Mac Mojo : Office 2008

Ship It, Ship It Good

Pat Fox — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:10:00 GMT

Hello everyone, I thought this would be good time to jump in and introduce myself. I’m the Director of Marketing and Planning for MacBU – a longtime ‘softie and closing in on my first anniversary in the Macintosh Business Unit. Like most of us in MacBU, I’m a long time Mac user – and this will date me – I set up and staffed the original Mac lab in college, finally saving enough to buy a “Fat Mac” of my own. As they say, the rest is history.

Speaking of history, we announced earlier this week RTM of the English version of Office 2008, with additional languages following right on schedule. What does that mean for my team? Well, we helped the dev teams celebrate (yes, that was me cranking the air raid siren Geoff was hearing.) Beyond that, there’s a lot more cranking to do before we launch January 15th – advertising, PR, launch events, and of course, getting ready for Macworld!

Ah, Macworld. It’s going to be a great show and we’re planning a big presence. First, A Day at the Office – a day-long conference at the Moscone on Monday, January 14th, dedicated to extensive user training on the new Office 2008 for Mac. Tickets are close to sold out, but if you’re quick you might still be able to grab one. We also have conference sessions and hands-on labs where attendees can get great training on the new Office 2008 for Mac.

You won’t miss our big booth on the show floor where we’ll have demo stations set up for you to test drive the new product and theatre presentations every half hour highlighting the most popular new features. Even better, most of MacBU and some of our most knowledgeable MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions. We’ll be hanging out again with the community in our new and improved Blogger Lounge (wireless access this year!) Best of all, the product will be available at retail (and online) starting January 15th in North America (including at that swanky Apple Store close to the Moscone.)

And since this is a year to celebrate - we’re the exclusive sponsors of the Macworld Blast at the Warfield Theatre this year, where we’ll have our blow-out launch party Tuesday, January 15th.

This will be a fun night. Long before Office 2008 was on the drawing board, before Mark Mothersbaugh contributed to Art of Office and way before Craig published his “Ship It” lyrics. I was a big fan of our surprise musical guests for the evening…DEVO! (Well, not such a surprise anymore. Sherjo couldn’t keep it from Shawn King on Your Mac Life during an interview with Paul Kent from IDG Wednesday night.)

Now we’re all excited, but I’m not your casual spudboy; there’s ample evidence of my devotion even back in college, as one look at my senior yearbook photo will prove. If you don’t know the band or have never seen DEVO live, do yourself a favor and get one of the few tickets left. The first 300 attendees will get a special gift bag with some limited edition goodies cooked up by Mark Mothersbaugh and my team, so get there early!

This will be a party to remember – and I hope to see you there! Look for the guy wearing the energy dome...

Pat O

Office 2008 Hits RTM

Geoff Price — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:36:00 GMT

Here’s the latest official word – Office 2008 for Mac has Released to Manufacturing (RTM)!

We’re very pleased to announce that the product team has signed off, and our final build has left the building and is en route to manufacturing sites abroad. Needless to say there’s some joy in MacBUville, with festivities as I post. While we love building Mac software, actually getting that software into the hands of the people we’ve been building it for is something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time. For my teams, the RTM milestone is the last step in the process.

It’s quite a thing to think back on everything that has gone into arranging the bits on this one polycarbonate disc. One way to think about the approximate total man hours is that if a single multi-talented person had done all this work they might have started around the time that King John signed the Magna Carta.

I know it’s been said before, but I’d like to extend my thanks to the team. Office 2008 is MacBU’s most significant release to date. I’m excited about both the new user experience and capabilities we’re delivering now, as well as the work we’ve done at all levels to make this release a great foundation for future releases to come.

Though our work is finished, our operations, localization and marketing teams remain busy getting Office 2008 on shelves for our product launch on January 15th at Macworld 2008. A large portion of the MacBU team will be on hand at Macworld, and I know people are excited to show their work and talk to real users about the release. We hope to see you there on the show floor, in presentations, and at various events around town – watch Mac Mojo for more details about what we’ll be up to at Macworld!

I'm hearing the ship siren getting cranked again – off to check on the latest margarita batch.

It's About Data

rkmiec — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:45:00 GMT

In my Calendar post, I touched on some of the work we’ve done in our Entourage 2008 reliability focus. I’d like to continue that discussion today with some details about our efforts in another critical area, the Entourage Database. Apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Rules definitions, signatures), essentially all Entourage user data is stored in the database. Reliability and trustworthiness here are our top priority. In Entourage 2008, we dedicated a large amount of time to identifying database areas with potential for new approaches and improvements. We found new ways to better detect database inconsistencies. We’ve also implemented tighter controls on data type enforcement and are smarter about reclaiming storage from deleted items. The end result is more confidence in the integrity of your data.

For those instances when inconsistencies are detected, the Entourage 2008 database recovery tool will be a more effective solution. In past versions, recovering your database was intrusive and required additional work to get things back into shape. Metadata like Categories, Project designations, and Links were lost. Mail filtering rules were also often victims when the clearing of IMAP and Exchange caches would break links between Rules and their related folders. In Entourage 2008, these are all preserved. Categories, Projects, Links, and Rules are no longer vulnerable to the process. The recovery is now more precisely focused on correcting only problem areas.

Compatibility with Apple’s Time Machine backup feature in Leopard is a database area that has received a lot of attention recently. Because Entourage uses a single file database, over time it can become large (sometimes really large). In those cases, Entourage data will not work optimally with Time Machine. Our recommendation is to exclude your Entourage Identity folder(s) in the Time Machine preferences and use alternative backup methods. We are committed to integrating with key Apple technologies and are weighing our options here for future releases.

