Joe Friend : Word

Simple things like copy & paste

Jfriend — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 18:45:00 GMT

By Stuart J Stuple

One of the things that I love about Word 2007 is that many existing features are becoming easier to find and easier to use. The thing I find most challenging about my job and the particular areas in which I work is that if features are designed and implemented well, they fade into the background. A good example of that (which I can’t take credit for) is the spelling autocorrect, which silently corrects simple typing mistakes such as “teh” or “adn.”

For the most part, copying and pasting text from one place to another works like that. You never notice when it gets it right. But, pasting content really isn’t simple as anyone who has ever looked at the variety of options available under the Paste Special command has probably realized. In cases like this, our goal is to figure out the outcome that is usually desired and make that the default. From there, we may do work to make sure that the most common alternatives are easy to find.

And with pasting, that’s where noticing a feature that was introduced a few versions ago comes in handy. Every time that you paste in Word, an icon appears at the lower left edge of the pasted content.

This little control unlocks a world of options that makes pasting content with the “right” formatting for the particular situation a simpler task. When you click on the control (or press Shift+F10), a menu of alternative ways of pasting that content is displayed.

The choices that are available on this menu depend upon the type of content being pasted. For most content, the “Keep Text Only” option is always available and is useful for removing any formatting and using the formatting where you are pasting. Matching Destination Formatting is very similar to Keep Text Only but some emphasis (such as bold or italic) is preserved.

Pasting with style

With Word styles, an additional option may become available when copying from one document to another and when the styles that you using are defined differently in the two documents. In that case, we offer one additional choice—continue to use the styles but update the look to match where you are pasting—and that becomes the default. Keep Source Formatting is still available as an option and does the same thing it does normally—preserves the look of the source, removing style definitions as necessary. Note that if the style you are copying is not used in the document into which you are pasting, we go ahead just copy that style definition into the document as part of Keep Source Formatting.

With improvements to both Excel and PowerPoint this version, it is possible to create tables in those applications that include graphic effects that cannot be created in Word. Because of that, the choices on the paste option menu have been updated to include the ability to include a picture of the table. (Don’t worry; we’re planning to do the work to let you do the same sort of effects in Word but that’s going to be in a future version.)

Changing your defaults

Word 2007 now allows you to decide what the default paste option should be for the three most types of pasted content—general text coming from another application, text pasted from Word where there is no style conflict (the most common case), and text pasted from one Word document to another where there is a style conflict. You can use the Set Default Paste command to navigate to these options on the Advanced tab of the Word Options dialog.

One other change that has happened with paste is how we handle pasting headings or other content into the middle of an existing paragraph. In most cases, if you have included the paragraph mark at the end of a selection, then when you paste we also insert a paragraph mark before the pasted content. This means that if you paste a heading into the middle of a paragraph, we split the paragraph into two sections and add the heading between the two. If that’s not what you want, then you can move to the start of the pasted text and press the backspace key. So far, hardly anyone has noticed and that’s the greatest praise for most of our features.

Ten things I wish everyone knew about Word

Jfriend — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 01:01:00 GMT

By Stuart J Stuple

Mastering Word isn’t about understanding the architecture or the intent of the designers; it’s about finding the features and shortcuts that make your day-to-day job easier.

Copy just the formatting

Almost everyone knows how to copy and paste text to re-use the same boilerplate in more than one document. But did you know you can do the same thing with formatting? The Format Painter is located on the Home tab, it's that little paintbrush icon. When you click the Format Painter, Word copies the formatting of from the start of your selection and the cursor changes to a paintbrush. Now, wherever you click in your document, that same formatting will be applied. Whether your selection will just be text formatting or both text and paragraph formatting depends on what is included in the selection. And if you want to keep pasting the same formatting, you can double-click the Format Painter button to make it “sticky.” When you're finished "painting" just press Escape to release the painter.

Move from one spelling errors to another without using the dialog

Many people do a final edit of their document, checking each unrecognized word to see if it needs to be correct. There’s nothing wrong with opening the Spelling dialog to do this but you can accomplish the same text by clicking on the spelling icon in the status bar. At each unrecognized word, it displays the context menu with suggestions for you.

Change the formatting of an entire list

When you click on a number or bullet for a list, the entire list is selected. You can then apply text formatting for just that list without changing the paragraph formatting. You can also change the type of numbering or bullets used by selecting from the gallery associated with the bullet or numbering button.

