A few weeks back we talked about co-authoring in pretty good depth (Word: Co-authoring – Where we are Coming From & Word: Co-authoring (i.e. Simultaneous Editing) in Word 2010).
If you want something a bit more high-level that covers co-authoring in not only Word, but also in PowerPoint and OneNote 2010 here's a three minute overview video.
We'd love to know what you think of it.
- Jonathan Bailor
We are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Word 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for you to download at www.microsoft.com/2010.
We've talked in a bit of detail about the goodness of Word 2010 in these posts, and our friends in marketing put together a handy top 10 list here. In addition to these new features and experiences you'll find a lot of fit and finish, performance, and stability improvements since our technical preview. If this is the first time you'll experience Word 2010, we highly recommend reading Scott's framing post before jumping in.
Grab the beta (click "Get It Now" on upper right-hand side of the page) and let us know what you think.
- The Word Team
Over the last couple of months, we've posted about many of the exciting new features of Word 2010 – Co-authoring, the new Find experience, and the Word Web App. This week, at SharePoint Conference 2009, we announced one more (and one that I'm especially excited about): Word Automation Services.
In the post on framing the Word 2010 release, one of the pillars described is "Word Power in New Contexts". Word Automation Services is a big part of that pillar, and represents our desire to ensure that the power and functionality of Word is available beyond the desktop; in this case, by enabling developers to harness the capabilities of Word on the server as part of SharePoint 2010.
Word Automation Services
Have you ever wanted to convert .docx files into PDF? We've heard from many customers trying to perform server side conversions of Open XML files (.docx) into fixed formats (PDF and XPS) using the Word desktop application, and that's what motivated us to create Word Automation Services.
As a component of SharePoint 2010, Word Automation Services allows you to perform file operations on the server that previously required automating desktop Word:
- Converting between document formats (e.g. DOC to DOCX)
- Converting to fixed formats (e.g. PDF or XPS)
- Updating fields
- Importing "alternate format chunks"
- Etc.
If you've done any automation of Word, you're probably familiar with the challenges of doing so – challenges well documented by this Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757. With Word Automation Services, those challenges are a thing of the past:
- Reliability – The service was built from the ground up to work in a server environment, which means that you no longer have to worry about issues like dialog boxes that bring the process to a halt, expecting a user to provide input; creating interactive user accounts under which to run the application to avoid running into permissions issues, etc.
- Speed – The service is optimized to perform server-side file operations, and in doing so provides performance significantly better than existing solutions.
- Scalability – The service can take advantage of the processing power available on typical server hardware (multiple processors, additional memory). For example, although a single instance of WINWORD.EXE can only utilize a single core of processing power, with Word Automation Services, you can specify the number of simultaneous conversions (and the # of processing cores) to use based on the available hardware.
And you still have a solution that has 100% fidelity with respect to the Word desktop application – documents are paginated the same way on the server as they are on the client, ensuring that what you see on the client is what you get from the server.
In future posts, I'll spend some time digging into exactly how the service works, as well as each of these benefits of the service in further detail.
Word Automation Services and the Open XML SDK: Better Together
One of the most important things to understand about the service is what it doesn't do: this service is not intended to be a 1:1 replacement for the existing desktop object model.
Instead, the server is one half of a replacement for the existing object model – the other half being the Open XML SDK.
- The SDK is designed to handle tasks that don't require application logic, such as inserting or deleting content (paragraphs, tables, pictures), inserting data from other data sources, sanitizing content (removing content, accepting tracked changes), etc.
- The service is designed to handle those few tasks that do need application logic: reading all of the document formats that Word supports, converting to all of the output format that Word supports, recalculating dynamic fields, etc.
The two halves together enable the creation of rich, end-to-end solutions that never require automation of the client applications, yet sacrifice none of its capabilities – another topic we'll discuss in more detail in the future.
I wanted to keep this introductory post short, but there's a lot we'll talk about in the coming weeks – this service is a big part of our vision of "Word power in new contexts", and should change the way you think about and build document-based solutions on the server.
- Tristan
Today is a great day for the Office 2010 team!. As Nick Simons posts on the Office Web Apps blog:
We are making available Excel, Word and PowerPoint Web Apps for a select group of Windows Live users as part of the Office Web Apps Technical Preview. While the initial functionality is modest it will expand over time. As we get closer to the release of Office 2010 we will make the Office Web Apps available to more Windows Live users.
This early peek at the Office Web Apps will include high-fidelity viewing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser. Invitees will also be able to edit Excel and PowerPoint files. Over time we'll add OneNote Web App and the ability to edit Word files as well. Stay tuned to this blog to hear more about the upcoming features.
If you weren't one of the folks that received an invitation today, sign up for early notification about Office 2010 Beta and we will let you know when you can try it out too.
Brian Hall from Windows Live has also written more detail about the Office Web Apps on Windows Live -- check out his post on the Windows Live blog.
- Stuart J. Stuple (MS)
When we first started blogging about Word 2007, we talked a lot about 21st Century Documents. Our vision was that Word 2007 would allow authors to easily create much richer documents (Quick Styles, Themes, SmartArt, Picture Styles, Building Blocks, etc.). In Word 2010, our cutting-edge authoring pillar builds on the 21st Century Documents vision in that 21st Century Documents often have multiple authors. To accommodate this, we're working to make co-authoring as natural as solo-authoring. Here's how…
Co-authoring 21st Century Documents
At the end of my last post, the question of the day was: "What if co-authoring rich documents just worked?" What if we could let multiple authors focus on producing great looking documents, rather than being disrupted by multiple versions, getting locked-out of the document, or limited features and formatting preventing them from creating professional looking documents?