When the topic of Entourage and databases comes up, it’s often about compatibility with Outlook personal store files (.pst). Entourage 2008 will continue to work with the PST Import Tool for Mac. It’s important to note that this tool is used to import Mac Outlook 2001 .pst files into Entourage. Directly importing Windows Outlook .pst files is not supported in Entourage 2008. We have heard from many of you that a Windows Outlook .pst solution is important. This feedback is factoring into the database development planning for future versions of Entourage. For now, there is an AppleScript based solution that I think is worth a look.

Another important consideration here is how we interact with Exchange’s database, “the store.” We’ve made some welcome improvements to our WebDav synchronization performance with Exchange in Entourage 2008. Through code reviews, customer feedback, and working closely with the Exchange team we’ve been able to find optimizations that will make the Exchange experience better. We solved efficiency bottlenecks and implemented smarter priority and thread utilization, especially with deep folder trees. You'll also have more control over the order folders sync with smarter prioritization of selected folders. This will result in faster Exchange folder updates and Entourage responsiveness will sharpen.

To conclude, I’d like to reiterate a point from my first post, that we understand that our Exchange customers want “an Exchange client on the Mac with features, performance, documentation, and reliability on par with Outlook.” This is a goal that will be achieved in stages, through Entourage 2008, its updates, and beyond. In Entourage 2008, the Exchange focus has been weighted towards reliability, better meeting management, performance, and documentation. While we’ve added important new enterprise features like OOF, Managed Folders, and Compliance Labels, and delivered features that will help you focus you on what you need to get done, we’ve concentrated on making things right in some rough spots. We know that there’s more important work to do, notably in the area of Task and Note sync with Exchange.

I look forward to upcoming posts from our team that will reveal our security feature work and some cool things we’ve done around To Do Flags. Entourage 2008 is a big step forward and we’re all anxious for you to see it.

Richard Kmieciak

PowerPoint to Go

blairn — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:36:00 GMT

PowerPoint is a communications platform at its core. We communicate ideas powerfully using PowerPoint in the board room, on the desktop, in the classroom, in the elevator, and on the go.

Wait. Did he say "In the elevator?" Sure, let me just pull out my Mac Book real quick and fire up PowerPoint for you here on the elevator. Oh wait, this is your floor? Elevator pitch is over? But I hadn't gotten to my killer slide yet to close the deal!

Back up. Let's try that elevator pitch again, this time using my iPhone. Now we're talking! Not only do you see that I'm a person of refined taste for using my iPhone, but I just showed you my killer deal-closing slide with just a few flicks of my finger. Bang, bang! You're sold, and we haven't even hit your floor yet. How about sashimi later? Great doing business with you, iPod!

Getting presentations from PowerPoint 2008 for Mac to your iPod or iPhone* is easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto**, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPod or iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPod or iPhone to show your presentation. No sweat!

Presentations look great on the big wide screens of iPhone and iPod Touch, but they look even better on a big screen TV or projected. Plug your iPod into a television or projector using the Apple Component AV or Composite AV cable and leave your laptop in the case.

Once your presentation is saved as pictures on your iPod or iPhone, there's really no limit to where you can communicate. At the karaoke bar, on a train, on the beach, or in a ski lodge. These are just a few ideas. Where do you want to go today?

* Works with any iPhone or iPod model that supports pictures, like the iPod Touch, iPod Classic or current generation iPod Nano.
** Requires iPhoto ‘06 or later.

Office 2008 for Mac: BFD!

sherjo — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:24:00 GMT

BFD! Big Friday Deals. Best Friday Destinations. The mall, online - wherever I can find them, I love a bargain. And there is no better bargain-hunting day than Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. En masse, we will drag our L-tryptophan dosed selves off of our couches and into the crowds in search of the ultimate deal. This year, in the giddy frenzy that is the road to Macworld and the worldwide launch of Office 2008 for Mac, we wanted to do something BIG. Bigger than big. The BFD-biggest deal out there.

So, for ONE DAY – if you purchase this coming Friday November 23rd – you can get an additional $100 mail-in rebate from us on any qualifying Office 2004 for Mac product (Standard Edition, Standard Edition Upgrade, EVEN Student & Teacher Edition!) AND, you can combine it with our Super Suite Deal, which means you can get Office 2008 Special Media Edition (about $500 street price) for under sixty bucks, if you include the $6.99 shipping and handling fee for Office 2008 (which we’ll send to you after it launches in January.)

Whoa. That is our BFD – Best. Friday. Deal. EVER. Never seen before. Unlikely to be repeated. Hope you like it. Get the full details and download the rebate coupon here.

There's a new cat in town

Schwieb — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:56:00 GMT

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Apple’s newest version of Mac OS X, called Leopard, was released into the wild at 6pm local time on October 26^th. I’ve seen a number of people asking about how compatible Mac Office is with Leopard, and I thought I’d chime in to say a few words about it. One of my roles as development lead is to coordinate with several other MacBU developers, testers, and program managers to work with Apple and their seeding program. We get the chance to test early releases of Mac OS X, the Xcode toolset, and other software updates in order to both report issues back to Apple and to identify areas of our own code that we need to change.

The news is that Mac Office is very compatible with Leopard! Mac Office 2004 works just as it always has. Over the course of Leopard testing, we ran thousands of scenarios in our lab to verify that Office 2004 ran with no adverse behavior on Leopard. Its performance running inside the Rosetta compatibility layer is quite good. As is normal with any major software release, we found issues here and there and accordingly reported them to Apple, and Apple’s engineering staff did a fantastic job in fixing up regressions. We found a few issues in our own code as well, and plan to update Mac Office 2004 shortly.