Save a set of formatting as a style

Format Painter provides a convenient way of copy formatting from one spot to another but you can also store formatting for later use. Simply select the text that has the formatting that you want, right-click, and select Save Selection as New Quick Style. Once you give your new Quick Style a name, it will appear in the Style gallery on the Home tab.

Repeat an action

If you’ve just gotten through performing a complex task with a dialog and find yourself needing to do the same task again, you can click the Repeat button next to the Undo button or press Ctrl+Y.

Move between objects by clicking

At the lower right side of the window (just below the scroll bar) is the “Object Browser,” which consists of three buttons--a selection menu and a pair of Previous and Next arrows. One use of the Previous/Next arrows is after you’ve search for something using Find. When you close the Find dialog, the arrows are blue, indicating that you have a stored search. You can just click on the arrows to repeat the Find in the indicated direction. You can also use the “middle” button to select the type of object to browse. You can select to move among pictures, pages, headings, or any of a dozen object types.

Scale the text in your document

If you’re struggling to get text to fit in a certain number of pages, the first thing you’ll probably try is adjusting the margins on the Page Setup tab. But if that still doesn’t give you enough room you can select all of your text and use the Shrink Font button to reduce all of the text in your document--text at different sizes reduces proportionally so that your headings remain larger than the rest of your text. And you can squeeze just a portion of your document if you prefer; the command works on any selection.

Change the formatting of the standard paragraph

When you start a new document, Word makes some assumptions about the spacing of the typical paragraph (in Word 2007, it puts a bit of space between lines and almost a 1/6^th of an inch of space between paragraphs). If you don’t like that spacing, you can make changes to any sample paragraph and then right-click on the “Normal” Quick Style and select “Update Normal to Match Selection.” Any existing paragraphs in your document and any new ones you create will use this formatting.

Show or hide the gridlines for tables

Tables in Word 2007 do not display the dividing lines between cells by default. These lines are called gridlines and show the borders of each cell. But unlike “real” borders, they don’t print with your document. You can use the Show Gridlines command at the bottom of the Borders menu or on the Table Layout tab to control whether or not these lines are showing.

Templates are a convenient way to store the starting point for a document

Most of us have documents that contain boilerplate text that we frequently need to reuse. And most of us who have a standard document that we use as a starting point have made the mistake of saving over the original of that document. If you have a document that you frequently use as a starting point for other documents, save a copy of it as a Template (DOTX) on your desktop. Then, when you double-click on that template, a copy of the document will be opened—no risk of ever saving over the original.

The new document look

Jfriend — Mon, 22 May 2006 14:02:00 GMT

The Word team is lucky to have a whole host of very talented people working on it. This is the first of many guest posts where you'll be getting details on the features from the mouths of the feature designers.

Stuart J Stuple is a program manager on the Microsoft Office Word team who focuses on the formatting and editing experience of long or complex documents. His background is in book publishing and education.

One of the things that we hope you notice as soon as you start working with Word 2007 is that the new font, new line spacing, and space between paragraphs give your documents a fresh, more professional look. And when you insert content such as charts, diagrams, or material copied from other documents, that content shares the same fonts and colors as already in use in your document.

As described previously, the new fonts used in Word are based on the ClearType technology that provides a crisper, more easily read display of the fonts on most modern monitors. ClearType is a feature of the operating system and has been available since Windows XP; however, these are the first fonts from Microsoft designed to take advantage of this technology. The new font collection includes six fonts: Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara, Corbel, and Constantia. Calibri was selected as the default font for Word because of its modern look and is appropriateness for onscreen documents. To complement the look of Calibri, Cambria was selected for use in headings.

For more information on fonts and typography see the team's fontblog,

The new spacing also contributes to the readability of your document. This new spacing comes from a combination of three things. The new font chosen is more “open” than Times New Roman, the font previously used. We also added a bit of space between each line within the paragraph. Though some folks have described this as “double-spaced,” it is actually 115% of the line height (double-spaced would be 200%). You could call this one-and-about-a-sixth spacing if you’d like. Finally, we added space after each paragraph. That means that rather than having to press Enter twice at the end of a paragraph in order to make the start of the paragraph noticeable, you simply press Enter once and we add the space for you.