When thinking about how to answer these questions for Word, we focused on three key rules:
- Starting co-authoring needs to "just work"
- We need to maintain the normal Word author experience while co-authoring
- Authors need to know who's doing what when while co-authoring
Starting Co-Authoring Needs to "Just Work"
From a design perspective, this part was pretty easy, thanks to the groundwork laid by our authoring cohorts in OneNote. In OneNote 2007, if three members of a workgroup need to update a notebook at the same time, they all just open the notebook and update it. This is the much like model for how shared documents work in Word 2010.
For example, let's say you, Sean, and I need to co-author a proposal. I'm from engineering, Sean's from marketing, and you are the project manager—serving more of a reviewer role. In Word 2007, we'd each have our respective areas of the document that we're responsible for—I do the technical details and Sean covers how we'll sell it, and you make sure everything we're saying is in line with the company strategy—and then we'd go off and individually draft our sections, bring our drafts together, and then you'd do your best to copy and paste everything together. From that point on we'd pass around versions with Comments and Tracked Changes until you did a second manual merge and called it good.
With our understanding how authors already collaborate on Word documents, we wanted to ease this process in Word 2010, rather than try to get authors to change the way they work. In Word 2010, you, Sean, and I can still divide up the work, co-author, review, and finalize just like we always would; but now we can do all of that in a single shared document. Sean and I can be authoring away, and you can begin reviewing the document.
You'll just see a little toast from the status bar when you open the document so that you know that you aren't alone.
You can also click the little pawns in the status bar to see the other authors in the document.
This is what we mean by starting co-authoring needs to "just work." In the scenario above, nobody did anything out of the ordinary with the shared document. We worked the way we're used to; it's just a lot easier now because we no longer need to take turns or merge different versions of the document together.
We Need to Maintain the Normal Word Author Experience While Co-authoring
While it's certainly helpful to no longer get locked out of files, there are other big questions when it comes to simultaneously editing rich business-critical Word documents like proposals, reports, articles, etc. Not to trivialize the simple "getting started" experience, but simply getting more than one author into a document at the same time is just the beginning. What makes or breaks the Word co-authoring experience is the design of the actual experience when you start authoring with others.
For example, authors shouldn't lose any of the richness or control that they are used to in Word just because another author opens the document. Similarly, authors shouldn't have their edits prematurely shared with reviewers or have other authors' edits unexpectedly shift their view of the document around. After all, the point of our collaborative authoring investment is to eliminate disruptions (e.g., lots of versions, getting locked-out, etc.), not to introduce new disruptions (e.g., losing features, losing control, etc.). The goal has to be to make existing workflows easier in Word, not to force new workflows in Word.
Full Feature Set
To this point, essentially all of the rich editing and formatting features in Word 2010 are available regardless of the number of authors working on the document. Going back to the scenario of you, Sean, and I working on the proposal, you can review with Comments and Tracked Changes like you always would. It's just that now you can do it without worrying about being locked out of the document or without worrying about compiling revisions from a bunch of versions.
Controlled Sharing
Along with being used to having all of Word at their disposal, authors already have a mental model for how to share changes when authoring a shared Word document: They save. When you are reviewing the proposal from Sean and me, I certainly do not want you to review the paragraph that I am working on until I am done with it.
Generally speaking, most authors of Word documents don't want their half-formulated thoughts automatically shared with other authors or reviewers. That's why we designed Word co-authoring such that authors explicitly save to share their changes. We respect authors' existing model of save-to-share, and we don't force authors to share their changes before they are ready.
The other half of sharing is important too—that is, how you get other people's changes. Again, we really have to think about Word scenarios like collaborating on complex papers, legal briefs, and newsletters, and consider that in conjunction with the fact that Word is a flow based text editor. Because authors spend a great deal of time fine-tuning content and layout, and because changes to content or layout reflows the entire document, we have to think hard about how merging other authors changes into the document fits into the scenario.
For example, it would be bad if you were struggling to get the wording of a paragraph just right and unexpectedly had:
- a picture from another author plopped right next to where you were working
- your document layout changed to two columns
- your screen shifted around and your cursor scrolled off the screen
Any of those experiences would really disrupt the scenario, and disruption is exactly what we're trying to avoid.
To avoid disrupting focused editing, we decided on a "get updates" model that does three things:
- Notifies authors that updates are available to their document in real-time
- Enables authors to control when they see others' changes (they do this the same way they share their changes, by saving the document)
- Prevents other authors' changes from moving your cursor position on the screen
Note the new QAT Save icon and status bar Updates Indicator for shared documents
By providing authors with real-time status on update availability, giving authors control over when they see others' changes, and locking cursor position when the document is saved, Word prevents disruption to authors' normal Word editing experience.
In sum, you, Sean, and I could edit our proposal just like we are used to—with all the power of Word, saving to share our changes, and without worrying about the document unpredictably changing from underneath us—it's just a lot more seamless now. We "simply" take an augmented version of our document merge code and automatically combine the changes other authors saved with your changes when you save (we will go into a lot more technical depth on this in the future).
Authors Need to Know Who's Doing What When While Co-authoring
The last core piece of the model for co-authoring in Word has to do with other authors. Up to this point we've only talked about "your" experience. That is, you just open the document, you can use all of Word's features, you control when others see your changes and when you see their changes…but what about everyone else?