With regard to Office 2008, we’re also in great shape. We’ve made some tremendous architectural changes to the product to take advantage of newer technologies in Mac OS X that have come out since Office 2004 was released to run on Mac OS X 10.2. Because of those changes, we’ve given seeds of Mac Office 2008 to Apple so that they can run their own tests against it. Since these early builds of Mac Office and Leopard contain pre-release code and may contain features that have not been made totally public yet, both we and Apple are very careful to keep access to these seeds confined to a small group of people. This mutual seeding arrangement provides a way for the developers at both of our companies to ensure the best user experience for our mutual customers. We’ve been able to use this seeding time to make sure that Mac Office 2008 looks great on Leopard (picking up the new Leopard UI theme), works with new Apple technologies like Time Machine, Spaces, WebKit 3, AppleScript (ok, AppleScript isn’t new itself, but Apple made some big changes under the hood), and cooperates with lots of other smaller changes in various parts of the OS.

In order to make the most of this arrangement, I have the privilege and responsibility of attending periodic meetings with my MacBU peers and Apple contacts (Oh yes, with every increase in responsibility comes an increase in meetings. I’ve got a great Dilbert cartoon on my door about it…). During these meetings, we kibitz about the latest news ("Hey Matt, when can I get a seed of the iPhone SDK?") and run down a list of our current hot topics. These can range from a status request on list of bugs that are important to us or to Apple, a request for information on some new feature or API, or perhaps a discussion of why a particular bug fix request is so important to either of our respective companies.

It’s generally a very friendly, casual meeting, and the benefits of such close communication are tremendous for both of our companies. I’ve discussed this a while ago on my personal blog, and it still holds true today.

One anecdote from a few months ago demonstrates this really well. Apple has made some large changes to the configuration for the Networking pane in the System Preferences application. One particular seed that we received from them had some bugs in the network proxies support, such that once Leopard was installed, we couldn’t actually connect to any other server on our corporate network. This meant that I couldn’t access source code or test files, make check-ins, or in general connec to to anything else to fix bugs on my Leopard machine. Of course, I was able to continue Office 2008 work on my Tiger machine, but the problem meant that Leopard investigations were halted unless we rolled back to an earlier seed. I filed a bug report with Apple’s online reporting system and sent a quick email off to our contacts at Apple. Shortly after that Apple asked me a few questions about our network proxy configuration here at Microsoft and, based on my answers said they thought we were being affected by a known bug with that seed. Within a few days I got back an unofficial one-off build of an updated Network preference pane to test. I copied it into place on my Leopard install and sure enough, the problem had been resolved; I could access our source code, and was off and running again.

I’ve also been keeping up with the seeds of Xcode 3. Apple has made some significant improvements to Xcode in this release (I’m personally most happy about the performance improvements when viewing and stepping through code in a very large file, and the popup inspector bubbles that show current variable values are very cool.) When I led our transition from CodeWarrior to Xcode back in late 2005, I noted just how picky the tools were. I’m pleased to note that the gcc toolset is even pickier now, and has helped us find and fix a few bugs that Xcode 2.4 missed.

As others have noted here on Mac Mojo, Mac Office 2008 is rolling along quickly toward its own release to the public. I’m happy to have the opportunity to show you a little bit of our relationship with Apple, how we handled Office 2008 development on the latest big cat from Apple, and to confirm that Office 2004 itself works just fine with Leopard too.

Object Palette

Bart Chellis — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:07:00 GMT

There is a new tool in town… the Object Palette. This new tool lives in the Toolbox and allows you to quickly find and insert images into your document. The OP, as it is nicknamed, is designed to provide quick access to the following commonly used objects:

Shapes
Clip Art
Symbols
Photos (from your iPhoto Library or a folder)

With modern documents more commonly using imagery to communicate ideas, we wanted to centralize the tools for inserting images and enable users to quickly create visually appealing documents.

The idea started with iLife integration, hence iPhoto libraries, and grew to include the most common object types for document creation. In the future, we aim to increase the capabilities of the OP and provide further iLife integration, but we think this is a good start.

All of the OP panes provide an image preview, categorization to aid in browsing a collection, and a zoom slider to customize your view. The Shapes and Photos palettes also offer search controls to help you find specific items.

Clip Art

Clip Art is a palette that displays all the clip art stored by the Clip Gallery without having to load a separate app. This is a great place to find and insert clip art. The Clip Gallery remains the tool for organizing and managing clip art. To add your own clips, you can add them to the Clip Gallery, or you can place your clips in a folder and put that folder in the Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Media/Clipart folder.

Also, as you can see in the screenshots, the Clip Art palette provides some great new high quality clips. One issue that we have heard a lot from customers is that our clip art is stale. To improve on this, we have added a new collection of photo objects to our clip art. These new clips are 300 dpi images of real-world objects, people and animals. They are alpha-clipped (have no background) so they will float on your page and text will flow around them. These new images will help in creating great looking, modern documents.

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The zoom slider allows you to customize your view to see more items so you can quickly find an item, or to see more image detail to determine if the item meets your needs.

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As an example of some of the hard decisions we have to make, I wanted to talk about Search in this pane. We had planned to provide search for Clip Art, but the Clip Gallery database that stores the clip art did not permit this functionality. We had to make a choice: either cut the palette or remove the search control. We felt that the ability to quickly browse the collection of clip art via this new tool was worth it. For quick clip art insertion you can use the OP. For more advanced keyword and title searches use the Clip Gallery. In the end, we think this the right trade-off.

