Hi, my name is Maithili Dandige. I am a Program Manager at Microsoft working in the Office Security team. For this release, I’ve worked on several security and privacy-related features such as Office File Validation, Recommended Settings, improvements to Document Inspector, and Trusted Documents. I will be talking about all these in the upcoming months. Today, I am here to give you some insight to the Trusted Documents feature, a simple enhancement that improves the user experience when interacting with our security features. You can go here if you are interested in reading about other security features on our team. Trusted Documents alleviates my personal long-term frustration as an end user by reducing the number security prompts seen when working with Office documents containing Macros, ActiveX controls, Data Connections and other types of active content that are blocked by Office Trust Center.
Before we go into the details of how Trusted Documents work, I’d like to spend a few minutes on why we built this feature. Versions of Office before Office 2007 showed you modal prompts for macros and other types of active contents before opening documents. Those dialogs were useful but problematic; you were shown the prompt that said - “Do you want to enable macros?” before letting you interact with the file. Many users who didn’t need to enable those macros also ended up enabling them, although often all they wanted to do was read the document.
In Office 2007 we fixed that. We didn’t show you the modal prompt before opening the document; instead we showed you what we call the Message Bar. This was a significant improvement as you could read or edit your document safely and deal with the security warnings later. Unfortunately, for a document with macros you created, or a workbook with data connections that you worked on every day, you’d need to enable the content every single time from the Message Bar. This could be a frustrating user experience because now not only did it take you two additional clicks to get to your next task, it didn’t seem to provide any real security benefit for a document. This is why:
a) First, how likely are you to change your mind about trusting a document? If you enable content once, you are almost certainly going to again do it the next time round as you need your document to work properly.
b) Second, if there was malicious intent that created the macros or other type of content, your machine was probably compromised by it the first time you enabled the macros, so prompting you the next time for the same file does not add any additional security benefit.
So this motivated us to provide users with a better security experience which we call the Trusted Documents feature: In Office 14 we now remember which active content you have enabled, and don’t prompt you again the next time you open the same document.
So what are Trusted Documents? – Trusted Documents provides a simple one click step to always enable active content (e.g. Macros, ActiveX controls etc.) in a document. We remember your trust decision on the file and don’t show you the security prompt the next time you open the file.
It more closely reflects how people work. If I create a document with a macro in it, I don’t want to be prompted to enable the macro the next time I open it. Or, if I get a document with daily reports from my co-worker that has a pivot table, I don’t want to enable the data connection to our trusted server every time I want updated numbers. Also, I may be opening documents from multiple folders (SharePoint, network shares, desktop, attachments received in email). I don’t necessarily want to put them into a trusted folder every time I open them. Trusted Documents helps with all the above. It remembers the first time you enabled the content and unless the trust record for that document changes, it doesn’t bother you with a security notification for the content anymore.
With Trusted Documents, the trust is recorded on a per file basis. The trust record is added to the Current User section of your local registry and contains the file’s full path along with other data such as the created time for a document. Note that because ‘trust records’ are stored on a specific machine you’ll get prompted again if you open the file on another computer. Also since the trust record consists of more than just the file’s path it protects against social engineering attacks such as replacing existing trusted documents with malicious documents that have the same name.
Protected View helps us create a good security boundary between documents that are on your machine which you may have trusted vs. new incoming untrusted documents opened from the Internet, attachments, etc. For example, an attachment containing macros is first opened in Protected View. If you trust the file and exit Protected View we do not enable the macros automatically. Instead we show another Message Bar to enable the macros. By disallowing macros from running automatically while exiting Protected View we prevent opening up the computer to additional risk where the user may have intended to just reply to the document with comments and not run the macros. Now, if you explicitly save the attachment and also enable the macros we make it trusted and the next time you open the document it does not open in Protected View and active content is enabled for that document.
In Office 2010, you will continue to see the Message Bar when a macro, data connection, ActiveX control or other type of active content is in the document. Here is the Message Bar that comes up when more than one type of active content is disabled (e.g. macros and ActiveX controls).
