On this blog we've already started discussing many of the new features (like the Microsoft Office Backstage) which span across all of the Office 2010 applications. In addition to many continuing posts about these features, we'll also frequently highlight other product features or team blog posts you might be interested in.
We're really excited about the new improvements coming in Word 2010. From providing the familiarity of Word in new contexts such as the server, the mobile phone, and the browser, to providing cutting edge co-authoring, document navigation, graphics, and typographical effects, Word 2010 will enable you to create rich documents, alone or collaboratively, easier than ever before.
To learn more about Word 2010 check-out Scott and Jonathan's intro posts on the Word Team Blog.
I'm Jon Gordner, a PM on the User Experience team. As Clay wrote in his post, we created the Backstage View for the opportunity to take Office's OUT features - those that you use to do things to the whole file (rather than the content within it) - and make them a little more WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get.
Many of the Backstage features in Office suffer from low discoverability and we want to use the Backstage View to address that. We also want to help you get more out of the Backstage features that you already know. One of the best examples of a Backstage feature you know and likely rely on is Print. It's been around for ages and largely hasn't changed since you first used it:
Word 97's Print dialog box
Over time, while we've added a few features, things have stayed largely the same:
Word 2007's Print dialog box
Even though Print hasn't really changed in all these years, it is far from perfect. Has the following ever happened to you? After writing a document, you format the page so it looks just right. You click Print and walk over to the printer, only to discover in horror that you forgot to set it to print two-sided, or that a last minute margin change meant the last word of your document got pushed onto its own page. You realize this as you watch the first of 30 copies printing.
Considering how popular printing is (in Word it is the 8th most commonly used feature), we knew we could beat the existing workflow with one that was more straightforward and less frustrating. To figure out how to improve it we needed to first understand specifically how Print was failing users so we looked back to the WYSIWYG interaction model:
The five stages of WYSIWYG
When we looked at the steps one by one, Print didn't fare too well. Scanning the page is hard without Print Preview, and even if you remember to use it, you'll also have to dig around in the Printer Properties dialog box (which is out of the way of the normal workflow) to see if there is something to change (like if you are currently set to print two-sided.) Finding the right tool to use can be a bit of a challenge because tools related to printing are spread across the Page Layout tab, the Page Setup dialog box, the Print dialog box, and the Printer Properties dialog box, which is different for every printer you use. To take advantage of the tools, you need to bounce between all of these dialog boxes and hopefully you remember to check Print Preview in between! After going through this whole process, you'll see the results on the page... the real page... the one made of paper. That's the part where you notice on the very first copy that you made some silly mistake and now need to start the whole process again. That's when it gets frustrating; that's when you're wasting both time and paper!
To improve this experience we needed to improve every stage of the process. By using the space available in the Backstage view, we've been able to consolidate everything you need into one place.
The Print tab in Office 2010's Backstage View
The first thing you'll notice when opening the Print tab is the Print Preview on the right. There is no need to remember to preview after you make a change since it's always there for you displaying what is about to print. Better yet, whenever you change a setting, the preview is automatically updated, so no matter how much tweaking you do to get it just right you'll always know what's going to come out of the printer.
On the left, we've combined the print-related settings people used most in all of those dialog boxes so that the Print tab is the only place you need to go to make sure you are printing what you want. If your printer at the office can staple and print two-sided, then when you are using that printer we'll show galleries that let you choose how to do those things. If your home printer doesn't support that fancy stuff then we keep it simple and only show you the galleries you can actually use.
To help you use these settings, we've created a new kind of gallery. It doesn't just show you the name of the feature, it tells you what the status is and describes it. This can help you figure out if you want to change the setting from what you have. You don't have to remember to check if you're printing two-sided since the answer is right there when you print.
Galleries show you the current settings so you don't have to remember to look them up
When you click on the gallery we'll show you the information you need to choose the right option. For instance, when you click on the gallery to select a printer we'll show you the status for each printer so you know right away which printers are working, which are running out of ink, or anything else that might prevent you from printing successfully.
See if a printer is available before you choose to print to it
Of course, if you are happy with the default printer and all of the default settings then you can still add Quick Print to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) just like in Office 2007 and send the document straight to the printer with a single click. For the keyboarders out there, Ctrl+P will take you to the new Print tab.