Symbols

In 2004, we added the ability to access common symbols from the Formatting Palette. In 2008, we have moved this functionality to the OP in the Symbols palette and have added more common symbols in categories such as Currency, Fractions, Music, Accents, etc. These categories make it easy to quickly find commonly used symbols.

As with all OP panes, this is meant to be a lightweight solution providing access to common items and functionality. For access to the complete list of accessible symbols, you should use the OS Character Palette.

Shapes

The Shapes palette provides access to our newly updated OfficeArt shapes. As you can see, the new shapes have a nice blue, gradient default look to give your documents a more contemporary look without having to modify the shapes. In Excel and PowerPoint, these shapes will even insert into your document according to the current document theme to further simplify shape and document creation. And... our shapes and their new formatting are also fully compatible with Win Office 2007.

For more information on OfficeArt in 2008, see Derek's OfficeArt Unleashed blog post.

Photos

The Photos palette is the one I am personally the most excited about. I take lots of photos of my kids and family, and I often want to send them in email to the grandparents or put them into my documents. Now, I don’t have to leave Entourage or my other Office applications. Right inside my apps, I have quick access to my photos without ever having to switch to another app.

If you are an extensive user of iPhoto or have multiple libraries, you can even browse by album or select a different iPhoto library. Also, as mentioned before, you can select a folder with photos in it if you are not an iPhoto user.

A somewhat less obvious feature is that you can flip over to the Toolbox Settings and choose what size you want to insert your photos, which will prevent your email or PowerPoint presentation from getting too big.

I am very excited about the feature set in OP. Personally, I love being able to access my photos and other imagery quickly in the Toolbox. The OP makes it easier to access your images and create great looking documents. I can’t wait to hear how people like it.

The Smart in SmartArt

Derek Snook — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 06:42:00 GMT

I use Office every day to communicate – email, documents, presentations, spreadsheets. I like to use visual aids to improve my communication -- it’s invaluable to reinforce your ideas with graphics, and if it looks cool, even better. How do you take a textual concept and quickly show your meaning in a graphic that is memorable, relevant, and beautiful?

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With Office 2008 for Mac, I do it with SmartArt graphics: a new set of tools for creating attractive, effective visuals. With SmartArt, a list becomes a colorful sequence array, a roster becomes an organization chart, or a numbered list awakens as a simple, bold process diagram.

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Choose a layout in the Elements Gallery and enter your data in the SmartArt text pane (we added the genie effect when showing/hiding the text pane; not only is it a cool touch, but it highlights the relationship between the SmartArt object and the text content you're bringing to life in the diagram.) In PowerPoint, you can select a bulleted list already in your presentation and click on a SmartArt layout to convert the list into a graphic.

What’s so “smart” about SmartArt graphics? The graphics automatically update and adjust as you add data, creating new diagram parts, moving existing parts to fit, resizing the contextual elements that show relationships.

Wine making, for example, is a continuous process of growing and harvesting grapes, fermenting, storing and aging, and finally tasting and enjoying. Describing this in your latest newsletter or school project? There’s a Continuous Cycle layout in the SmartArt gallery. Click in the Gallery to add the graphic, type in your stages of wine production, and click a SmartArt style in the Formatting Palette to add a splash of color. Done, and it looks great!

There are over 80 layouts built-in to Office 2008, and you can flip between them, updating your graphic in the document as you click, until you find the one that best expresses your idea. Add or remove data at any time and the graphic will adjust.

SmartArt graphics you create in Office 2008 for Mac are compatible with Office 2007 and vice-versa; we use the same SmartArt engine underneath. SmartArt graphics are part of the OfficeArt family, and inherit the powerful formatting and document theme awareness of other OfficeArt graphics. Use the Formatting Palette to customize SmartArt graphics, including 3D effects, reflections, transparencies, glows, and shadows. Explore your options willy-nilly; the Reset button takes you back to the crisp default SmartArt Graphic that you started with. SmartArt graphics automatically match your document, spreadsheet, or presentation color scheme, though that too is customizable. Roger Baerwolf and I will talk more about document themes in an upcoming sneak peek blog post.

Welcome to Word Publishing Layout View

Han-yi Shaw — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:50:00 GMT

In my previous post, the focus of attention was our new Office 2008 User Experience. For this post, I will turn the focus to another area that I am deeply passionate about --- Microsoft Word 2008. At MacBU, many of us have the great fortune to work on multiple areas of interest. So when I’m not “pushing pixels” in our new Office UI, my other role is Lead Program Manager for Word for Mac. Together with my passionate and dedicated team, we’ve been hard at work on a feature that has been three years in the making. With this new post, I am pleased to talk about one of our latest labors of love --- the new Publishing Layout View.

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First, some background. For those using Word for Mac, you may already be familiar with Notebook Layout View from Word 2004. Notebook Layout View is a specialized notebook-like environment optimized for quick note-taking. By adopting the appearance of the familiar spiral paper-based notebook --- with notebook tabs and rule lines --- you can quickly capture thoughts and information as you would in an actual paper-based notebook. Notebook Layout View represented a new design philosophy in the development of Word for Mac. The premise of this new approach was to present a minimalist and “task-based” user interface in which 90% of Word’s typical UI is hidden and only exposing features relevant to the task at hand, in this case note-taking. Our customers have responded positively to this approach because the user interface is more approachable and less “bloated”, thereby making relevant features easier to find. I’m pleased to say that we’ve further streamlined and improved this popular feature in Word 2008, but that’s a subject for another blog post. :)

Now let’s fast-forward to Word 2008. For years we have known that Word is used to create a wide spectrum of documents that fall under two basic categories:

Text-centric documents --- these include manuscripts, reports, resumes, letters, etc.
Layout-rich documents --- these include newsletters, brochures, flyers, greeting cards, business cards, among others

Word has long provided a full complement of the features necessary for the creation of these two different categories of documents. However, given that all of such features were presented all at once with a single “one-size-fits-all” user interface, users found it difficult to find the right features for the right task.