There are two entry points to make a document Trusted. If you click Enable Content on the Message Bar the document will be automatically added to Trusted Documents list in your registry. Second, you can click the Message Bar for details; it will take you to the Backstage view. In the Backstage view you can click the Enable Content button which will bring up two options.
a) You can enable all the content and make it a trusted document. This will enable macros and ActiveX controls in the document and add the document to your list of trusted documents in the registry. This option provides you with a simple one-click option to enable all the content at once and make it a trusted document. The next time you open this document you will not be shown the security warning.
b) If you are an advanced user who wants more control over the types of content to enable/disable then you can click the Advanced Options button, which brings up the Security Notifications dialog that has options for enabling content for one time (this is similar to Office 2007).
Similar to Trusted Locations we have security restrictions and settings around trusted documents. For example, we do not allow users to trust documents from untrusted locations such as Temporary Internet Files (TIF) or TEMP.
Trusting documents on a network share is riskier than trusting documents on your local hard drive as other users who have access to the network locations can modify the contents of your file. For this reason, we show you a security warning the first time you try to trust a document on a network location. In Trust Center, you can disallow documents on a trusted location to be trusted, causing Office to show you the security notification every time you open a document from a network location. We also provide you with more options in the Trust Center, such as disabling all trusted documents completely or purging the documents you have trusted. All these options can be found under Trust Center settings for an application. Similarly all these settings can also be configured by an administrator of an IT organization via group policy (e.g. an administrator can configure for disallowing trusted documents to be created on network shares thus limiting the use only to your local hard drive).
To summarize, the main security UX goal we are striving to reach in Office 14 with Trusted Documents and other security features is to make unnecessary prompts go away and to only prompt users when necessary. By reducing ‘prompt fatigue’ we hope to enable users to make better, more informed decisions when they do encounter security prompts
We’ve recently heard that over the past several weeks many of you have tried to post comments on this blog that never appeared. We’re working hard with support folks to track down why this is happening.
In the meantime if you make a comment and it doesn’t appear within 24 hours, use the ‘e-mail’ link at the top of this page to let us know! Please include when you commented and on which post; we'll follow up directly with you to troubleshoot the problem.
Thanks!
Have you ever closed Word after making a bunch of changes, and then accidently clicked ‘No' when asked if you want to save your changes? Then you suddenly realized what you have done, only to find that there was no way to recover your work? You are not alone. In fact, so many people were in similar situations that we improved Office 2010 so you can get that document back! We call this feature Versions and I would like to spend a little time introducing it to you.
In prior versions of Office we periodically save your document in the background when you are editing a document. We keep this file around so we can use it to recover your work if the application crashes.
For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Office 2010 improves on this idea. In the Backstage view we expose the periodic autosaved files from your current editing session and allow you to compare or restore them as the newest document. We purge them when you save and close your editing session.
Additionally, if you close an editing session without saving, we now keep your last autosaved file and let you access it from the Backstage view, under Recent Documents, or from Document Information when you open your document again. So now you can recover that unsaved work with a few simple clicks.
To ensure that we don't clutter your computer with these autosaved files, we only keep these files for 4 days, or until the next time you edit your document.
Now you can enjoy Office 2010 Excel, PowerPoint and Word with the knowledge that the software is working to protect you from losing your work.
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.
My name is Mirko Mandic and I am a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team. Today’s post is about the work we are doing in Office 2010 to improve the most frequently used Office command – Paste.
Despite its usefulness, Paste doesn’t always work like users expect it to. Their feedback and usage data (Paste is the most frequently undone action) indicate that pasted content often does not look like what they expected. Changing the format of the freshly pasted content to look correct can be time-consuming. Undoing and redoing a paste is tedious and interrupts the user’s workflow. Instead of being a quick stop en route to a great looking document, pasting can seem like a complex task that comes with added “repair costs” (as one of our users described it).
Some of Office users have found creative ways to achieve better results when pasting content into an Office application. For example, some users tell us they take their content “through” Notepad before pasting it in an Office application in order to strip away the formatting.
Prior versions of Office offered some powerful, but underused pasting tools. The Paste Special dialog enabled the users to achieve their desired result by picking the specific Paste format, such as pasting the formula or the formatting only. Unfortunately, few users found these tools. And those who found them faced several challenges – the names of the formats were often not descriptive enough to suggest results and pasting via the dialog required multiple clicks and a lot of mouse movement.