While most documents look better with this new spacing, some documents require a “tighter” look and some people simply prefer less space within the paragraphs or are so used to pressing Enter between paragraphs, that they’d prefer the old spacing. If your preference is for the spacing used in previously versions, you will be able to easily obtain that by selecting the “Classic” look from the Style Set gallery on the Change Styles control of the Home tab. Style Sets not only change the appearance of the standard paragraph but also any text that has been formatted with the styles from the Styles gallery.

(NOTE: I’m sad to report that there’s a bug in the Beta 2 release that prevents the "Classic" look from working. For now, to get a document with the classic spacing, use the New command from the Office menu, select Installed templates at the left, and then double-click on the Office Word 2003 Look template.)

More Word blog authoring tidbits

Jfriend — Thu, 18 May 2006 14:26:00 GMT

In general, I prefer to sit back and watch the comments come in and respond to them in future blog posts. This means that some folks have to learn a little about delayed gratification. However, no one needs to worry about missing important information that only gets mentioned in the comment stream. So, here are a few answers to issues raised by recent comments.

Word blog feature: Is it a mode?

Fred wrote the following:

"In your screenshot for WordBlog UI I didn't see an 'exit' or close button. As you've removed the other Ribbon tabs (not quite sure I'm understanding why that was done rather than using some 'contextual' tabs as Jensen shows for things like working on pictures) is this a 'view' in Word, or an outside applet, or ???"

The blog feature is built on top of Word as a special mode. So, it is full blown Word, but based on the template we load we are scoping the user interface. It is not a view or an outside applet. Everything that we've done in creating the blog feature could have been done as a COM add-in by a developer outside of the Office team using the new Office extensibility model.

The user interface that appears on the blog templates surface is done using content controls. These controls are bound to our XML data store and the metadata for a post (post date, categories, title, blog account, etc) is stored there.

We'll be getting more details on these new features and how template authors and developers can use them to create exciting new solutions on top of Word.

Post management

Several people have asked if you can download posts from your server in order to edit them in Word. The answer is yes.

Also, the posts you create from scratch in Word or download from the server can be saved to your local drive for editing later. These are standard Word documents (.docx), but they will always remember that they are blog posts and so they'll have the appropriate ribbon commands available

OneNote integration

Chris Pratley pointed out that you can start your blog posts in OneNote and then transition to the new Word feature via a "Blog this…" command on the right click menu. You need to do a little leg work to enable this in beta 2, so make sure and read Chris' post.

Coming up next: Posts with images and other types of graphics.

Word Blog HTML Quality

Jfriend — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:55:00 GMT

Every post you make as a blogger can be a huge learning experience. In Friday's post on the new Word 2007 blog post authoring feature I made a fairly modest claim that the HTML emitted by the feature would be better than the standard HTML from previous versions of Word. Well, it is, but I should have looked at the source code before I told everyone else to do so. There were a few problems:

Blog service vagaries

There were a number of issues introduced by Community Server (the blog system on which blogs.msdn.com is built). The upper case tags are the major example of that problem. Also, a number of issues were pointed out around the template for the site. The template is one of several standard CS template and, of course, had nothing to do with the HTML emitted by the blog feature (ID attributes with strange values are an example of this).

My stupid HTML mistakes

As I stated, I hand coded the image tags and I made a couple stupid HTML coding errors. Luckily I will not be shipped in the box with the feature and our developers will output it correctly.

Real problems we need to address

Also, several people made great suggestions for improvements that we want to look into. An example of this is needing to use <del> for strikethrough and the need to have proper tag content flow.

Goals

Most importantly I'd like to lay out the goals for the HTML output.

We will hand off valid XHTML for each post

We can't be held responsible for what Blogger, Spaces or anyone else does to the XHTML after we give it to them, but we'll send it to them as valid XHTML.

Clean HTML is more important than visual fidelity

This is a huge change for Word. Our focus has always been ensuring (as much as possible) that the HTML we output would result in full round trip of all the content and formatting in your document. The blog feature is all about representing what we can in a clean way without any special action/decision point on the part of the post author.

Suggestions welcome

With these two goals in mind, I would like to announce that we will post our the details of our XHTML output for public comment. The manner in which we do this (blog, discussion list, wiki, or something else) will be announced early next week. We can't promise that we will respond to all suggestions, but we will seriously consider them.

Blogging from Word 2007

Jfriend — Fri, 12 May 2006 12:42:00 GMT

Word is a great tool for writing stuff, right? Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too). So, why not use Word to write your blog posts?

