John R. Durant's WebLog

The "Voice" of Office Development

Task Pane Programming with Office 2003: Not "stupid, stupid, stupid"

On Jan 14 of this year a discriminating member of our audience on the Office Developer Center added the following feedback to our article Creating an Office 2003 Research Service Using the Amazon Web Service API. Here is the full text of his feedback (no changes to grammar etc.):

"stupid stupid stupid The prospect of looking out at the world from any office app, is simply stupid. A waste of time this was to me to read...."

OK- I can appreciate the unguarded opinion. Perhaps unknowningly the reader introduced a topic that deserves reasoned response. For the record, I really like the "Yoda-esque" speech pattern ("Take you to him I will" etc.) in his/her comment.

What about task-pane programmability? The task pane made it's appearance in Office XP. I recall when it came out because I thought: hey, I want to program that space, put my own controls there. The fact is that programming the forms in Office has never been my dominant method. I would much rather build a Winform app and launch it from a custom Office menu than use the little forms engine built into Office. But, the task pane's slick inclusion in the authoring real estate is a great advantage. I just had to wait until version 2003 to get at least some of the programmability control I wanted.

But the question is: does it make sense to look out at the world from an Office app? The answer is resoundingly YES. Customers have convinced me that this is what they want. The reception of the Research task pane has been enthusiastic. Just a month ago I presented a session on this for our Office Developer Conference here in Redmond. It was enthusiastically received. It is the simple truth that the ways in which information workers author documents has changed. IW's look out at the world and bring synthesize thoughts, facts, impressions, and other utterances in documents. These documents are not isolated and are inextricably bound up in the broader world of facts and ideas. Office wisely makes it easier for IW's to connect to this world. Have we perfected that  connection? No. That's what subsequent versions are for- to respond to the ever changing needs of the user.

What do you think? Is it "stupid, stupid, stupid" or is it is "smart, smart, smart"? I would like to hear from you.

 Rock Thought for the Day: Queens of the Stone Age, a band whose members seem to change about as often as the drummer for Spinal Tap, have a new album that will hit the streets in two weeks. Look for "Lullabies to Paralyze" to be a rocking album. I am eager to hear the first single, "Little Sister".  My critique is that they have not made it easy to even hear low-quality snippets online. That they have included Dave Grohl in the mix is a very good sign.

Rock On (Are you guys just having a killer time?)

Published Tuesday, March 08, 2005 9:15 AM by johnrdurant

Comments

 

Keith said:

BBC Radio 1 have been playing 'Little Sister' for a few weeks now, and Sky's 'Scuzz' has the video - You could try the 'Listen Again' feature on Radio 1's website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1) and listen to today's (08th Mar) "Colin and Edith Show" - it's on there, and the feed is pretty good quality.

Dave Grohl was the drummer on the last album (Songs for the Deaf), but apparently only guest-stars on one of the tracks for this album.
March 8, 2005 9:35 AM
 

Trent Buckingham said:

During my Java days a long long time ago, I released a POP3 client plug-in for Ecplise and while some found it useless, most users loved it. The need of the user, it depends on.
March 8, 2005 9:37 AM
 

John R. Durant said:

Thanks, Keith! I will check it out today.
Have you ever checked out Dave Grohl's Probot album? I blogged about it a couple of months ago, and I have enjoyed the album very much. What an amazing talent.
March 8, 2005 9:38 AM
 

William Sullivan said:

Can you progmatically use the task pane in 2k3??? I looked into creating an outlook add-in a few months back, but when I found that I couldn't add items to the task pane (like another "tab" or button) and was limited to a toolbar, I dropped the idea. I wanted to be able to add a button to the task pane which when clicked opened my program in the explorer pane like you would the calendar or contacts interface. My research told me that this was impossible. Was I wrong?
March 8, 2005 9:54 AM
 

John R. Durant said:

Trent- your humor, I like! I agree with you that it depends on the needs of the user. For Grandma in Witchita, I suppose that task pane is not as vital. She probably doesn't want to connect to a corp databased, extract records and auto-insert the text into specific XML nodes of her Word doc. Fair enough.

But, as you say, there will be users for whom this scenario is typical. This is when the task pane programmability fills the gap.
March 8, 2005 9:58 AM
 

John R. Durant said:

William, you can definitely program the task pane in 2003. You can create a smart document, a research service, or a Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System solution. The best method is VSTO 2005, and we have loads of stuff on the dev center about this. Also, you can use smart documents, and we have an SDK for that. I also wrote a solid intro article that can help you out in this regard. Go to the Smart Tags/Smart Documents section of the site, and click on Technical Articles.

The good news is that you can put pretty much any control you want in the task pane space.
March 8, 2005 10:01 AM
 

Jeff Cate said:

John, are you sure the task pane in Outlook 2003 is programmable with VSTO? I've never seen an Outlook project type in Visual Studio / VSTO. Have seen Word projects, Excel projects and InfoPath projects, but not an Outlook project type - even in VSTO 2005. Maybe I have just missed downloading and installing it.

What I would like to do in Outlook 2003 is develop a custom task pane that would allow the user to pull up a SharePoint document library (or perhaps just a Sharepoint list) that would have docs in it that contain responses to common questions. Then they should be able to see the text inside the doc/list and click on a button to automatically paste that text into the email they are creating or replying to.

For a customer service rep who answers customer emails this could be quite a productive system by combining the ease of use of Sharepoint Lists/Libraries with Outlook 2003.

