Intro/ Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Welcome to the Microsoft Office Word Team's blog; your source for all things Word related. I'm Jonathan Bailor, a program manager on the Word team. I joined the Word program management team about a year ago and before that interned as a program manager for the MSN Search team.
My focus over the past year has been on the compatibility of the new default file formats of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 with previous releases of those applications. I'll have a post dedicated to compatibility with Word 2007 in the coming weeks, but in the mean time, check out the Compatibility Pack . The Compatibility Pack allows previous versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to read and write our new default formats…I think that's pretty cool.
Anyway, since Word 2007 has obviously been in the works for over a year, I actually started on the Word team as we were approaching our Beta 1 release. Translation: If you have tried the beta of Word 2007, I can empathize with trying to take all of Word 2007 in at once; my first exposure to Word 2007 was a beta as well (beta 1). So, while I am not going to be the guy that can give you an in depth historical account of Word, I am the guy who can clearly remember life before Word 2007. And don't worry; we got plenty of other people here that can post all about the history of Word if you'd like to hear about it.
One thing that joining the Word team right around Beta 1 enabled me to do was to literally sit in my office and play with all of Word 2007 at once. I didn't have any preconceptions or any previous exposure to Word 2007 before I saw it in beta, and I was pretty blown away by it. In fact, I think I may have gotten a bit too excited. See, my first project on the Word team was to demo the new version of Word at an internal trade show we do every few years, so the Office teams can "show off" the latest version of their app. In the wake of my excitement, my teammate Zeyad and I ended up delivering more of an infomercial than a presentation. We were right on the edge of offering a free version of Word 2007 if the audience bought a copy within the next fifteen minutes. This was also before I understood how expense reports worked, and I spent $600 on buttons that said MICROSOFT WORD SWEEPS THE NATION! Oh well, I guess any publicity is good publicity, right? Good times. Good times.
Seeing the forest for the trees
Anyway, aside from allowing me to make a fool of myself in front of the rest of the Office team, this top-down exposure and investigation on Word 2007 allowed the luxury of "seeing the forest for the trees". What I mean here is that program managers are generally given the task of becoming "feature experts"—knowing everything there is to know about a specific feature—and while I ended up taking on this role for the Compatibility Pack, I also had the opportunity to step back and take in Word 2007 as a whole. I was exposed to all of the things new to Word 2007 at once—the features, formats, and UI—and was then able to sit down with the creators and have them explain the method behind their madness.
Put simply, the Word team showed me the forest for the trees; they showed me how the new features, the new formats, and the new UI fit together in a way that drastically changes the way Word can be used to create documents. It's been a while since a version of Word has tried to change the basic way documents are created, and the hope is that the change is for the good.
In an effort to share this experience with you, over the next few posts, I'd like to take a shot at discussing 'the forest'. Specifically, I'd like to chat about some of the basic Word scenarios we tried to improve with this release. "Scenario" is a term we use internally to refer to a situation our customers face that we'd like to improve with our software. For example, "Tim sits down at a computer and wants to write a report." is a very basic scenario Word 1 targeted. Our scenarios are a bit more ambitious now.
As we discuss these Word 2007 scenarios, we will not dive deep into any specific features, but if you'd like to hear more about a given feature we touch on, please let me know and I'll queue those topics up. If nothing else, these scenarios should give you a bit of context such that future feature specific posts will make a bit more sense.
In sum, the next few posts will not be focused on individual features, or specific benefits of the new default format (Brian's blog), or the paradigms behind the new UI (Jensen's blog). Instead, these posts will discuss scenarios we hope Word 2007 as a whole will add value to.
Here's to the forest.
Jonathan Bailor
Program Manager
Microsoft Office Word