If you think about Word document collaboration today, everything is done in silos. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing. We're all working on our own versions because we each have our own copies or because we have to work one after another to avoid getting locked out of the document. Because of this, work often gets wasted. You get versions of the document back from Jane and Steve where Jane's edits don't make any sense given Steve's edits. Or you have three people fix the same spelling mistake.
"Siloing" is one primary aspects of document collaboration today that we wanted to change with co-authoring. When you bring simultaneous edits into the mix, having a way to prevent authors from conflicting with one another's changes moves from a "nice to have" to a "must."
We avoid siloing and conflicting edits by providing real-time presence, paragraph by paragraph, in co-authored documents. While co-authoring, you will see where other authors are editing as they edit, and the other authors will see where you are editing as you edit. You don't need to press a button to let others know where you are; Word keeps everyone's presence in sync in real-time automatically.
You can also go beyond seeing where other authors are working and avoiding conflicting edits and IM, email, or call them right from within Word.
So the model for co-authoring in Word is basically: collaborate just like you do today on shared documents, except have visibility into what others are doing and don't worry about myriad versions or getting locked out. Word acts like it normally does; you just open, add and edit rich content, and press save to share. The one new bit is that since multiple authors are editing at the same time, you see where everyone is, and everyone sees where you are, so that you don't conflict with one another.
So if you, Sean, and I are working on that proposal:
- We still work out that I'll take care of the technical content, Sean will write the marketing content, and you will review everything.
- Sean and I get started on the document and then you come along and open it. You see the little toast and Sean's name and my name on all the paragraphs we're currently editing (see earlier screen shots).
- You then go on and use Word like you always would to review or edit, and all the while we all know where everyone one else is so that we don't waste work or conflict with one another.
- When I finish making some changes, I share them as I normally would in Word: by saving.
- You and Sean get a real-time notification in the status bar and next to the area of the document that I finished-up editing that updates are available.
- You're ready to share the revisions you've made, and you're ready to review mine, so you save. Sean and I are notified of your changes, your view of the document updates with my changes, and everything I added has a green overlay on top of it so you can easily find it and review it.
You maintained your normal Word experience, and everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Again, the hope is to make the existing Word document collaboration scenarios easier, not to force authors to change the way they collaborate on documents.
That's the general design, please let me know what you think.
- Jonathan Bailor (MS)
A big part of Word 2010 is enabling what we call cutting-edge authoring. Cutting-edge authoring is all about making deep enhancements in the core document creation experience in Word, given the types of documents people are creating today (i.e., a lot more than just plain text) and the way people are creating documents today (i.e., authoring with more than one person).
In this post, I'll focus on cutting-edge collaborative authoring, give a brief history of the types of collaborative authoring investments we've made in the past, and touch on some recent authoring trends that influenced our deep investment in cutting-edge collaborative authoring in Word 2010.
In the Beginning Was the Digital Word…
…and the digital word wasn't especially collaborative. Back when the first version Word was released in 1983, authoring digital documents was typically a solo activity. Generally, an author typed their document, printed it, and shared the printed copies. Feedback from other authors was either verbal or it was written on the printed copies.
As the years went on, we still saw only limited examples of authors sharing and collaborating on digital documents. We did, however, see more emphasis on moving digital documents between different versions of Word and other applications. Authors started to ask themselves, "Will my document look the same in this version as it did in the last version?" and "What if I wrote this document in another word-processing application?"
These questions led to Word's very first collaboration-esque features; features that focused on moving documents between other versions and applications. For example, Word added compatibility options to maximize version-to-version visual fidelity, and import/export converters to help with application compatibility.
And Then There Was Email
The big shift towards collaborating on digital documents came with email. As email use became more mainstream (i.e., you could assume that all of your co-authors had email), collaboration on digital documents made a big move towards center stage. Suddenly, there were visions of the "paperless office" and digital documents flew from inbox to inbox. With an easy distribution medium, people started the document collaboration experience that is still the norm today:
Email certainly made sending and receiving documents easier, but unfortunately it did not do a lot in terms of the experience around collaboratively editing documents. You now had a lot of different versions of the document sitting in your digital inbox instead of in your physical inbox. Granted, digital copies were nice because you could use copy and paste, but you still needed to spend a bunch of time managing all of the versions. It was essentially the same experience that you had with printed copies, except that the copies were easier to send and receive. And actually, the ability to more easily send and receive lots of documents wasn't necessarily a good thing. Just like credit cards digitizing money made spending money much easier and more frequent, email digitizing document sharing made sending copies much easier and more frequent.
In fact, when you collaborate on a document via email attachments, you easily have upwards of n copies of the document, where n is the number of people on the email, times the number drafts you send out, plus the number of drafts you start with.