Our previous efforts with Notebook Layout View allowed us to gain valuable insight and experience in crafting specialized working environments. By leveraging what we’ve learned from Word 2004, we set out to create Publishing Layout View --- a streamlined workspace optimized for creating professional layout-rich documents. By stripping away all the unnecessary controls in this special environment, we are able to elevate our desktop publishing-caliber tools with a greater level of cohesion, all without adversely impacting how users work in the standard view of Word. In this specialized environment, it's no coincidence that there is only one single horizontal toolbar, the Standard Toolbar --- in this case, less is more. Also, the basic metaphor of entering text is also markedly different --- text is entered through floating Text Boxes that the user can feely position anywhere on the page (and even off the page). No longer will text “get stuck” or “jump around” due to the properties of “inline text” --- which like the term itself --- is a mystery to anyone but the most advanced Word user.

In designing Publishing Layout View, we’ve taken a methodical approach to rethink how existing features work, and how to present them. Again, let’s take the most basic element --- the Text Box --- as an example. While Text Boxes in Word have long offered users the ability to establish connecting “links” between individual Text Boxes, it was neither obvious how to create such links, nor was it easy to determine the relative order of a linked Text Box within a “chain”. In Publishing Layout View, users can create a new linked Text Box directly from another Text Box. Also, at the moment a link is created, all Text Boxes within the new “chain” will pulse just once with a subtle blue halo to denote that a link has been created across the affected Text Boxes. When a link is broken, all Text Boxes within the chain will pulse with a subtle red halo to denote the chain has now been broken.

As shown above, to help users quickly identify the sequential ordering of linked Text Boxes within a document, we’ve provided a number badge that reveals the relative order when the mouse hovers over each Text Box. Moreover, given that complex layout rich documents like newsletter and brochures can have multiple Text Box “chains” within a document, Text Boxes are given color coded outlines (upon hover over) to indicate which “chain” it belongs to. These are just a few of the many new innovations we’ve added to Publishing Layout View.

What has made the creation of Publishing Layout View particularly exciting is that despite being the creators of the product, we are also target audiences ourselves. My first encounter with the Mac was during my high school days and the Mac introduced me to the power of desktop publishing --- while this was many many moons ago, this encounter left a lasting imprint on me. At the time, I was an editor-in-chief of one of my school’s student publications and I soon realized the amazing possibilities of desktop publishing even though the tools were still primitive compared to today’s standards. Yet years later, while our customers have been aware of Word’s powerful capabilities, many have not been able to fully tap these features and other dedicated DTP applications remain too high-end or intimidating for the majority of users. With Publishing Layout View, we were afforded with the exciting opportunity to go back to the drawing board and rethink how we could offer this powerful functionality with a more discoverable and intuitive user experience.

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As noted earlier, by offering a specialized working environment, we can elevate our desktop publishing-caliber tools without affecting how Word looks and behaves in the standard view. In Publishing Layout View only, the single Standard Toolbar features a special toolset containing the most commonly used commands and elements used for layout-rich documents. Our popular Formatting Palette is also designed to expose advanced typographical features that have long lived in the depths of Word’s user interface, unknown to many users.

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A new feature now accessible directly from Publisher Layout View’s Formatting Palette is the ability to turn on ligatures, allowing users to further tap the richness of many beautiful fonts on the Mac. From the first time I was introduced to ligatures back when Macintosh Classics were all the rage to the world of Intel-based Macs today, in between there was an emotional moment when I saw the very first ligature display on the screen inside Word.

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In Publishing Layout View, the keyboard combination of “Command + or –” now zooms in and zooms out as you would expect. However, we’ve you’ll also notice a new “Zoom Loupe” Tool. This is a new tool that allows you to target a specific area on the document, and then seamlessly zoom in and out with a single mouse movement. As quickly zooming in and out is one of the most common actions performed when creating a layout rich document, the Zoom Loup is a small but useful innovation that I wish I had many years ago (besides wishing that I could also travel back in time).

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To capture the very essence of what is commonly referred to as “desktop publishing”, we also examined the concept of a “desktop” in the context of the overall workflow. In Word, the content of a document lives on a page --- and this page is set on a background surface much like a piece of paper is set on an actual desk. In Publishing Layout View, users can place layout elements such as text, pictures, and shapes on what we refer to as a “pasteboard” during the layout process. Given that we also know that one’s workspace is often highly customized to one’s own tastes, we provide 14 different customizable pasteboards --- all of which reflect our aesthetic vision through high fidelity and photo-illustrative examples of real world materials. These different pasteboards also ensure that there is sufficient visual distinction between “special-purpose” and “standard” Word views.

While there are a long list of noteworthy features, I would like to shift focus to the actual Publishing Layout View designer templates. I believe that the output capabilities of a product can be better demonstrated by a collection of professionally created designer templates than a long bulleted feature list.

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The planning and creating of designer templates started as early as product development started. I have always maintained that instead of having the application drive template designs, it should be the other way around. That is to say, let’s not develop the product first and then come up with a collection of templates as an afterthought. Instead, we should start with a strong vision, understanding, and appreciation of what great output looks like, and then build the product and features that enable that vision. If a feature is just added for the sake of adding features, but cannot be used in a meaningful or integrated manner during document creation, then it is of little value to the overall product, and most importantly, to our customers. Also, with Office 2008, you will not find a “bajllion” new templates --- instead, our focus favors quality over quantity and our bar is higher than ever.