Stop, don't jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I'm not an idiot. I'm not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you've ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I'm talking about. Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don't look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?

Well no more. We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software. That said, I hope that everyone is pleasantly surprised with where we are going with this feature.

Why bother?

When I write a blog post using my blog providers web-based editor I miss some of the familiar Word features that I've come to rely on, specifically background spelling (those little red squiggles) and autocorrect. These features keep me from making stupid mistakes. Also, I simply want to use the tool that I use for most of my other writing tasks.

Targeted user experience

Click on the picture above to see the a larger version of the image. Notice that the new user interface has been scoped to include the feature you most likely will need when authoring a blog post. We've gone from seven tabs on the ribbon to just two! The Home tab has been replaced with a Blog Post tab. We've add some special commands that you will need to manage your blog service accounts and publish your posts. We even added strikethrough to the basic text group since bloggers like using it so much.

Click on the images below to see the full tabs.

Publishing clean HTML to your blog

That's right. No more verbose Word HTML. The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog. The HTML for this post was created by Word. Go ahead, click View, Source in your browser and look at the HTML starting with "Word is a great tool..." We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become <strong>, Italic becomes <em>, Heading 1 become <h1>, Quotes become <blockquote> and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn off that feature in Word, but the goal is to output just what is needed to make your blog post clean and readable (code and rendered HTML).

Pictures

When you set up your blog you can specify an upload site and Word will take care of uploading any pictures that you insert in the blog post. Also, we'll automatically generate & upload PNGs for the Office graphics (charts, diagrams, etc.) that you insert in your post.

In Beta 2 we have basic FTP support. We hope to add support for metaweblog API picture handling, SharePoint picture libraries, and one or two others. While we have a limited ability to add many more providers to this late breaking feature, the feature is extensible and other providers can insure that their systems work with Word even after Office 2007 ships.

Getting started

You can start a new blog by simply going to the File icon, New dialog and selecting "New Blog Post." Or, if you want to start your post from an existing document go to the File icon and select Publish and Blog.

Setting up your blog

This is pretty standard stuff if you've ever used one of the many blog post authoring applications. In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we're still working out. But the basics should work in Beta 2. We hope to add a few more services to the list before we ship. The Word blog authoring feature is extensible and we will publish information so that blog providers can insure that their systems work with Word.

More info coming…

We're excited about getting into more details about this feature, but I'm calling it a night now.

PS. A little honesty
Did I mention that this was beta software and we were running hot? For complete transparency I need to admit a couple things. I had to make a few hand tweaks to my post due to bugs (I'm sure our developer would blame it on user error). I had to upload and hand code the pictures because I had problems with my FTP site. And, I had to hand change the items with the CODE tag since we didn't map the Word code style correctly. You too can help find a report bugs with this feature once beta 2 is available. More on that later.

Whew! That feels better. Now I can sleep soundly.

Word 2007: sneak peak

Jfriend — Thu, 11 May 2006 17:06:00 GMT

I returned to Microsoft (after a 7 year hiatus) in late 2003 just as the Office 2007 effort was getting under way. Landing on the Word team, where I'd spent a couple years in the mid 90s, was pretty exciting for me. After being away from Microsoft for so long (I left the world of software and move to Indonesia and worked in the world of NGOs) I shared the view of many Word users that Word hadn't changed much since Office 97. It seemed to me that there was so much room for improvement. (I'm now ducking to avoid getting pelted by my friends and teammates who labored long hard hours over all those releases!)

Now don't get me wrong, I take no special credit for the great things that are in store for you in Word 2007. The timing of my arrival was completely serendipitous. But it was all very exciting to me none-the-less. The entire Office organization was all excited about creating a mind blowing version of Office that challenged a lot of people's assumptions about what Office could be.

As the project got underway our efforts began to focus on a few key ideas. I'm going to give a quick overview of these below. It's a bit of a tease, but helps set the stage for a more detailed discussion of all the work that has gone into Word 2007. If you're head is spinning at the end and you are wondering if we added/changed [insert your favorite feature addition or change here], just hold on and we'll get to the details in future posts!

Dramatic improvements in document authoring

Let's face it, Word 2003 is too hard for many of us to use. It's powerful and it's complicated. The new user interface in Word 2007 is a vast improvement for us all. I'm sure you're reading Jensen's blog to catch all the details on the new UI. Things that were hard to find before are now discoverable and tasks that used to take you many clicks now take you just a couple. For example, inserting a complex cover page is as simple as selecting one from a visual gallery.