(recipients x drafts) + drafts = # of documents
So if you send five other authors a draft of your TPS report, and repeat the process two more times, then you may have 18 copies of your TPS report—(5 recipients x 3 drafts emailed) + 3 drafts on your hard drive—and one very unhappy person who has to manually merge the 18 copies into one. This manual merging process is why email-based document collaboration often ends with documents with titles like:
TPS Report_SallysChanges_TomsChanges_NeedBills_AddSummary_3rdReview_Thursday.docx
File Shares and SharePoint
Another option authors used for sharing and collaborating on digital documents was the file share (and eventually document management systems like SharePoint). Unlike email, these document management systems provided a single "shared" document people hoped would avoid the need for multiple copies and manual merging. But the document wasn't truly shared because in reality only one author could edit it at a time. Things would start-off well—you'd have one shared version of the document (whoohoo)—but if anyone wanted to edit the document while someone else had the file opened, they got locked out, saved a copy locally, and started the multiple copies nightmare again (d'oh). And who could blame them? There's little else quite as frustrating as having a half hour to polish up a document only to see this dialog box when you go to edit it:
More and More Collaboration Features
Over time, we added more and more features in Word to dull the pain of email and file share collaboration. Change tracking and commenting, useful even while authoring alone, were especially useful when working with other authors. You still had to manually merge and make sense of all the copies of the document, but at least you only had to review the changes (track changes) and co-authors could make suggestions without impacting the layout of the document (comments). When it came to dealing with the actual versions of the document, document merge was a big step forward, and in Office 2003 we paired document merge with Document Workspaces, so that you could publish your document to SharePoint, invite authors, and manage the collaboration right within Word.
The Next Step
The next step, though, was to think less in terms of adding individual collaboration features, and to think more about making collaborative authoring "just work" in Word. We wanted authors to be able to focus entirely on producing great content. We wanted to completely eliminate the pain of multiple versions and file locking instead of simply helping authors deal with the pain. We wanted to cure the disease instead of treating the symptoms.
And our push to make seamless and natural co-authoring a core part of Word couldn't have come at a better time. With the Web 2.0 movement becoming mainstream, so did the expectation that co-authoring should just work. In fact, we saw that in certain situations easy collaboration was so important that people were willing to trade rich features and formatting for it. A great example of this is from the Web 2.0 world is the wiki. There had been many examples of wiki-like solutions in the past, but the difference in the Web 2.0 era was that wiki-like collaboration was mainstream; even at the cost of the features and formatting. Trading features and functionality for easy collaboration is quite a compelling statement about the pains of email and file share collaboration. Authors were simply done with the hassle of myriad versions and getting locked out. They just wanted to author, and they needed to author with others.
And that's just what wikis enabled. One wiki is stored in a shared location. If you want to change the wiki, you change the wiki. Not one of 18 versions of the wiki that reflects Tom's first set of changes, Sally's second set of changes, and no changes from Steve or Mary. And authors don't save local copies, because they don't get locked out of the wiki. Everyone can edit the wiki anytime. Instead of multiple copies of the document, each with one author, you now have one copy of a document with multiple authors. Instead of a shared document that locked everyone out, you now have a shared document that everyone can actually share. And just like that, the whole manually merging myriad copies and file-locking hassle was gone.
I Just Want to Write, With Others
A wiki's ability to let authors focus more on writing and less on managing or creating versions was super interesting to us. Here you have wikis, which despite their very basic feature set, changed the authoring game thanks to that fact that they were natively collaborative. Other compelling features available to wiki authors include the simple nature in which you can link to/create other content, but it was the popularity of the wiki's collaborative authoring functionality that stood out to us, because it was similar to the direction we had been heading in terms of making co-authoring "just work" in Word.
So the question is: How can we get rid of the either/or? What if you didn't have to give up features, functionality, and familiarity to easily collaborate with others on a single document? What if you could focus on authoring rich documents while not worrying about managing who's doing what when on which version, and how or if you'll be able make sense of it on Friday afternoon? What if co-authoring rich documents just worked?
I mentioned some of the work we've done to address this in the "Introducing Word 2010" post, and we'll get into more of the details in future posts that help answer those questions. Stay tuned.
- Jonathan Bailor
A lot of great stuff from the shared Office teams involving Word over the past few weeks, and I hope you like the new look of the blog.
- Jonathan Bailor (MS)
Continuing on from my last post on the Navigation Pane, another example of some of the work done for Word 2010 is the new default Find experience. This is again a feature built in support of the "Polished User Experiences" vision pillar described in Scott's Framing the Release post.
Find is not a new feature, and has been in Word for a long, long time. As a user, you hit Ctrl+F, and a little dialog pops up. You type the word you're looking for, and hit ENTER. As you continue hitting ENTER or pressing Find Next, you scroll through your document, stopping at each match in the content. Occasionally, the little dialog changes screen location, so that it's not sitting on top of the range of the document that you're trying to look at. It works, but it could certainly be more polished and integrated…
New Find Experience
Also in the Navigation Pane, in Word 2010 we have a new, more seamless and integrated flavor of the Find feature. Rather than a modeless dialog box that jumps about on the screen to get out of the way, the basic Find experience now sits conveniently at the top of the navigation pane.
[Note that the old find dialog is not completely gone, and is still available by clicking the dropdown at the right-hand edge of the search box. Two primary reasons it is still around are 1) the new find does not yet support every advanced feature of the old find dialog, and 2) the navigation pane does not have any Replace functionality.]
So, what is the new Find user experience?
- Just type in the "Search Document" box at the top of the navigation pane to start (Ctrl+F will put focus in the box, and show the navigation pane if necessary)
-
As you type…
- All matches within the document highlight yellow, and Word will scroll the document to the first match (and continues to scroll as you refine the term). If you cancel the search or hit escape, you return to where you were.
- If you're on the headings tab of the navigation pane, any tab corresponding to a heading whose content contains the term you searched for is highlighted yellow
- If you're on the pages tab of the pane, the thumbnails for the pages that don't contain the search term are filtered out, leaving you with just the list of pages that have what you're looking for
- If you're on the search results tab, you'll see the list of matches with a small snippet of context. Again, this list grows and shrinks as you refine your search
- Hitting Enter is the equivalent of clicking Find Next, which actually commits you to the location of the next search hit and selects it (just as it always has). Hit enter again to go to the next match.
