Microsoft Office 2010 marks the first time Office will be shipping in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
With Windows 7, you have the option of running 64-bit Windows on your 64-bit PC, and now with Office 2010 you have that same choice. As 64-bit processors and operating systems are becoming the standard for systems ranging from servers to desktop computers, 64-bit Office will be able to take advantage of everything that 64-bit systems have to offer.
Some users need greater memory capacity, and those who crunch huge Excel spreadsheets filled with financial data or those who track large projects (such as building an aircraft carrier) using Microsoft Project have that capability. File sizes greater than 2 GB are now possible for applications such as 64-bit Excel and Project, with pretty much all the same user experience and functionality as 32-bit Office. It’s important to note, however, that 32-bit and 64-bit Office side-by-side on the same machine is not supported.
In this post, I’ll help you decide what version is best for you, show you how to install the version you want, provide some background on 64-bit Office, and list some things you should keep in mind.
First, let’s take a step back and understand what 64-bit means. A 32-bit processor uses a 32-bit memory address length, which limits the memory it can address to about 4 GB. As users are running more memory-intensive applications at once, a 32-bit address length is no longer adequate. Enter the 64-bit processor, which can address a potential 17 billion GB.
With a 64-bit processor, you can install a 32-bit or a 64-bit operating system (OS), though only a 64-bit OS is capable of addressing more than 4 GB of memory. Finally, depending on what OS you’ve installed, you can then install a 32-bit or 64-bit application. There is support for 32-bit applications to run on 64-bit Windows using Windows-32-on-Windows-64 (WOW64).
Before talking about 64-bit Office, I want to emphasize how much better 32-bit Office is on 64-bit Windows compared to 32-bit Windows. The basic reason is simple. On 32-bit Windows, it doesn’t make sense to install more than 4 GB of physical memory because anything beyond 4 GB can’t be addressed. However, the limitation means constantly jumping among multiple applications could degrade performance because of thrashing.
On 64-bit Windows, you can install a lot more physical memory. While we work hard to minimize the amount of memory our applications use (Office 2010 has the same minimum memory requirements as Office 2007), this ability to access more memory means that 32-bit Office applications on 64-bit Windows will be able to open, edit, present documents, and switch among applications much faster than on 32-bit Windows. This is especially true if you run other memory-intensive applications alongside Office. Of course, your ultimate performance will be determined by the relationship between the amount of virtual memory being actively used and the amount of actual memory installed on your system.
Whether you choose to run 32-bit Office or 64-bit Office, 64-bit Windows 7 or Vista makes a great operating system environment.
If you’re trying to decide between 32-bit and 64-bit Office, you should ask yourself what your needs are. Are you an Excel power user working with huge amounts of data? Do you need to work with file sizes greater than 2 GB? If so, then you would benefit from 64-bit Office being able to utilize more memory. If not, we’re recommending 32-bit Office 2010 as the default installation on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows mainly due to compatibility with existing 32-bit controls, add-ins, and VBA (update: most VBA code will work without modification on 64-bit Office, but see this paper more details).
We expect over time for 64-bit Office to become the norm. Beyond the immediate benefits of supporting larger documents, there will be benefits to having a consistent 64-bit ecosystem for all extensions and controls. By offering a 64-bit version of Office 2010, we have taken a huge step along this transition path and enabled both customers and partners to be well-positioned for the future.
If you’re downloading Office 2010 online, then you get to decide what version to download (you can get the other version later if you want). If you buy it on a DVD, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010 will be available. If you install 32-bit Office, for example, and you decide later you want to use 64-bit Office instead, the 32-bit version must be uninstalled (it’s as simple as uninstalling any other program) before installing the 64-bit version.
On the DVD, you’ll notice that the file structure looks like this:
On a computer with no Office products installed, the setup.exe file denoted by the red arrow is the “platform selector.” If you run it, it will automatically install 32-bit Office 2010 by default, even on 64-bit Windows. The only time it will install 64-bit Office is if it detects 64-bit Office already installed on your computer. If you want to install 64-bit Office, then open the x64 folder and run setup.exe from there. Similarly, running the setup.exe file in the x86 folder will install 32-bit Office directly.
You’ll see these instructions if you run setup.exe on 64-bit Windows, select Customize, and click on the Platform tab.