You can still add Quick Print to the QAT for one-click printing
The Backstage View Print experience has been built into Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, and Project. Between the Print Preview and the galleries that show your current status, finding something you need to change before printing has never been easier. The tools to make any necessary tweaks are right there to use and the preview updating in real time helps you see the results before you print thus making it easy to fine-tune until you have it just the way you want it. Now that's WYSIWYG! You can be sure that with Office 2010 you will print it right on the first try - saving you frustration, time and even a few trees.
Though not available for the public to try (yet), there has been quite a bit of recent buzz around the Office Web Apps we will be shipping with Office 2010 (here links to articles from PCWorld and from ZDNet).
Mike Morton (Group Program Manager of the Web Apps team) just wrote a great post on the Office Web Apps Blog that provides some insights into how we are creating these lightweight, web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
If you’re interested in reading more, read his post here.
Next week we’ll discuss more detail about the new Office 2010 Technical Preview features. Enjoy and have a great weekend!
Hello, my name is Brad and I work on the Office security team; we focus on a couple of key areas: building security features that improve the Office product line and driving the security engineering process across the division as part of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL).
I would like to start with a high-level introduction of several of the new security features in Office 2010, what our goals are, and how we think about them. Because shipping Office isn’t about how we think about it, but instead how you think about it, feel free to ‘send a smile’ with the Technical Preview and let me know if we hit the mark.
To start things off, ‘Why?’ is always a good question. Why did we spend time doing anything in this space, and to what end? Well, as the security landscape has been changing, Office has had the misfortune of becoming one of the next big targets for hackers to attack. They have been going after many of our file-format parsers and how we read Office files. They’re looking for ways to exploit bugs and to get their code running on your machine. We have done a lot of work to find and fix bugs, but we can’t find everything. We have to take a more proactive approach and build Office to be more resilient to attack.
To do that, we have designed what we have been referring to as a new security workflow, a layered defense that Office documents have to go through as part of the File Open process. We strive to make this process as invisible as possible. This means no noticeable delay in open times, as well as no dialogs asking you how you feel about security.
The security workflow we designed has several key features that we believe achieves the goals. First, we have improved our File Block feature that was introduced in Office 2007. We now have a way to configure it in the application and have a finer level of granularity to manage how Word, Excel, and PowerPoint open their file types.
Another feature is our new binary file-validation system, which call Office File Validation. Since the vast majority of the exploits have focused on our older file formats, pre-dating our XML versions, we built a system that can validate those files to make sure they conform to the documented format, before they are opened by Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. This is something we did in Publisher 2007, which worked out pretty well. Office File Validation is an integral part of Office that on most days, you would never know exists.
The next question is ‘What do you do with those blocked or invalid files?’. Well, if we just blocked a file and said it was invalid, you would probably be pretty curious why it was invalid, or if maybe we made a mistake. Or, you may be sure you know what it is, and still need to read it. Denying you access to these files doesn’t really meet our goals, so we also built another system we call the Protected View.
Protected View is a way for us to show Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to you, but without all of the worry about those files being dangerous. We build up a read-only view of the document in an isolated sandbox, which has minimal access to the system, and no access to your other files and information. Even if the file is malicious, it can’t get out of the sandbox and do harm to your computer or data.
By tying all of these features together into a layered defense, any file that reaches your machine will get inspected for the file format being blocked, tested for validity, and maybe shown in a read-only protected state. All this happens in real time, with an indistinguishable performance impact on your load time, and you can open these Office files without worry.
The other goal to make these features and workflow successful is that they don’t get in the way and instead have a positive impact on your experience. That means fewer dialog boxes and less information that is not actionable. We need to make security smart enough to get out of the way when its job is done. To do that, we have made files that open in Protected View remember when you chose to trust them, so you don’t have to re-trust them next time. You are not less secure; you’re just less annoyed (hopefully!).
In future posts, my team and I will be digging into these and other features to explain how they work and give some insight into how to get the most out of them for system administrators. Stay tuned, and give feedback if you want to hear more about a specific security feature. We hope you enjoy using Office 2010, as much as we have enjoyed working with you toward its creation.
Thanks,
Brad Albrecht
Senior Security PMOffice Trustworthy Computing
Hi, I'm Clay Satterfield and I'm a Senior Program Manager on the Office User Experience team. Within the first few hours or so of using the Office 2010 Technical Preview, it’s pretty likely that you’ll eventually need to “Save As” or “Print” or do something else with your file. When you finally do click on the Office Button, you’ll see something that you probably didn’t expect. Instead of a menu, or even a Ribbon tab, you’ll see the new Microsoft Office Backstage View.