- Clicking on the arrows for Previous or Next Search Result do what you'd expect, searching up or down as appropriate.
- The dropdown menu to the right of the search box also offers many of the popular object types you might want to search for, including graphics, tables, equations, footnotes/endnotes, and comments (by author).
Example
Suppose I want to search for "navigate" within my last blog post document. I hit Ctrl+F and start typing. As I type, Word is busy searching, as described above. By the time I've typed the first seven letters, and have "navigat" in the box, here is what I'd see:
Here is what I would see in each of the three tabs of the pane:
At this point it's matching all manner of words that start with those letters, but as I continue typing and get to "navigate", the result set is much smaller (one match, in fact):
Again, each of the three views in the navigation pane:
A couple of things to notice:
- It scrolled ahead automatically so I can see this first (and only) instance of the word "navigate"
- Because the word appears in the content that is under the heading "Rearranging and moving content", that heading is highlighted in the navigation pane
- The page list is filtered so that now the only thumbnail is has is that of page 3 – if you look close, you can even see the yellow highlight on that page
- And of course the results list now just has the one match.
At this point, I can either just start editing in the document if I've found the thing I'm looking for, or I could hit ESC (or click the X) to return to where I was, or hit ENTER to actually select that first instance of the match. Note that in terms of keyboarding, there is essentially no change here even though the UI is very different. For example, in both Word 2007 and 2010 the end-state of the following steps is identical: Ctrl+F, type a word to search for, press enter (however many times), press escape. In both cases focus is in the document, and the word is selected. Similarly, if I press escape prior to hitting enter, I find myself right where I was before hitting Ctrl+F (even though in the new Find experience in 2010, I may have temporarily been looking elsewhere).
Conclusion
And that's my brief overview of the new Find UX in Word 2010. I left out some details, such as the fact that you can turn on or off the incremental search mode, and in the search options you can change settings such as match case, whole word only, etc.
There are a lot of things I'm really excited about adding here in the future. For example, we don't [yet] support all of the things you might want to find, such as Revisions. And we don't yet support Replace through the new UI. But what we do have so far for is pretty amazing to use, I hope you think so too.
Again, thanks for reading. Any comments or questions are welcome!
--Scott Walker, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Word
One of the Pillars of the Word 2010 vision outlined in Scott's post on Framing the Release was "Polished User Experiences". This pillar represents a desire to dramatically improve a set of scenarios that define Word's core user experiences in terms of polish, ease of use, and responsiveness – basically, setting and holding a high bar for user experience excellence. Work that we did in support of this part of the vision isn't necessarily all new features, but is rather about looking at the experience of performing some common types of activities in Word, and evaluating not just whether you can be successful, but is the experience a good one – does is feel polished and seamless.
One such core scenario is working with long or structured documents, and the simple tasks of reading and moving around in the document, searching for content, or manipulating the outline and headings. Word 2007 and other previous versions of the product had a variety of relevant features or tools available, some of which date back many releases – in particular document map, find, and browse objects. The new Navigation Pane is an attempt to bring these features together in a fresh, cohesive and polished experience.
The Microsoft Word 2010 Navigation Pane
One of the new pieces of functionality you'll find in Word 2010 is something we call the "Navigation Pane". This pane hosts a set of related features for getting around in your document, searching for content, and manipulating the structure and organization of headings. Essentially, this task pane replaces and improves upon the old "Document Map" and "Thumbnails" panes, as well as integrating Find and even some aspects of the little known Object Browser.
By default, the pane is docked on the left (as shown above), but can be moved to the right, or even floated independent of the document window. You can show or hide the pane on the View tab of the ribbon.
The primary bits of the navigation pane are called out in the following figure, and then described in more detail in turn.
Browse Headings
The headings view of the navigation pane, shown below, is the updated replacement for the document map. It is basically a series of nested "tabs", each of which corresponds to a heading in the document.
There is a wealth of functionality available here…
Viewing and getting around
Rearranging and moving content
- Drag and drop a tab in the list to move the heading plus all of its content to a new location in the document. If that heading has subheadings, the structure remains intact, and simply moves the whole branch. This makes rearranging your document incredibly quick and easy. Bonus: Ctrl+drag to duplicate the content.
- While you cannot directly drop arbitrary content onto a heading tab, you can hover over a tab while dragging to navigate to that heading. You can then drop the content in the document where you want it.
Manipulating the outline
- Right-click on a heading tab to promoting or demoting the heading up or down a level. Changing the level of a heading that has subheadings under it also changes those headings to the appropriate new level.
- Also on the context menu, you can add a new heading of the same depth above or below a given item, or add a new subheading under it. This essentially inserts a new blank paragraph with the appropriate Heading Style applied. Then as you type the heading text, it appears in the navigation pane heading tab.
Additional functionality
- Right-click on a heading and choose Select to select the heading and all of its content
- Choose Delete to delete the heading and its content
- And finally right-clicking and choosing Print is equivalent of selecting everything from the start of that heading down to just before the next heading, clicking the File tab, clicking Print in the Backstage view, and then changing the "Print What" option to "Selection". Not an everyday task, but handy when you need to print just a particular region of the document.
Browse Pages
Clicking on the "Browse the pages in your document" tab gives you a view of all the pages in the doc. This is very similar to the thumbnails pane in previous versions of Word.
Clicking a page's thumbnail takes you to that page in the document, as always.
There are really only two big improvements in this part of the pane, when compared with the existing one:
- First, it now works in all the layout views – web layout, and even draft and outline.