We do not support 32-bit and 64-bit Office versions side-by-side natively on the same 64-bit Windows instance. For example, you will be blocked from installing 64-bit Excel 2010 if 32-bit Outlook 2010 is already installed. This also applies to previous versions of Office, so that 64-bit Project 2010 cannot be installed on the same Windows instance as 32-bit Office 2007. Of course if you are running a 32-bit operating system, you will only be able to install and run 32-bit applications.
You’ll be able to check the version of Office you have by going to the Backstage view (click File tab | Help):
If you want to check what version of Windows you have, right-click Computer, select Properties, and look under “System type.”
What did it take to get here? Simply telling the compiler to generate 64-bit code was a first, but very small step. We had to find all the places where pointer differences or buffer lengths were stored in 32-bit values rather than 64-bit values. We built special tools to examine code for problematic computations that might fail on 64-bit. We had to find new ways of testing the applications to identify errors that would only arise when the code was running. Virtually every line of the millions of lines of code in Office needed to be examined for the consequences of this shift. Many of our tools also needed to be ported as we shifted our default development environment to 64-bit.
We also needed to consider ActiveX controls and components. For example, 32-bit Internet Explorer (IE) can only load 32-bit ActiveX controls, so the 32-bit version of the controls in Office needed to be shipped with 64-bit Office. In addition, there are some components from teams within Microsoft that ship with Office, and we needed to make sure 64-bit versions of these were also available. (For developers: there are exceptions, such as the Microsoft Common Control (ComCtl.OCX) files, which will only be available as 32-bit controls).
Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office are largely indistinguishable, except that 64-bit Office has a much higher memory capacity. As mentioned above, the extra memory capacity comes at the cost of some compatibility with existing extensions to Office, such as 32-bit versions of ActiveX Controls and some 3rd party add-ins, in addition to 32-bit versions of programs that interface directly with Office. New versions of these extensions will need to be obtained, and it will take some time for 64-bit compatible extensions to be made available.
For these reasons, we recommend running 32-bit Office 2010 even on 64-bit Windows operating systems for better compatibility. On 64-bit Windows, more applications and documents may be opened at once, and switching among them will be faster because the machine can have more physical memory for the processes to share. When the 64-bit ecosystem for Office is more mature, you’ll be able to easily migrate to 64-bit Office!
Ted Way,
Program Manager, Product Lifecycle and Engineering Excellence (PLEX)
Microsoft Office
Today, over on the MDOP BLOG, we announced the release of the next version of Microsoft Application Virtualization (4.6) as part of MDOP 2010 (Microsoft Deployment Optimization Pack). From Takeshi Numoto, Corporate VP in Office:
“App-V 4.6 provides Office customers with a robust set of features to tackle core challenges including application upgrade, application coexistence, and user readiness. It’s an exciting, powerful new way for IT to deliver Office 2010 quickly without impacting user productivity.”
We are particularly excited about the announcement because a huge portion of the work that was done to make this great release is going to go a long way towards simplifying the deployment and management of Office 2010. If you are new to application virtualization you can get background and quick how to guidance here.
The release fixes a lot of the key issues customers ran into when sequencing such as:
In the next few weeks we will have a more detailed post on how to sequence 2010, benefits of AppV and more but in the meantime check out this detailed post on Office 2010 and AppV 4.6 from some of our awesome virtualization MVPs. For those of you that have already tried sequencing the beta (or older versions) we would love to get your feedback and thoughts.
-Reed Shaffner, Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Office
Do you want to learn about InfoPath and SharePoint 2010 in FREE Web casts with the InfoPath product team? Then sign up for the InfoPath 2010 Academy Live Series.
There are 3 remaining sessions in the series. The next session “Building SharePoint Applications with InfoPath 2010” will take place on Wednesday, March 10th from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM (PST).
If you missed our 1st session, “An introduction to SharePoint applications using InfoPath 2010”, you can view it on demand here. Just click the “Register Now” button.
This is a great opportunity to learn all about our new features and scenarios directly from the product team, so sign up now!
Also, as we first mentioned in this blog post a few weeks ago, the InfoPath team is continuing to publish their weekly “5 for forms” demos. In particular, check out the following two recent topics:
Enjoy!