Before getting into the details of the Backstage View, I’d like to talk about the thinking that led us to the design. And to do that, I have to start way back in the fall of 2003, before we started designing the Ribbon.
The Office User Experience Team is responsible for providing the UI platform for the rest of Office, so it was our assignment to tackle the following two problems. First, we knew from user feedback that people had a lot of difficulty finding, using, and understanding the vast feature set in Office. Second, we were struggling internally with the fact the menus, toolbars, and task panes were collapsing under their own weight. Those UI concepts were designed for much simpler programs, and could no longer handle the volume of commands in the mature Office applications.
So, we spent a lot of time looking at entire the Office feature set. We thought hard about how new features should be built and we made some predictions about the types of features we’d need to build over the next several versions.
One of the first things we identified was that there were two distinct types of features within the applications. We called the two types IN and OUT features.
The IN features are the ones most people are more familiar with. These are the features that act on the content of the document and show up on the page. Examples include commands like bold, margins, spelling, and styles. These are the features that make up the heart of the application. When using these features, you need to be able to view the document content and often need to have a selection or blinking cursor somewhere in the document.
The “Out” features help people do something with the content they create. Examples include Saving, Printing, Permissions, Versioning, Collaboration, Document Inspector, Workflows, etc. The Out feature set includes a wide ranging and surprisingly long list, but they all have a lot of similarities. The primary characteristic is that they don’t act on a specific point in the document, and their effects don’t appear on the page. In fact, you could easily imagine using one of these features without even opening the document to look at it (for example, setting permissions on the file or sending it as an attachment).
Unfortunately, the other thing the OUT features have in common is that they almost all suffer from low discoverability and poor usability.
When we looked closely at the requirements on the UI platform, we realized that IN and OUT features have very different needs. Some of the most striking differences become obvious when you start thinking about Office’s WYSIWYG user interface.
The user looks at the document, sees something they want to change, and then they find and use a tool that lets them make the change they desire. They repeat this loop until they decide the document is finished.
In fact, when we created the Fluent UI for Office 2007, we specifically focused on improving a few parts of this model. For example, the Ribbon helps users “Find the Tool”. Galleries combine complex steps into a visual result so that “Using the Tool” is easier. Live Preview takes advantage of the power of “Seeing the Results on the Page.”
The Ribbon needs to stay out of the way because most of this model depends on seeing as much as possible of your document. Nearly all of the communication between you and the application happens on the document surface. We don’t need to pop up a dialog box to tell you when you successfully changed the font size – you just see it happen. Same goes for changing margins, inserting a picture, or any other IN command.
Here’s the problem though – The OUT features don’t show up on the page, so the WYSIWYG model falls apart for those features.
· You can’t scan the page for something you want to change. The status of OUT features doesn’t appear there. For example, there’s nothing on the page to indicate who has permissions to read the document, so you have to form the goal to set permissions some other way.
· When people form an editing goal because of something they don’t like on the page, they assume an appropriate tool exists in the application somewhere. People rarely make that assumption for OUT features. For example, many very smart people have no idea that you can e-mail a document to someone from within the application. They just never even imagine that something like that could live in a word processor.
· Even if you do find and use an OUT feature, the communication with the application is difficult and inconsistent. We use a combination of the status bar, message boxes, dialogs, task panes, pop-up notifications, and even web sites to tell you what’s actually going on with your document. For example, if you notice that you can’t edit a document you’ve opened, you have to check three or four possible permissions dialogs, a task pane, the status bar, and the application title bar to find out which feature is making the document read-only.
Sadly, the only way the average person can be successful using our OUT features is with assistance from outside of our user interface. Most commonly, people use these features because a coworker has found and explained them, or because a boss required that they be used (and provided training). A few people might get lucky and read about a new feature on a Tips and Tricks blog.
What we were sorely lacking was the WYSIWYG equivalent for the OUT features.
What made this particularly scary for us internally is that for the foreseeable future, the OUT features are the ones that are growing rapidly. Documents are now rarely simple files authored by one person who keeps it on his hard drive until he prints. Collaboration and sharing are critical. Documents are key parts of complicated business processes. There’s a ton of context surrounding documents, and increasingly, that context needs to surface within the authoring application.