- And second, when you have searched for something via the new Find feature, the list of pages shown dynamically filters to show only the pages that contain the term you searched for. This is another super useful way to find what you're looking for. I find it especially handy when the thing I'm searching for isn't text, such as a particular table, chart, or image.
Browse Search Results
Finally, the navigation pane hosts a search results list, as shown below.
This list contains and item for each of the matches in your document. In the example above, you can see I searched for "navigation", and it found 3 instances of the term, each of which is represented by a clickable item in the list, with a brief snippet of the surrounding text to give a bit of context. Clearly I took that screenshot early in the authoring process for this post, because there are now over a dozen hits, and I'm still writing… J
Clicking an item takes you to that location in the document.
In my next post, I'll discuss the new find experience in more detail.
Conclusion
Well I think that's about it for the basics of the new navigation pane. Based on early feedback, I'm pretty confident it is going to be useful for a great number of customers, in a variety of scenarios. There's a lot of room for additions in the future, but I think this is a super solid start that enables a lot of functionality.
There are a number of design decisions we made along the way, and I'd be interested in whether any of them will pose any problems for you. For example, as you can see in the images of the navigation pane, each heading takes up more vertical pixels than the old document map entries did. They're way more useful, but it's undeniable that you see fewer headings at a time without having to scroll the list. Similarly, you could configure the look of the old document map items by tweaking the doc map style, but now each heading is essentially a UI control, and so uses the default UI font. This also means that you don't see things like tracked changes or other formatting within the text of a heading as displayed on the heading tab. We also don't guess about things you might have intended to be headings, such as lines of text in bold or all caps – we strictly pay attention only to content with an explicitly applied outline level (unlike the old doc map, which would use autoformatting logic to add those levels). I do think we've found the sweet spot on all of these issues, but would be interested in feedback if you feel strongly to the contrary.
Thanks for reading, any comments or questions are welcome!
--Scott Walker, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Word
With my introductory post and Scott's framing post, we hope that you have a good sense for many of the advancements coming in Word 2010. And while we will be posting some Word specific details later this week, in the meantime, I would like to introduce you to the blogs of four shared teams in Office. These blogs are great resources for features and functionality that are new to Word, but not new to only Word. The Ribbon in Office 2007/Word 2007 is a great example of one of these shared features.
To give a quick bit of additional context, the Word team (i.e. the team that writes this blog) is best thought of as a piece—albeit a large piece—of a much bigger puzzle that makes up the Word application. Building off of the Word 2007 Ribbon example, for the 2007 release, the Word team worked very closely with…
Given that we're continuing this type of collaborative engineering in Word 2010 with shared features like the new Backstage View and Office Web Applications, you can learn a lot about Word 2010 by reading the blogs of the other Office teams that we're working with.
We'll certainly continue to cover any and everything about Word on this blog; these blogs are just great complements.
I'll be tagging these types of cross-Office link posts as "shared" moving forward. Hope these are useful.
Jonathan Bailor (MS)
Hi, my name is Scott Stiles and I run the Program Management team for Word. The goal of this post is to provide some context regarding how we framed this release.
As I've been largely behind the scenes in the context of this blog, I thought a quick introduction was in order.
I've been with Microsoft for a total of just under 19 years on many different teams and in many different capacities. My first job at Microsoft (an internship during my senior year at college) happened to be in "product support", supporting all of our DOS apps – a list that included DOS Word 5.0 and 5.5. This job ignited my passion for Word. I'd been using MultiMate in college prior to the internship, but returned to college a huge Word fan, offering to tutor anyone who'd listen. I even built a small business for a while writing Word document-processing macros.
Throughout my career at Microsoft, "authoring" apps (across client, web and mobile) have been a common thread, and I've never been far from Word. I was excited to join the Word product team about 3yrs ago as we ramped up planning for Word 2010. I continue to be amazed by how far the product has come since my first deep immersion back in 1990.
OK, back to the product…
By now you've seen Jon's introductory post, giving you a high level taste of the features we're delivering in Word 2010. I hope the post piqued your interest; we're enjoying the process of bringing the features to life, and are looking forward to finally getting the product into the hands of our users. There's far more content to come in future posts, as we talk in much more detail about what we're delivering in the client as well as on the web and your mobile phone. We'll tune the future posts based on what we hear in the comments, so keep them coming.
Building-in quality
One of the common themes in the comments on Jon's post that struck me was "I see you're adding a bunch of new features – what about fixing the bugs I'm running into?" In hopes of addressing this, I thought I'd take a step back and talk briefly about how we address user feedback as part of building and shipping a new version of the product.
As we approach the release of each version of Word (or Office for that matter), a chunk of the team is already hard at work planning the next version.
This planning has many inputs, including market analysis, competitive trends, customer requests, MVP and Partner input, and a deep study of the issues users are having with the products we've shipped. We take customer feedback very seriously, and endeavor to fix as many of the known issues as we can in the next release. So, the key point here is that we work hard to fix existing issues as we build every release.
With the Word 2010 project, we went a step further than we have in past releases in this regard and did two things at the outset: we set aside specific development budget to address known issues, and we built one of our 3 release pillars around "polishing existing experiences" in the app.
Framing the release
In the simplest terms, here's our philosophy behind our investments in Word 2010:
- We will add a few deep, meaningful features to the product that will truly affect the way people work, and
- We will spend a significant amount of time and resources polishing the existing features and related scenarios delivered in previous versions.