By the way, I was in the audience for your presentation at the Office Dev Conference in Redmond. The IM log retrieval application you wrote was very impressive. I agree that Office Task Panes are a very powerful new feature - even though they are apparently not well understood.
March 8, 2005 12:09 PM
 

Sean Severin said:

John,

I was at the MS Office Dev Conference back in Feb. and enjoyed your presentations!! I would offer a resounding "No way" to the "stupid stupid stupid" comments made by the reader. We've built a couple of great apps using the research pane and MS Office 2003. And VSTO 2005 will open even more doors for us all. We've just got to have the vision!!

March 8, 2005 12:13 PM
 

John R. Durant said:

Jeff,

Sorry for the confusion. I missed the fact that the focus was on Outlook (I was in a big hurry this morning- sorry).

With Word as the email editor, you have some task pane availability. But, you are on Word territory, not Outlook really.

To do the type of thing you are proposing with SharePoint lists, you could do a COM Add-in, or you could go with a Web-based app entirely (not what I would recommend really).

BTW: I am glad you liked my presentation on the IM retrieval. It was a fun thing to write.

This Office dev community is so cool. I mean that. It makes my work so worthwhile. It energizes me.
March 8, 2005 1:38 PM
 

Priskorn said:

The Research pane is indeed usefull. I've created a research service which hooks up with a web service at the largest danish telephone company. And voila - you have full access to looking up company information from within Office 2003 (address information, telephone numbers, financial information, maps and so on).
But I admit that the Research SDK is indeed version 1.0. It helped a lot with the Research Extras, but I'm still having some trouble. E.g. returning multiple lines from the actions button into Word.
March 8, 2005 11:25 PM
 

Russ Ramirez said:

The person who could not see the value in *any* open, standardized container in an Office application must not work with real people. Ever work with a user who thinks the computer *is* the screen or that all their PC does is Outlook, Excel and/or Word? I would venture to say that among folks whose boss acquired their licenses for Office one at-a-time, the world they know is only as seen it through one or more Office applications.

Loved your presentations at the ODC in Feb. You said: "This Office dev community is so cool. I mean that. It makes my work so worthwhile. It energizes me." Hey, it's contagious, and it's rubs-off from people like you who are passionate about what they do.
March 9, 2005 5:45 PM
 

Andrew Houghton said:

My response to the question are Office Research service stupid or smart is a resounding extremely smart. What Microsoft has done is turned Web services upside down. In the normal events of designing and deploying Web services, it's the information provider who defines what the schemas are. Anyone who wants access to the publisher's information must use the publishers schemas. Microsoft has turned this around. With Office applications (and IE too) as a Web service consumer *they* have published the Web service schemas that any information provider should conform to that allows the provider to enhance *their* applications. By doing this have created another extensibility mechanism for third parties to make *their* products more valuable in the market place.

This opens up opportunities for corporations and other organizations to build infrastructure on top of (in this case along side of) the Office applications platform. Office Research services are valuable in many different ways. Since they are available with IE, it opens up possibilities for interactions with Web based metadata capture applications and OCLC [1] is exploring this very area with their Web based metadata capture application for libraries, called Connexion [2].

You started out this entry with a reader who didn't see the value of the Amazon article. Interestingly, before the article came out, I just finished creating my own Amazon Office Research service that demonstrated how a library could transform the Amazon data into the metadata format used by OCLC's Connexion metadata application. This could save libraries from rekeying metadata information that has very specific rules on how entries should be constructed by librarians. Another use case was that librarians could use the Amazon data to enhance existing metadata records.

From an Office application perspective, in a presentation [3] that was done for our members, we [4;5] demonstrated a use case on how a public library who keeps a summer reading list in Excel [3, slide 6] could use Office Research services to search and add genre categories to their summer reading list. I believe that we have not touched the potential that Office Research services have to offer.

[1] http://www.oclc.org/about/
[2] http://www.oclc.org/connexion/
[3] http://www.oclc.org/research/memberscouncil/2004-10/vizine-goetz.ppt
[4] http://www.oclc.org/research/staff/vizine-goetz.htm
[5] http://www.oclc.org/research/staff/houghton.htm
March 9, 2005 7:13 PM
 

John R. Durant said:

I'm blown away by the reasoned responses given in the feedback here. You guys should consider working here in Redmond!

I have pointed the Research services program manager to this thread. I know he will be pleased.

What is especially interesting is that the focus has been very firmly on Research services, not smart documents or other techniques.

I share with you the belief that Research services in Office are a truly marvelous innovation. The RSDE make it so much easier to do also. The possibilities are endless.
March 10, 2005 11:56 AM
 

Stephen Bullen said:

Hi John,

Yes, the Task Pane can be a useful area of the screen to use for UI, but why isn't it possible for us to use it for application-level customization? Why can't I create my own top-level task panes? Why can't I tell the host to show my VBA Userforms as Task Panes (e.g. Form1.Show vbModal/vbModeless/vbTaskPane)? Why is it that 99.9% of the articles on the site are about making use of .Net in (at least) six different ways (Smart Docs, Smart Tags, Research Services, IBF, VSTO) to get information *to* Excel/Word, rather than using it *within* Excel/Word once it's there? Is that where the natural boundary between VBA and .NET lies? .NET is best for getting information there, but VBA is best for manipulating it (through the OM) once there?
March 11, 2005 4:14 PM
 

John R. Durant's WebLog said:

March 15, 2005 8:49 AM
 

George said:

I HATE IT! I am used to doing everything by the keyboard, and every time I want to change the style, in the old Windows, I hit Alt-O, S, hit the first letter of the style, Enter. That doesn't work in Word 2003. I have to click the style and then close the stupid Task Pain-- which requires an extra effort. Another gripe is that the style no longer applies to the paragraph but to a selection.
March 22, 2005 5:45 AM
 

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