Not only is Word 2007 easier to use, but you can get better looking results too. We have new defaults that create better looking, easier to read documents. We've added wonderful new fonts. Document themes let you get the perfect color, font and effects combinations for your document. Document building blocks (designer created document parts like the cover pages I mentioned above) are built on top of styles & themes so that they always match the document in which you use them.

Lots to talk about here to say the least.

Powerful, easier to create Word templates & solutions

The new Open XML formats alone go a long way to enable more powerful and easier to create (read less code) solutions in Word. Brian is doing a great job of covering all the technical details in his blog. We've added content controls which allow you to structure your solutions/template in a way that helps guide the user as they author a document with the solution. Think of them as super placeholders (for starters). And, finally the Open XML format supports an XML data store. You can bind to data from a variety of sources (SharePoint is one example) and present that data on the document surface.

The power in these new features isn't captured in my one sentence overviews above, but when you combine these new features with those in point #1 you get a lot of muscle for creating good looking, flexible and powerful solutions on top of Word. Oh yeah, and I didn't even mention the new RibbonX extensibility model that comes with our new UI!

Key improvements for our legal and academic customers

Each release of Word provides us the opportunity to focus a bit extra attention on one or two unique groups of Word customers. This release legal and academic customers won the feature lottery. (Of course, it isn't a lottery but it probably feels that way to everyone reading this.) I could list out the features that we've done for each of these customer groups, but I'd rather keep you guessing. I think you'll be pleased. Each is a significant enhancement to Word and, while they are targeted at specific customers, they will be useful for many people.

And…

That's not all. Those are just the major areas. We've improved reading mode, improved our integration with Outlook, added PDF support and a lot more. Next week we'll start jumping in to the details.

Tomorrow look for an interesting post about a feature that will make its debut in the upcoming public beta. Very few people have seen or heard about it.

Oh, and tomorrow will definitely come this time.

What more can you add to a Microsoft Word?

Jfriend — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 13:32:00 GMT

This is a common question for all of the Microsoft Office applications, but particularly so for Word. It's a close relative to the question, "Aren't you finished with Word yet?"

Recently one of my nephews visited from Oklahoma. After seeing the Microsoft Visitor Center and playing with the Xboxes there, he joked that I must spend a lot of time playing games there "since you've been done with Word for long time." Okay, so I didn't think the joke was really that funny, but I did let him know that he'd be eating his words when the next version was released.

Seriously, haven't we been done with word processing for a long time now? What else can we possibly add? Weren't the red squiggles the last really useful feature added to Word?

The answer to most of these questions is yes and no. Yes, Word already has a lot of features. No, most people can't use them very effectively. Yes, the red squiggles (background spelling) and other improvements in spell checking (such as auto-correct) were important innovations. But we've added tons of other useful features, if you can find them. :-)

At the start of the Office “12” project the Word team created a document collection of over 700,000 documents. We know from evaluating our document collection that users struggle to use Word to its full potential. Even if we thought we had already included every possible feature anyone would ever want (yeah, right), even if the underlying architecture was perfect, it is obvious we still have tons of room for improvement because people have trouble finding, let alone using, the features we have.

The new Office “12” user interface is a big step forward toward making our feature easier to find and easier to use. You can read all about it on Jensen Harris' blog. It's been very exciting working with Jensen and his team.

But, the new UI is only the means to an end. The end is moving the state of documents forward in a significant way. With Word “12” you will be able to create documents quickly and with significantly improved results. Let's face it, even though we've add a ton of features to the Office applications over the past 15 years, the look, contents and effectiveness of the documents we create haven't changed that much. Our goal is to enable you to create a new generation of qualitatively better documents.

So how will these next generation documents be better than those we create today? Over the next few days I'd like to describe what makes a document a next generation document. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list. Also it is important to point out that Office “12” is just at the beginning of the journey to create next generation documents. More tomorrow…

New Office "12" file format news

Jfriend — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 19:34:00 GMT

If you haven’t made your way to Brian Jones’ blog, do so immediately. He’s announced some very exciting news Microsoft’s plans to standardize the new Microsoft Open XML formats. Also, Scoble has an interview with Jean Paoli regarding the news.

We are so excited about all the opportunities that exist for our customers and partners around these file formats. ECMA standardization will make this even more compelling for everyone.