While we haven't shipped yet, I believe we're well on our way towards delivering on both of the above goals.
To expand on this, I like to think of the work we're doing for Word 2010 in the context of the 3 "pillars" that we defined before writing the first line of code 2.5 years ago. These pillars have guided the decisions we've made at every step of the release. They are:
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Word Power in New Contexts – While the PC is still at the core of "productivity", there's no denying that people are leveraging computing power in ever expanding ways. In light of this, we've spent a significant amount of time in this release bringing key pieces of Word functionality to new "contexts" such as Server, 64bit, Mobile and the Web.
- Word Web App – the story for this is beginning to unfold on our Web App blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/ ), but you should expect to hear about the Word Web App in more detail on this blog as well. We believe the Word Web App will be a powerful addition to the Word family -- adding amazing "reach" to the way people work with documents.
- Server – In support of viewing in the Web App, and a few key standalone "server" scenarios, we've built a version of Word tuned for the server. More on this later as we're able.
- Open XML SDK 2.0 (more info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/ ) – This SDK opens up a powerful new set of document processing scenarios for our users – especially when combined with Word on the server.
- Mobile – We've made significant improvement in how users are able to leverage Word on Mobile devices.
- 64 Bit version of Word, optimized for 64bit OS'.
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Cutting edge authoring – We picked a handful of deep features that we felt would raise the bar in terms of the core authoring experience for all of our users.
- Co-Authoring – With Word 2010 users will be able to write documents collaboratively, without having to worry if someone else already has the document open.
- Enhanced graphics. Improved editing and effects on photos, shapes, Smart Art, etc.
- Enhanced text, with graphical text effects, and enhanced typography through OpenType (ligatures, kerning metrics, stylistic sets, etc.).
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Polished user experiences -- As I noted above, we've invested deeply in polishing existing scenarios in this release. Our goal here is to meaningfully improve the overall experience of using the application when compared to previous releases. I've called out three specific examples in the bullets below, but this is just a small sampling of the work we've done to improve basic usage.
- Improved Navigation Pane, integrating Find with the Document Map. We've built an integrated experience around document navigation and organization that I think our users are going to love.
- Improved object anchoring. Listed as an example of the type of work we've done to address user feedback – we've done work in Word 2010 to expose how and where objects are anchored in the document.
- Microsoft Office Backstage ( http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/ ) – one of the key improvements to the overall Office user experience, available in Word 2010.
- And many, many detailed improvements to basic usage scenarios
As important as describing what the release is intended to be, is describing what it isn't. In contrast with some previous releases, as a rule we haven't invested deeply in a particular customer segment in 2010. This doesn't mean there aren't a few careful exceptions to the rule, but I think it's worth stating the rule to help frame the release. This release also isn't about having the longest possible list of new features on the "back of the box". Think "quality and depth" over "quantity".
As Jon noted in our previous post, we'll have a regular stream of posts over the next year delving into increasing levels of detail on Word 2010. Again, your comments will help us tune the blog plan.
On behalf of the Word team, I want to thank the readers for their continued interest in and passion regarding Word. We look forward to your comments, and to sharing more about the release in the weeks to come.
Scott Stiles, Group Program Manager, Word.
We've been patiently waiting to talk with you about what we've been working on for the last two years, and the wait is over. Today we'll introduce Word 2010 at a very high-level, and then dig deeper and deeper into specific topics and features in the coming months.
Of course, please let us know what you want to hear about.
Word 2010 from 30,000 Feet
The way we work with documents has changed dramatically. In the past, individuals worked on relatively simple, local documents, from their office. Today, it is common for groups to work on rich, shared documents, from anywhere.
Given this shift, we've focused Word 2010 on dramatically improving document collaboration, graphics, and navigation…and then taking the richness and familiarity of Word, and putting it into the browser and onto the mobile phone.
Dramatically Improved Collaboration, Graphics, and Navigation
- Simultaneous editing of Word documents -- all the richness of Word with multiple people at the same time. Say goodbye to this dialog:
With Word 2010, you can co-author right within Word. You don't need to hassle with email attachments, or documents with names like TSP_final_2_reallyFinal_FINAL.docx. Instead, just open your document, and start co-authoring. You can see who else is working with you, and where they are editing.
- Automatic offline editing and sync'ing of shared documents -- when you open a shared document, Word automatically caches it so that you can edit it offline, and then Word will automatically sync your changes when you come back online. So if you need to work away from the office, you will no longer need to worry about saving local copies or manually merging your changes into the server document when you get back to your office. Word 2010 takes care of all of that for you.
- All sorts of new graphical goodness -- artistic picture effects and easy picture editing, more SmartArt diagrams, and rich graphical and typographic effects on text.
Note how "pear" and "shooze" are squiggled. That's because they are just really rich text in the document, not a picture, WordArt, or any other object.
- A new navigation pane and search experience -- easily reorganize your document via drag and drop, and find stuff quickly with incremental search. You can stop copying and pasting huge sections of your document, quickly find your way around long documents, and you don't need to know exactly what you are searching for to find it.
Word in Your Browser and on Your Phone
The other big piece of Word 2010 is giving you the power and familiarity of Word everywhere you need it. In short, you will be able to view, navigate, and edit your Word documents from the browser and from your mobile phone without compromising your document's richness.
I know that was really high-level, but hopefully you have a sense for how Word 2010 will dramatically improve how and where you work on documents.
We'd love to hear your initial thoughts, and what you'd like to hear more about.