The Office Paste Recovery feature tried to help users fix incorrect pastes by offering alternative Paste options after the content had been pasted. Word even offered a setting in the Options dialog to modify the default Paste format. While some found these features useful, their wide adoption was hindered by discoverability and efficiency issues similar to those for the Paste Special dialog.
In Office 2010, we’re combining the rich functionality of the Paste Special dialog and the Paste Recovery feature into a new Paste Options gallery. The Paste Options gallery includes Live Preview – hovering over each Paste item allows users to preview the Paste formatting with their actual content. The new Paste Options gallery helps users get the right results the first time, making the task of copying and pasting content into a document quicker and easier by eliminating the repetitive process of pasting, undoing and trying again.
The Paste Options gallery shows up in three places– in the Ribbon, on the right-click context menu and in the Paste Recovery on-object UI (OOUI) that appears near content you have pasted in your document:
The contents of the Paste Options gallery are contextual. They change based on what the user has copied and where the content is being pasted. For example, copying some data from Excel will yield a different set of Paste choices than if the user had copied some text from Word:
Keep Text Only is a useful Paste format that works in many scenarios. Whenever it is included in the Paste Options gallery, it shows up as the last item in the gallery to make it easy to spot and select. Similarly, the first option in the gallery is almost always the default Paste option, the format that would have appeared when pasting with CTRL+V in previous versions.
When the user right clicks and hovers over an option in the Paste Options gallery, two things happen in addition to the Live Preview:
- The rest of the UI “gets out of the way” by becoming transparent. This effectively increases the size of the visible Live Preview area, helping the user preview the results and select the right Paste option.
- A tooltip is displayed, showing the label and keyboard accelerator information. The tooltip is intended to complement the Live Preview in helping the user chose the right option from the gallery, and as importantly, educate him/her during the transitional period of getting used to the new graphical presentation of the functionality.
Many of our users paste using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V. We are making the Paste Options gallery useful for them as well. The Paste Recovery OOUI is now much easier to access using the keyboard than in previous versions (most users did not know they could drop the Paste Recovery OOUI via Alt+Shift+F10). In Office 2010, after using the Ctrl+V shortcut, just press the Ctrl key one more time to drop the new Paste Options gallery and change to a different Paste option. Similarly to what happens on mouse hover, extra label and accelerator info is displayed in the tooltip as soon as keyboard focus is moved to an option in the gallery.
By exposing Paste options at a higher level in the UI, we are aiming to improve the task of pasting content into a document and we are making that task more efficient for keyboard and mouse users alike. Paste tasks that previously required long keyboard sequences (from the Paste Special or the Paste Recovery OOUI) can now be completed by two keyboard presses – a press on the context menu key to launch the context menu, followed by a press on an accelerator key for the desired Paste option. When it comes to mouse usage, several mouse clicks (and a lot of mouse movement) have been replaced by just two quick clicks – the right-click to bring up the context menu and a press on the desired option in the Paste Options gallery.
We hope that the Paste Options gallery in the Technical Preview of Office 2010 is already making it easier for you to create great looking content with less clicks and in less time than before, and we are looking forward to continue hearing your feedback on it!
The Excel team has made several improvements in the data visualization area for Excel 2010 and been posting lots of details on the Excel Team Blog. First off, the Excel team added a visualization that you can use to enhance your spreadsheets, sparklines:
“For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence. Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing…”
Data bars and icon sets have been enhance to address important customer feedback. One of the biggest requests for data bars was negative data bars, which is now in Excel 2010:
“In Excel 2010, we have introduced negative value data bars which can help analyze trends when negative values are involved. By default, we smartly position the axis in the cell so that a small negative value will not occupy half the cell lengths when bigger positives values are also in the range. If you prefer, we let you position the axis in the center of the cell.”
Also, there are improvements to charting, especially around the performance and rendering of charts:
“In today’s article I will outline some of the significant new chart improvements that impact performance. In Office 2007 the graphics engine used by Office Charts was replaced with one that could support more complex rendering. A downside of this change was slower performance in certain scenarios relative to Office 2003. For example, supporting anti-aliasing in Office 2007 allows the chart to render smooth lines; however, the computation for smoothing takes multiple rendering passes which take additional time. One of the top priorities for Office 2010 was increasing chart performance.”