Two decades ago, the world saw the debut of the revolutionary product known as the Macintosh. One of the hallmarks of the Macintosh was that it introduced us to a new world of “desktop publishing” which forever changed the typesetting and personal computer industries. One of the overall pillars for Office 2008 is “great looking documents made easy” and Word 2008’s Publishing Layout View is a cornerstone of this effort. I have found Word 2008 to be my new application of choice for layout-rich documents and it is my hope that you will find Publishing Layout View to be your new freeform canvas for your boundless creativity.

Update on Office 2008 progress!

Geoff Price — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:08:00 GMT

Last Wednesday was our general “ZBB” target for the Office 2008 project, a major milestone on the road to release and something we’ve been pushing hard for over the past several months. We saw some fantastic surging by the development team to clear out backlogged product issues late into Wednesday night. Thursday, we sat down to review project status and metrics in depth, and to hear all teams report out on their plans and readiness to lock down for release. The bottom line takeaway that you may be most interested in: all teams have confirmed readiness to ship on the current schedule. As previously announced, this means RTM in December and general availability starting on January 15th (by region).

ZBB what? This stands for Zero Bug Bounce, or as alternately phrased, Zero Bug Backlog. At this point we have been logging, tracking and verifying all changes to the product in great detail for some time – collectively we refer to this list of logged issues as the “bug list”, though in reality it includes a variety of issues including bug/defect reports, tracking records for artwork or content, usability improvements, numerous suggestions (submitted by team members or beta testers, or representing customer or partner requests), and various other categories of issues. The ZBB milestone is defined as the date across which we will no longer carry logged product issues that are more than one week old. Hence, the “backlog” of issues has been cleared out, and all older pending decisions on what we are or are not going to change before we ship have been made. It also means that the developers have “caught up” or “outpaced” the incoming find rate of our test efforts.

From here on out, the focus is increasingly on lock down. We are testing for defects literally around the clock, using a variety of methods ranging from automated efforts such as “massive file testing” to targeted manual test passes and “ad hoc” free testing. We also continue to log and fix significant issues found in private beta testing. At this point we remain busy fixing bugs as they are found (any one of our millions of lines of code could be the source of a defect,) but there will now be increased scrutiny on making changes – i.e., is there sufficient customer need to justify a proposed code change given the associated risk of regression (the outside chance that making a given change causes a new and potentially more severe problem.) Stabilizing the product for release requires conscious commitment to slowing and eventually stopping the changes we’re making to it, and as a result we now start reviewing all proposed changes daily in “triage”.

I’d like to congratulate and thank everyone on the product team for an amazing effort on ZBB – our developers, testers and program managers have all done incredible work. I’d also like to thank every other person who has helped in the creation of Office 2008: planners, researchers, designers, artists, writers, editors, builders, product managers, recruiters, HR generalists, international teams, MVPs, beta testers, partners, vendors, contractors, our many friends at Apple, partners across Microsoft, and many others have all helped us get this far. Finally, a very sincere special thanks to all of our families and friends for their support during this push.

Collectively we’ve made nearly four years worth of heavy investment in modernization, improvements and features in Mac Office. We look forward to continuing to share more about the new suite here on the blog and out in the world straight through RTM and into next year. But, as folks like to say, at this stage of the project the most important feature is shipping.

We’re getting more excited about that feature every day.

Toolbox and Window Management

Bart Chellis — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:08:00 GMT

The Toolbox is a useful new collection of tools that was introduced in Office 2004. The primary concept was to prevent the possibility of many palettes being opened at once causing a window management problem for users. In general, it worked fairly well, however, it often collides with the Formatting Palette. In such instances, users have mentioned that they have to manage these two windows and that they take up a lot of valuable screen real estate. I personally find it annoying, especially when I am working on my laptop.

To address this primary problem of the Formatting Palette and the Toolbox windows taking up valuable screen real estate, we decided to integrate the Formatting Palette into the Toolbox as another client. Whew! Much nicer! In 2008, there is only one tool palette window... the Toolbox. Now, the first tool in the Toolbox is the Formatting Palette.

I think this brings all our palette-based tools together in a synergistic way. All tools are available in one location. Plus, now there is one less window that you have to manage and move around. For 2008, one of our goals was to streamline the user interface and this helps by reclaiming some of that valuable screen real estate.

Some customers have said they are distracted by the Fade feature, which turns the Formatting Palette partially transparent upon inactivity. The effect is cool and some people really like it. For me, I find it a bit distracting as I keep my desktop very cluttered and I end up turning it off. For 2008, we have added a new Collapse feature to the Toolbox. Users can click the Zoom/Resize button (the green button near the red Close button in the Title Bar) to collapse the Toolbox window to just the Title Bar and the Navigation Bar using a nice window-shade style roll-up effect. Clicking the button again will expand, or roll down, the Toolbox to full size. It is a relatively simple feature, but it allows you to get the Toolbox out of your way without completely closing it and, again helping to maximize screen real estate.

+ click to enlarge

To make it even easier, we have added an automatic collapse mechanism as well. By clicking the arrow button in the top right of the palette title bar, the Toolbox flips over to display the Toolbox Settings where you can set the Toolbox to Collapse after N seconds. The assumption is that if you haven’t used the Toolbox in a while, we can help by freeing up real estate.