- Jonathan Bailor
PS Here's some fun Word 2010 videos of note:
Introduction
A common question that comes up is about the difference between multilevel lists and list styles. Stuart discussed these two list types in his post The Many Levels of Lists. What I hope to do in this blog post is an in-depth look at the similarities and differences between these two concepts.
Quick Overview
An easy way to look at this would be to think of list styles as an improved version of multilevel lists, since both are ways to define all nine levels of a list in one go. So, why do we need both?
Well, a multilevel list is a feature that can be found in Word documents dating back to very early versions of Office. In order for these documents to render correctly in newer version of Office, this feature is maintained and made to work alongside new Word features. The disadvantage, as Stuart mentioned, is that multilevel lists could not be named, modified or easily exported to other documents and templates.
List styles were introduced in Office 2007 to give lists the same advantages as other styles (paragraph and characters styles), which included:
- Ability to modify the existing definition
- Ability to share the your perfectly crafted style with other documents
By allowing the list style to be named, Word is now able to better keep the definition of the list separate from the actual instance of the list. That way a single list style can be referenced by multiple lists and each list can have its own individual tweaks if necessary.
More Details
Defining a New List
Let's start by going through the dialog used to create and modify these two list types. As a quick review, you can create a new multilevel style or a list style by going to the third numbering button on the Home tab.
Other than the differences mentioned above, the features available for both types of lists are identical (as illustrated by the diagrams below). When creating a new multilevel list, you are thrown directly into a dialog that shows all of your available options for customizing the list. This dialog can be a bit daunting, so for list styles in Office 2007, we followed the example set by the other styles and simplified the dialog you are first shown. And also like the other styles, we list all of your customization options under the "Format" button. Once you select "Numbering…" under this button, you are presented with all of the same, advanced options as multilevel lists.
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Multilevel List |
List Style |
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Sharing Lists with Other Documents
Another strong point of list styles is the ability to share them across documents. This way, once you've spent the time customizing the lists in your document, you can re-use the style in other documents you create. The easiest way to share the "formatting" of a multilevel list is to copy a list from one document to anther and then modified the items of the list to suit the needs of the new document. With list styles, you can transfer them quickly to a new document the same way as other styles: through the Styles Organizer. This way only the formatting you want is transferred not the unnecessary content.
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Multilevel List |
List Style |
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Saving to DOCX
I'm not going to go through the full details of how bullets and numbers are represented in OOXML (although, if you are interested, you can find the ISO standard here: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html )
Simply put, the xml parts, within the document package, which are most important to multilevel lists and list styles, are document.xml and numbering.xml. Numbering.xml stores the actual definition of the list, while the document.xml part contains the main document text and references the numbering.xml part for the information on how the list should be formatted. The underlying structures of a multilevel list vs. a list style are quite similar.
- The way the document.xml part stores the list text and references the list definitions is identical.
- The numbering.xml part is also quite similar with the main difference in the being the additional of an element in the list style which stores the name of the style.
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Multilevel List |
List Style |
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You can also tell, from the sample above , that list styles grew out of multilevel lists by the fact that the <w:multiLevelType> element for both constructs are the same.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this blog post gave you a better understanding of these two list types and why they both exist in Word today. If you have any other questions about the similarities/differences, please let me know and I'll try to pull together another blog post with the answers.
- Amani
Hello! My name is Stephen Oliver and I'm a programming writer at Microsoft. From time-to-time, I'll post Office developer-oriented tips—specifically around Word.
Today's post is simply to alert you to a great resource for sharpening your Office automation skills—Office Palooza . Office Palooza was a two-week event (April 20 – May 1, 2009) but the content that came out of it is an excellent store of tips, How Tos, and even full-scale solutions for automating Office applications.
Office Palooza targeted "advanced business users" (most people call them "power users"); that is, people who have a great deal more than a beginning knowledge of the Office applications (like Word!) but aren't professional programmers. So even if all you've ever done with Office automation is record a macro in Word, this is just the place for you! If you look through the list of articles, blog posts, "How To" videos and book excerpts, you'll find things like:
…and many other topics.
But don't just take my word for it. Stop by and check out the Office Palooza content for yourself!
It's super easy to put generic text into a Word document for all of your filler text needs (especially useful during demos and presentations). Just start a new paragraph and:
- Type "=rand()" and press Enter for three paragraphs of text
- Type "=lorem()"and press Enter for three paragraphs of random characters that approximate a normal distribution of letters know as Lorem Ipsum
Example of the result of "=rand()"
On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look.
You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly.
To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.
Example of "=lorem()"
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.
Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus.
Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci.
More/Less Words and More/Less Paragraphs
If you'd like more or less than three paragraphs, you can get specific like this:
- =rand(insert the number of paragraphs, insert the number of sentences)
- =lorem(insert the number of paragraphs, insert the number of sentences)
For example, "=lorem(1,6)" gives you:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus.
And "=rand(1,6)" gives you:
On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly.
If you only include one number between the parentheses, that number will be the number of paragraphs, and each of the paragraphs will have five sentences in them. So "=rand(1)" does this:
On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look.
Lastly, if you can't get enough filler text, know that you will max out at about 200 pages of filler text per "insertion." For example, you can type "=lorem(111,111)" for 111 paragraphs with 111 sentences each, or 129 pages of filler, but you cannot type "=lorem(99999999999999999, 99999999999999999)" on your least favorite co-worker's computer to bring their CPU to its knees. J
- Jonathan Bailor
PS In the interest of completeness, you can also use "=rand.old()" to insert an assorted number of sentences and paragraphs of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
