Scenario: Creating a 21st Century Document

If you don't want to read this whole post, but would like to see a demo of how Word 2007 makes it easy to create 21^st Century/professional looking documents, you can check out this post's video. But, the post's got some good stuff in it too :)

One of the core scenarios we targeted with Word 2007 is creating what we call "21^st Century Documents", easily (easily is the key here). 21^st Century Documents are simply documents that look professional, i.e. they look like someone with design skill created them, i.e. they have more formatting applied to them than just bold, italics, and underlines. And while enabling professional looking documents has been possible in Word for a while, it has not been easy. Just like a big toolbox does not mean it's easy to build a house, similarly, hundreds, if not thousands, of formatting options does not mean it's easy to create a 21^st Century Document.

And this brings us to our first scenario which targets a fictional young business woman named Sara. Sara is a thirty-five year old consultant from Chicago who lives in Word. Her days are filled writing reports, memos, and proposals, and she's good at it; writing that is. She's not a designer, and when it comes to formatting, she'd rather be writing. But, Sara knows that the presentation of information is often as important as the information itself. Because of this, she has a love/hate relationship with Word: she loves Word as a writing environment, but hates the amount of time she spends formatting her content. Sara loves Word because of its richness and hates Word because of its richness. Can you blame her? I can't.

So in Word 2007, we tried to make it quantifiably quicker and easier for people like Sara to create 21^st Century Documents. To show you what I mean, consider a day in the life of Sara…

Sara starts her day in the Windy city of Chicago by sorting through the fifty or so emails she had gotten since eight PM the night before. After checking out her email, Sara blocks off the next hour to write-up a brief report for her client Contoso. After fifty-five minutes she has her proposal written up and five minutes left to make it look good.

Here's what she's got: four paragraphs, four headers, and a lot of Arial 11 point font

(I apologize for the resolution limitations of these images)

In the next five minutes and Word 2003, she would likely end up with this: a simple cover page, some bold and italics formatting, and some larger text.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this document; it only took five minutes to format, and where would be without bold & underlined text :) . But, Sara could have formatted this document in five minutes with Word '95. In other words, it is not a 21^st century document.

Consider the same scenario with Word 2007. Using the new features Quick Styles, Style Sets, Live Preview, Document Building Blocks, Content Controls, and Themes, Sara can create the following 21^st Century Document in five minutes (there's that infomercial vibe):

To keep me honest you can actually watch me format this document in less than five minutes in this video.

You can watch this in the video above, but here are the five basic steps I (I mean Sara) took to create this document.

Step 1

First, Sara uses Quick Styles Sets.

Now she's got a document that looks like this:

Step 2

Second, she uses Document Building blocks to insert a header and footer.

Which gives her:

Step 3

Third, she toggles the color, font, and styles used in the document simultaneously by changing her document Theme:

This gives her:

Step 4

Next, she inserts a cover page that is automatically populated with the document's properties (I don't mean to give off a black box vibe here. The specific feature that enables this called Content Controls, and it will have a dedicated post in the coming weeks.).

Which gives her:

Step 5

Finally, she can change the color scheme of her whole document.

Which results in the finished 21^st Century Document:

Also, as Sara goes through each step of this, she can preview all of these changes before she makes them (we call this "Live Preview"…which you can see in the video of this demo or if you play with the Beta of Word 2007).

And there she has it, a 21^st Century Document in about the same amount of time it would take her to create her bold and underline masterpiece. I think that is pretty cool.

I know we just touched on a bunch of features. Specifically, we mentioned:

• Quick Styles Sets (Step 1)
• Document Building Blocks (Steps 2 & 4)
• Content Controls (Steps 2 & 4)
• Themes (Steps 3 & 5)
• Live Preview (Steps 1-5) 

That's a lot. But, that's the whole point. To demo how a bunch of the features new to Word 2007 and the new UI combine to make Sara, you, and me look like we are designers with some time on our hands; to try and reveal at least part of the forest instead of getting hung-up on the trees, at least not yet.

Let me know what you think…

Jonathan Bailor

Program Manager

Microsoft Office Word