Once the Toolbox has collapsed, you can click on any button in the Navigation Bar or the Zoom/Resize button to expand it back to full size. You can also double-click the Title Bar to collapse or expand the window, just like the ever-popular OS 9 WindowShade control panel feature. This automatic collapse feature will hopefully help prevent distraction and desktop clutter, while still providing a clearly visible Toolbox for the user to re-expand.

I know it may not sound like a lot, but we are really trying to think about how to improve the work environment. I am excited that we have been able to work on small details like this that help in refining the experience. Moving the Formatting Palette into the Toolbox and adding window-shade style collapsing has made a big difference for me and many customers testing the product. I find it easier to get to my tools now that they are located in the same place. Hopefully this will improve the experience for you.

The Chart is the Message

stuartde — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:17:00 GMT

Did you know that someone once wrote a book entitled How to Lie With Charts? It’s true; check it out. The book was a tongue-in-cheek welcome gift when I took over Excel program management. Truth be told, I haven’t read it. It could be quite good; the reviews on Amazon.com would suggest that it is. Maybe after we’ve shipped Office 2008 I’ll find time to give it a once over. Then again, a small mountain of books piled up over the last few years. Reading about charts may not be that high on my list after Macworld!

The reason I write about it today is that the book (which occupies a prominent spot on my shelf) subversively illuminates an Office pillar: communication. I think we take charts for granted; pies and columns and bars have woven themselves into our pop culture fabric. We see them in newspapers, magazines, and television. Charts help us make important decisions, they can make us laugh, and they inspire us to think about things differently. Like any medium, charts can be used to misinform or illuminate. People choose the message; charts are but one way to express a point.

I’m a designer by experience, so I “get” charts. A line going up versus down speaks volumes to me. I must have created thousands of charts over the twenty years I’ve used Mac Excel (but who really tracks exact numbers for that kind of thing; not me, I suppose). I fancied myself something of an expert when it came to chart creation. I knew how to manipulate Office to create what I then thought to be great looking results. Heck, for years the only way you could create a chart with transparent fills was to use Mac Excel! I didn’t think we had room to improve, at least not in any significant way.

In 2004, when I read that Windows Office 2007 was revamping their charting engine, the skeptic in me snickered. They’d catch up with us at best, I thought. Maybe they’d finally be able to do transparency! Then I saw a few chart examples from our friends across the way. Photoshop mockups, I muttered to myself, nothing more. But they kept at it and darned if I wasn’t a fool for making silly assumptions. The fact is, the new charts in Office 2007 look great.

Fast forward to the present day. Over the last few years we’ve rebuilt our charting engine from the ground up. Every dialog, button, and pixel has been reborn. Charts looked great in Mac Office 2004. In Mac Office 2008 they look spectacular! Check it out – here’s a chart from Excel 2004:

I spent a lot of time getting that chart to look a certain way, and I wasn’t born with that skill. Now, the same chart in Excel 2008:

To be fair, the angle is slightly different, but you get the effect (and the above shot is from a recent build of Excel 2008). I think the difference is incredible – and humbling. The Windows Office team did great work, and our top-notch engineering team brought it to the Mac (and, soon, to you).

Of course, this wasn’t a simple job of porting code. Sure, we share some things in common with our Windows Office counterparts. That’s important, because you want your chart layout to look the same on Mac and Windows. But Mac Office leverages Apple’s Quartz APIs to render breathtaking results – as you can plainly see, above.

Better still, we’re still using the Mac Office user interface Mac users are familiar with. For starters, putting a chart in any Office file is a whole lot easier. You can pick from a variety of charts in the Elements Gallery, which is available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel:

Once you do that, all the major formatting controls are a mouse-click away in the Formatting Palette. If you prefer, deeper control is available through formatting dialogs. And, with Office 2008, all formatting can be done directly inside Word or PowerPoint in addition to Excel. This will let you format the chart in the file you’re working on, as opposed to switching back and forth from app to app. Really, all you need Excel for is to change the data itself. I’m pretty happy with it, and I suspect many of you will be, too.

Of course, we’re still not done. It’s been a long road to get to the point we’re at now. I guess it’s not surprising that rebuilding a major component of Office would be rather hard. Even so, we’ve got an incredible team of smart people working hard every day. I know, because I get questions from them all the time! Charts are full of twists, turns, and special cases. Working on this has been a lot of fun, despite some really (really) long days.

I walked into this challenge naively assuming I knew most everything about charting. Over time I've come to see that no communication tool is simple, especially one that conveys numerical data visually in so many different ways. Maybe that’s obvious to some, but it was a lesson in humility for me. A chart isn’t a picture it’s a language. That’s why a book can teach people how to lie with them. The grammar of charts is what allows comedians to be funny and thinkers to make decisions. In the end, I understand that charts are a phenomenally powerful medium. I can’t wait to see your ideas!

OfficeArt Unleashed

Derek Snook — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:20:00 GMT

You’ve been reading about our goal to make great looking documents easier in Office 2008, and this includes the document graphics you use to express ideas and emotions. The Art of Office is a reminder that picture formatting and drawing tools are well-established in the Office suite, but Office 2008 takes this to a new level. First, let’s take a look back.

A long, long time ago (before Office 97-98), Word, Excel, and PowerPoint each had their own individual drawing engines for creating graphics. Actually, if you go too far back you end up with just PowerPoint’s drawing engine, which was richer in many ways than what Word and Excel first derived, and ultimately became the model for the shared drawing engine in Office 97-98, code-named “Escher”.

Escher brought a detailed array of shapes, lines, WordArt, and formatting choices to the Office suite. It was powerful if you could master it, but it was also relentlessly easy to create boring presentations and diagrams. Default objects tended to be bland, and it could take several minutes of formatting objects to awaken the inner beauty of Escher. For Mac Office, our recent releases have made strides toward better document graphics with soft shadows and improved transparency, but the opportunity still remained for dramatic improvement: smarter defaults, richer formatting options, and a more powerful rendering engine.

Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, like its sibling Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows, introduces the new OfficeArt engine, called “Escher 2.0” internally. OfficeArt is a complete refresh of the Office drawing engine with the goal of making it easier and quicker to create modern, vibrant document graphics across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It was important to use the same underlying engine as Office 2007 to provide compatibility for document objects and formatting options, though under the hood we employ Quartz and other Mac OS X technologies for rendering and some enhanced features.

The “Quick Styles and Effects” panel in the Formatting Palette provides a hub of one-click formatting presets to style the OfficeArt graphics in your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Here you'll find one-stop shopping for soft shadows, glows, reflections, 3-D effects, and text transformations. Choose a Quick Style that applies a designer set of formatting choices together. Above, in a single click on a picture Quick Style, I have applied a white border, shadow, and 3-D rotation to a photo of my son for a nifty layout on a cover page.

You can tweak additional detail in the Format dialog, with your changes updating graphics in the document as you make them, without leaving the dialog. 3-D rotation and formatting has been updated to provide true 3-D renderings, with optional bevels and contours. Text on OfficeArt objects has its own Format dialog with the same kind of power - add a gradient fill, reflection, or shadow to the text directly.

The OfficeArt formatting that you can put on shapes is also available for pictures, charts, and SmartArt. Your graphics can also adopt the document theme you’re working with, including fonts and color scheme, providing a unified look and feel. You’ll learn more about SmartArt and themes in Office 2008 in this blog as we continue the Sneak Peek.

With a few clicks, you'll add polished graphics to your document, or explore a little more and unleash your inner artist. OfficeArt is an amazing toolbox for communicating your ideas, and it’s a pretty good sandbox for playing with your ideas, too.

“Velkommen, Tervetuloa, Velkommen” and “Bienvenue à Paris”

eric.paquin — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:50:00 GMT

So the cat is out of the bag! This morning, as the doors to Apple Expo opened, we officially announced the availability of Office 2008 worldwide from January 15 (dates will vary by markets). As part of the announcement, we also announced a new “Nordic Pack” that will include localized version of Danish, Finnish and Norwegian. Actually, Office is not the first product we offer in these languages; some of you might have noticed that the Messenger 6.0.3 update silently included them!

This means that between Office 2004 and 2008 we will have added 5 new languages (with Italian and Dutch for 2004). The localization team in Dublin has been working really hard the last few months to bring you all these flavours of Office 2008 (taking into consideration all the different flavours in the different languages, we will be signing off on 45 variations). In between the release of Office 2004 and now, we have been improving our processes to be able to introduce new languages in a more efficient and timely manner. It’s great for our team to see new languages coming to Office (for one, it keeps us really busy!).

We are now truly embarking the “Road to Ship”! With the new Mac Office 2008 website launched last week revealing some new features, it also means we can start showing Office in public! This starts this week at Apple Expo! I’ll also be showing Office 2008 at Apple Expo in Paris “en français s’il-vous-plaît!” So if you are around and want to discover the power of Office, drop by the Microsoft stand – 3 demos a day (12h30, 15h30 and 17h). I am really excited of finally being able to show you a product I’ve been working on for nearly 3 years now!

The show starts today and I will post my first impressions as soon as I have a few more minutes!

À bientôt!

Eric

Hello from Paris Expo!

sherjo — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:44:00 GMT

Amanda Lefebvre and I are here at Paris Expo - we're just ready to go over to the show floor now for the first time,and today we'll be talking to folks from Macworld UK, MacUser, MacFormat, ZDNet France and some other French outlets too, not to mention lots of customers.! Nous ne parlons pas beaucoup de Francais, so we'll probably stick to mostly English :-), and we finally get to talk about our new product line-ups (we've added a Special Media Edition, which includes Microsoft Expression Media digital asset management system) as well as the addition of three new languages - Danish, Finnish & Norwegian (the "Nordic Pack".) We're also announcing for many countries our Technology Guarantee: starting today (September 25th), if you buy Office 2004 for Mac, you will get Office 2008 for Mac after it launches in January for the cost of shipping and handling, so no risk if you're upgrading your Mac this week and want to make sure you're getting the latest!

We've already gotten some coverage from some of the pre-briefings that Amanda and Craig Eisler did last week, and Eric Pacquin from our Dublin subsidiary will be blogging live from the floor today in between presentations. Viva la France - today the Expo, tonight a stroll on the Champs-élysées tonight - I can't wait to meet up with all of our friends from our subsidiaries and other folks we haven't seen for ages. Watch for Eric's post later today!

Bonjour! Sheridan

Associated Press - Microsoft sets Office 2008 prices for Macs

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/software/2007-09-25-microsoft-office2008-mac_N.htm

CNET - Microsoft sets pricing on Office 2008 for Mac

http://www.news.com/Microsoft-sets-pricing-on-Office-2008-for-Mac/2100-1012_3-6209269.html

Seattle PI - Mac Office 2008 prices, packages announced / Prices set for Mac '08 editions

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/122399.asp?from=blog_last3

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/332962_macoffice25.html

TUAW - Office 2008 for Mav versions and pricing announced

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/25/office-2008-for-mac-versions-and-pricing-announced/

Macworld - Microsoft details Office 2008 for Mac pricing

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/09/24/officemac/index.php

ArsTechnica - Microsoft announces Mac Office 2008 pricing, upgrade details

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/09/24/microsoft-announces-mac-office-2008-pricing-upgrade-details