing it and (in Outlook 2003 and earlier) changing its color via the icon in the upper-left hand corner.

(The good news is that all the memory used is reclaimed when you close the sticky note.)

Thanks be to that ancient developer who, in his wisdom, persisted every change of position, size, and color in the undo stack. Many hours of fun have resulted from his work.

Super extra bonus points: Write your name on the screen using the sticky note. Hint: you need to drag it over the Outlook window.

Thanksgiving on a Wednesday

jensenh — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Thursday and Friday are Microsoft holidays, so the next new post will be on Monday. In the meantime, here's a "holiday" treat for you.

Thanksgiving in the United States is a holiday that always occurs on Thursday. However, one year Microsoft moved it to Wednesday. How? Read on.

Growing up as a program manager working on Outlook, one learns a lot about the variety of ownership areas available in a product. Outlook has marvelous opportunities: if you want to work on user interface, Outlook has tons of that. If you want to work on a technical area, you can get involved with internet protocols and MAPI and RPC and the PST. If you want to own big meaty features, you could own the calendar or the address book.

But, like in any trade, there are some less fun jobs as well. As a novice PM in Outlook, there were a number of areas you could get assigned as a way of kind of "paying your dues": the Journal or the file system browsing module, for example. Or, as I did, you could get stuck owning the very bottom of the barrel: holidays.

Outlook has always had a feature by which you could add holidays to your calendar. I'm not sure who designed it, and I don't think it's in the huge book of original Outlook specs I have, but by the time I was first on the scene in Outlook 98, it was already designed, built, and in the product.

The feature was pretty bare-bones; it works like this. There's a text file on the hard drive which includes holiday information in a very simple format. (If you have a recent version of Outlook, search for an OUTLOOK.HOL file on your hard drive.)

The contents of the file look something like this:

[Korea] 80 Arbor Day - Singmok-il,2005/4/5 Arbor Day - Singmok-il,2006/4/5 Arbor Day - Singmok-il,2007/4/5 Buddha's Birthday - Seokgatansin-il,2005/5/15 Buddha's Birthday - Seokgatansin-il,2006/5/5 Buddha's Birthday - Seokgatansin-il,2007/5/24

When you choose to add holidays to your calendar, Outlook looks in the file (using string matching) to find a section with the country name you specified and then creates appointments for any dates specified in the file. There's also a tiny bit of code which tries to avoid obvious duplicates.

The "Add Holidays to Calendar" dialog in Outlook

Once they're on your calendar, the holidays are just normal all-day appointments. There's never been a way to represent religious holidays that start at a certain time of the day (such as sundown.) Or to have a multi-day holiday represented except as individual appointments.

But the challenging part of owning the feature was the tedium associated with shipping a huge text file full of names and dates that have to be generated and verified mostly by hand. I had passed on to me a voluminous "World Holidays" book and a couple of web sites to use as references... but so many holidays change or are based on bizarre lunar schedules that most have to be entered in and tested by hand each release.

The result was a feature design prone to failure in three ways:

Adding holidays to the calendar was a pure "import" of appointments. There was no way to later automatically update or remove them once they had been added to the calendar.
Outlook 97 shipped 10 (ten!) years of holidays on the CD.
The process of creating the thousands of holidays involved typing them in from a book and proofreading them by hand.

Sigh. It only took a few weeks after Outlook 97 appeared for people to notice a rather, ah, interesting Thanksgiving schedule. That's right: Thanksgiving on a Wednesday.

Of course, many snarky press articles were written about Microsoft declaring a new holiday schedule. The bug was fixed in the first service release of Outlook 97 (8.01), but because of the way the holidays feature was implemented, there was no automated way to fix it on anyone's computer who already had added the holidays.

Happily, all of this transpired before I worked at Microsoft, but it made working on holidays that much more ominous--I didn't want to be the one at fault for the next "Thanksgiving on Wednesday."

The only other snafu I'm aware of (at least within the United States holidays) was a few years ago when yet another Outlook 97 bug surfaced: Memorial Day was a week late in 1999. We issued a tool that could fix that holiday on the fly, but not everyone found out about the error until it was too late. One particularly sad case I remember is that a couple bought tickets for the Indianapolis 500 automobile race which occurs each year on Memorial Day. Unfortunately, they purchased plane tickets based on the dates in Outlook and somehow missed that Memorial Day came and went.

The short of it was that they ended up in Indianapolis a week after the race ended, confused and with nothing to do. Eek.

I think we've done a much better job in the years since Outlook 97 at automating the process of creating and validating the holidays files (knock on wood.) It's a tedious task, but one that's important to get right. People depend on Outlook to run the details of their lives, and it needs to measure up to that trust.

As for the holidays themselves though, I'm reminded of the standard mapping software disclaimer: "be aware that some roads may not exist."

Don't Be Fooled: Thanksgiving's Always On Thursday

Keeping Up Appearances

jensenh — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Before I start today, a special note: if you haven't done so yet, you might want to read yesterday's entry. We shipped Office 12 Beta 1 (yea!) and I pulled together a set of articles designed to jumpstart your knowledge of the Ribbon, contextual tabs, galleries, and the rest of the Office 12 user interface. Get it while it's hot, because I'll be continuing with all-new material next week.

In the meantime, I thought I'd use this week's Friday article to let you know about some upcoming appearances I'll be making over the next month.

* * *

First, Rashmi Sinha from BayCHI has graciously invited me to speak in Palo Alto on December 13. BayCHI is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of ACM SIGCHI, the society for professionals in computer-human interaction. The details of my talk:

Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office

Tuesday, December 13, 7:30 PM
PARC's George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, California

You can visit the BayCHI site for more information. I'll be doing an in-depth look at many of the same topics I've been blogging about, along with some pictures and historical images I haven't shown before. I'll also be including demos of the just-released Office 12 Beta 1. There will be plenty of time for questions and answers, so if you want to come by and say hi or ask a question in person, this would be a great place to do that. I look forward to seeing you there!