Here’s the full list of Excel blogs posts around sparklines, conditional formatting, and charting:
Sparklines in Excel
Adding Some Spark to Your Spreadsheets
Formatting Sparklines
Sparkline Axis Options
Sparklines – Lining Up the Points
A Sparkline Trick - Using the Horizontal Axis as a Reference Line
One More Sparkline Trick
Icon Set Improvements in Excel 2010
Data Bar Improvements in Excel 2010
More Conditional Formatting Features in Excel 2010
The DisplayFormat OM
Chart Object Model in Word & PowerPoint
Improvements to Chart Performance
More Charting Enhancements in Excel 2010
Enjoy!
In Office 2007, information about your product, product licenses, and product support is buried several levels deep, and discovering this information can be challenging. For example, suppose that you wish to check for the latest Office product updates. In Office 2007, you would open the Office Options screen:
If you wish to find out about the license state of your Office product, you would visit this screen and click the About button to bring up a very familiar dialog box:
The Resources tab is a good first step towards putting all the product support information in one place. Still, product support options are located together with a number of Word-specific options, making it hard to pick out the information or options you're looking for. This does not quite fit Office's WYSIWYG user interface at all. Admittedly, product updates, product license activation, and product support don't necessarily align with the WYSIWYG paradigm in the first place. After all, how often do you really need to update Office?
In Office 2010, we set out to evolve the Resource Tab of the Office Options dialog into a dashboard-like interface: a dynamic, data-driven view that consolidates and surfaces application- and product-specific information such as versioning, updates, and license state in one convenient location. The Resources tab with its matter-of-fact presentation is enhanced in order to...
The Backstage Help tab makes it easier for you to get support, help, and product information.
The Help place has three key components:
A typical user will install one Microsoft Office 2010 product at a time. However, you may choose to purchase some products and trial others on a time-limited basis. This view dynamically adjusts to your specific installation:
Thus, as you work with and try out various flavors of Office 2010, you can return here to see everything you've got in one spot. Well, that's nice, but why should you care?
Good point! In general, you shouldn't have to care about product activation and licensing. However, issues related to product activation are a source of considerable customer pain. Activation status used to be buried in the Resources tab. Now, product licensing is a first-class citizen of the Backstage View.
Product activation verifies that your product license was legitimately issued by Microsoft. Across the spectrum of Office 2010 products, we have merged Office 2010 product activation with installation in order to automate the process. However, it is not always convenient or possible to activate the product right away. If you have not activated your Office 2010 product license, you may see the following notification when you launch an application such as Word:
However, you may be on the road, or you may not have Internet connectivity at your present location, so you simply close this dialog. If you ever want to get back to this information, you can just open the Backstage view and go to the Help tab to activate your product:
In addition, if you are running a trial version of Office, you can purchase the full product from here.
Let's revisit our scenario from above:
This illustrates a typical Office 2010 installation: you have purchased Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010. However, you also have a trial license Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, which provides some additional applications. From here, you can see which applications are covered by which licenses.
To anticipate a question: why not "subtract" the applications that you actually bought and show only the trial applications for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010? After all, that would be a shorter, neater list.
We settled on this list-every-application approach since we cannot anticipate every Microsoft Office 2010 installation. Multiple Microsoft Office 2010 products can be installed side-by-side on your computer. If we try to be creative with the application list, we risk making bad assumptions about your Office installation, possibly confusing more than enlightening.
In most contexts, you can click the handy Help "question mark" to get specific information on tasks you wish to perform on your documents. However, the Microsoft Office website offers a large selection of additional materials, training, support options, and handy online solutions to common questions. One of the most valuable is Getting Started, which solves the tabula rasa problem: launching Word or Excel for the first time, starting at a blank document window, unsure what to do next. The other options from the old Resources tab are present here as well.
We hope that the Help tab succeeds in its mission to bring disparate product information into one convenient setting that is more attractive, more informative, and easier to use than ever before. And, for those of you who like the familiar "About" dialog, don't worry - it's still there. Just click "Additional Version and Copyright Information" and see it for yourself!