So, based on the planned feature set for Office 2007, we knew we had to tackle the IN problems first. Features like SmartArt, Conditional Formatting, Themes, and all the Office Art effects required investments in Galleries, Live Preview, and contextual tabs. But we knew that the OUT features wouldn’t go away, and as planning for Office 2010 began, we could see that the Office Menu just wasn’t going to cut it.
The Backstage view is the solution that tries to achieve these goals. In future blog posts, we’ll discuss how it works and get into the details of the different features inside the Backstage view. For now, we hope you enjoy exploring it!
Using Office 2010, have something you want to tell Office? Maybe you're having trouble finding something in the UI or have a specific suggestion on how we can improve a feature. Or, maybe there's something you love and you want to make sure we know about it so that we keep it in the product. The best tool to use to give us feedback on the Office 2010 (Technical Preview) is called Send-a-Smile.
Hello and welcome to Office 2010! My name is Amanda and I am a Program Manager in Office, on my team we build Feedback tools, including Send-a-Smile. My job is to ensure the Office user has the opportunity to provide feedback (likes and dislikes) about their Office 2010 experience and then route this information to the right people on the Office teams. The teams use this information to make decisions regarding feature designs and to help prioritize bug fixes.
Where can I get Send-a-Smile? Send-a-Smile automatically installs with Office 2010, you’ll see two icons added to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a Smile to click when you want to give us positive feedback and a Frown to click when there's something you don’t like. On Win7, you may need to go specifically add them to the list of icons you want to see in the taskbar.
Do we actually read the comments? Absolutely! In fact we’ve already taken fixes to the product, which future downloaders of the Office 2010 (Technical Preview) will benefit from. Let me walk you through the process from sending a comment to someone on the Office team reviewing the comment.
How does one submit a comment? As previously noted, the Send-a-Smile tool installs along with the Office 2010 (Technical Preview). After the installation is complete, you will see the Smile and Frown icons in the taskbar.
Clicking on the Smile or Frown will launch the Send-a-Smile tool.
There is a text box to type your comment, and optionally you can include a picture of your screen and your e-mail address (so that we can contact you if necessary.) The screenshot is a really interesting and useful part of the feedback... especially where the UI is concerned. But, of course, you can just send the text if you'd rather. After you click “Submit”, off your feedback goes to Microsoft...
Where does the Smile or Frown go after you click submit and see the envelope fly away? Who reads my Smile or Frown comment?
The comment goes into a database here at Microsoft. Based on the comment text, we automatically group “tag” the comments by team and by feature. This helps get your comment to the appropriate team as quickly as possible.
An internal website has been created specifically for these comments. The Office teams use the website to review all the comments “tagged” to their team and features. While reviewing the comments, the teams have the option to give the comment a status to help categorize and later follow up on specific comments.
This feedback mechanism has already had a big impact on the product. Bugs have been identified and fixed. And of course, the many positive comments we receive help us not to tinker with the things that it seems we've gotten right.
We cannot guarantee that we'll act on every comment (which would be impossible anyway since many of the comments directly contradict other comments), but we can promise that we read them, consider them, and use them to help make decisions about the product.
The long and short of it all this, when you have feedback please click on the Smile and Frown icons...we are listening and love to receive feedback on the Office 2010 (Technical Preview). This is the most direct way for anyone in the world to get their feedback heard by the right person, with none of the barriers usually associated with trying to give feedback to a big company (phone trees, "customer service representatives", etc.)
This week, we announced the availability of the Office2010 Technical Preview for limited testing. Over the coming months, we hope to learn a lot from our Technical Preview customers about Office2010 and at the same time, we will use this blog to highlight some of the new capabilities that we have added to Office. In addition to this blog, you can find lots of content on the existing Office team blogs, plus the http://www.office2010themovie.com web site, which hosts a set of 'behind the scenes' videos describing the people and the ideas behind Office2010.
This blog will cover a wide range of topics, but will center on the experience of using Office. We will cover topics that are generally of interest to a broad set of Office users and multiple Office applications. We will rely heavily on the existing well-known Office application team blogs to provide in-depth product discussions for specific Office applications.
First up will be a post about how we use customer feedback to improve the product and some new feedback mechanisms in the Technical Preview. We will follow this with a post on the new Office Backstage UI. Please post comments. We are looking forward to hearing from you.
PJ Hough
On behalf of the Office team