* * *

As you may know, I'm an active classical musician in the Seattle area, playing bass trombone is several area orchestras. Since I've already wasted this blog post swimming in "Lake Me" I thought I'd throw in a plug for some upcoming events I'm playing in over the next month.

Feel free to come by and say hi at any of these events if you come!

First, I'm doing a concert with the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra on December 3, featuring an interesting program of music with a bit of something for everyone:

Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra

Ives: Variations on "America"
Sibelius: Violin Concerto
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5

Saturday, December 3, 7:30 PM
Town Hall (Eighth and Seneca), Seattle

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 is an especially moving piece, written at the height of Soviet artistic oppression. Outwardly, it appears to be a heroic, conformist nod towards the military might of the Soviet Union. (At least, that's what the censors thought.) In reality, Shostakovich fashioned an elaborate and bombastic parody. It works on both levels and is eminently listenable even if you're a casual listener of classical music.

Tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for students, seniors, and children.

* * *

A holiday ritual for many families is attending a performance of Tchaikovsky's Christmas-themed ballet The Nutcracker. This ballet contains some of the most well-known and loved music in the world.

Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" - December 9-11

A Seattle-area performance that won't break the bank is the Evergreen City Ballet's charming rendition. I'll be playing in the pit orchestra along with the Rainier Symphony. This is the only area performance outside of the pricy downtown Seattle rendition to do the Nutcracker as it was intended: with a full ballet company and orchestra.

Tickets ranging from $12 to $25. There are 5 performances over the weekend of December 9-11.

The Nutcracker

Evergreen City Ballet with the Rainer Symphony

Friday, December 9, 7:30 PM
Saturday, December 10, 1:30 PM
Saturday, December 10, 7:30 PM
Sunday, December 11, 1:30 PM
Sunday, December 11, 5:30 PM

Auburn Performing Arts Center (700 E. Main Street), Auburn

Hope to see you at some or all of these events!

Decoding Office Build Numbers

jensenh — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Open the About dialog box in any Office program. Near the top, you'll find the build number of the program you're using.

If you are using Office 2003, you'll probably see something like 11.5608.5606. If you are using Office 12, you might see something like 12.0.3417.1005. In earlier versions, you'll see something similar.

While these numbers may look like unintelligible garbage, in reality they can be used to tell interesting information about the version of Office you're using.

Numbers...

In Office 2003, the "11" that precedes the build number is simply to denote that Office 2003 was version 11 of Office. Similarly, the 12 in Office "12" means... well, you get it. Office XP was version 10, Office 2000 was version 9, Office 97 was version 8. You get the idea.

The most interesting thing to watch for is the first 4-digit number you encounter. In the examples above, 5608 and 3417. These are what we refer to as the "build number." Every few days during the development cycle, we compile all of the code in Office and turn it into a "build": essentially an installable version of all the work everyone's done up until that point. Eventually, a build becomes "final" and that is the one that ends up on CDs and in the store.

The 4-digit build number is actually an encoded date which allows you tell when a build was born. The algorithm works like this:

Take the year in which a project started. For Office "12", that was 2003.
Call January of that year "Month 1."
The first two digits of the build number are the number of months since "Month 1."
The last two digits are the day of that month.

So, if you have build 3417, you would do the following math: "Month 1" was January 2003. "Month 13" was January 2004. "Month 25" was January 2005. Therefore, "Month 34" would be October 2005.

3417 = October 17, 2005, which was the date on which Office 12 build 3417 started.

For Office 2003 and XP both, "Month 1" was January 2000. So, the final build of Office 2003, 5608, was made on August 8, 2003.

If you look at Office 2003 build numbers, you will see two four-digit numbers, separated by a period. The first of the two numbers represents the build number for the program you're using (such as Outlook.) The second of the two numbers represents the build number for the core Office shared library (called MSO), which is shared by all programs.

The Office 12 dialog boxes actually show the application and MSO build numbers separately--they're both even labeled so that it's easy to tell them apart. The Office 12-style build numbers (12.0.3417.1005) reveal another internal artifact of the way we do builds--something we call "dot builds."

Sometimes it's necessary to have two kinds of builds going on at once within the Office team. Recently, our build lab has been making both "Beta 1" builds and "Beta 2" builds. In order to ship a stable Beta 1, we have slowed the rate of code changes dramatically and concentrated on just crucial bug fixes. At the same time, we need a place to check in all of the other work people are doing for Beta 2--but we can't have those changes coming in and wrecking the stability of Beta 1 at the last minute.

The solution? The build lab makes two kinds of builds at once. A specific build number is chosen, and that build "becomes" Beta 1. In this case, 3417. That doesn't mean that Beta 1 is done however. As bug fixes are checked in, we make new versions of the 3417 build, each one with an increasing number as a suffix, separated by a period. (A so-called "dot" build.) So there would be a 3417.1, 3417.2, 3417.3, and so on until Beta 1 is ready to ship. Subtract 1000 from the second 4-digit number in the About box to find the "dot build" number. In the above example, 3417.1005 is the 5th "dot" build of our Beta 1 branch.

At the same time, the build lab continues to churn out Beta 2 builds on the normal daily schedule: 3423, 3425, etc. So, internally, we can tell which build is which kind by the number it has.

Last point: once a product ships, the rules for build numbers become even more complicated and different. So, if you have Service Pack 2 for Office 2003, you might see a nonsensical number like 6552 or something. Don't worry about it, it's not tied directly to a date in the same way anymore.

Armed with this knowledge, you're ready to amaze the world with your secret ability to decode Office build numbers.