Since announcing our public Beta, many folks on the Office team have been hard at work engaging with pre-release testers to find and fix any potential deployment issues IT departments may face with existing Office solutions once Office 2010 is released. In addition to engaging on specific developer features like UI extensibility, we also started the Office 2010 Application Compatibility Program – here are excerpts from this blog post:
With the great value Office 2010 brings for end users, IT Professionals and Developers, we are also investing heavily in making deployment of the new version of Office easier. As part of our focus on deployment, we have renewed priority on helping ensure applications and Add-ins for existing installations of Office continue to work without hangs, crashed or performance degradation when interfacing with Office 2010. …The compatibility program will provide tools for environment assessment, code scanning and remediation assistance, and an update to the document conversion tools introduced with Office 2007. The tools, guidance and services we are delivering will be the most comprehensive we have provided to date for a new release of Office.
With the great value Office 2010 brings for end users, IT Professionals and Developers, we are also investing heavily in making deployment of the new version of Office easier. As part of our focus on deployment, we have renewed priority on helping ensure applications and Add-ins for existing installations of Office continue to work without hangs, crashed or performance degradation when interfacing with Office 2010.
…The compatibility program will provide tools for environment assessment, code scanning and remediation assistance, and an update to the document conversion tools introduced with Office 2007. The tools, guidance and services we are delivering will be the most comprehensive we have provided to date for a new release of Office.
Now that we are getting closer to release, we wanted to double down and keep the great feedback coming, so we’ve started the Office 2010 Application Compatibility Tools Bug Hunt, with prizes for those who help us find bugs. Official rules and all the details in the linked post, but here’s a quick excerpt:
To win the prizes, all you need to do is to download beta of the Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT) and beta of the Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector, run them and report any bugs you discover to ofappcpt@microsoft.com before April 9th. If we are able to reproduce your bug or you can help us identify a defect in the tools, that becomes your sweepstakes entry. From the submitted and approved bugs, we will randomly select winners after April 9th.
Happy Hunting!
Recently, we posted information on the Outlook blog about a bug in the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta that increases the message size of some e-mails messages sent from the Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta. The Office team has been hard at work building a fix for this issue, which is available immediately.
Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 32-bit Office 2010 Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 64-bit Office 2010
Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 32-bit Office 2010
Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 64-bit Office 2010
This fix prevents future messages from consuming unnecessary space, but doesn’t resize existing messages. If you reply or forward an existing message that is affected by this bug, it remains enlarged. To help reduce the impact of large messages on your Inbox and mailbox storage quota, you can also run Conversation Cleanup (new feature in Outlook 2010) on large folders. On the Home tab, in the Delete group, click Clean Up. Also, consider starting new message conversations or threads when possible.
Although Office 2010 is in Beta and is not final, we are both excited and humbled by the fact that more than 2.5 million people have downloaded and used the Beta. We want to make sure you have a great experience with Office 2010. If you are using the Office 2010 Beta, take a moment to download this important fix.
Hello, my name is Tim Briggs – I am a user experience (UX) Researcher in the Office Design Group (ODG). Usage data is one of the important feedback mechanisms we look at to understand how Office is being used in the real world. Answering questions like “how frequently is a command used?” and “how many files contain this feature?” are critical parts of our entire engineering process.
Today, I’d like to give you a better sense of how we collect, interpret, and design based on usage data. To get the most out of this discussion, some background might be helpful to you. I encourage you to check out Shawn’s post on Designing with Customers in Mind post—it will give you an idea of our research and design process. I’ll also point you to Peter’s post on Data Driven Engineering—it introduces the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), which is the source of the usage data I’ll discuss.
We collect two main types of usage data: command usage and feature usage. Each gives us a different perspective but the goal of analyzing both is to find patterns of usage in customer data. It’s also important to note that because the data are coming from CEIP, they are anonymous and contain nothing that can identify individuals or their content. But seen in aggregate, general patterns of usage emerge that help us explore, confirm, or challenge our understanding of how all of the Office applications and services are being used.
Command usage data (aka “click data”) tell us how a specific command is used. For instance, take the example of the Paste command. If we combine all of the clicks on Paste, we can mine that data to get a better understanding of:
The Paste command in Word 2010 – command usage data helps us understand how it’s used
Command usage data also tells us about how different parts of the user interface are being used.
The Home tab in Word 2010 – the arrangement and size of buttons is informed by command usage data
This is basic but super useful information…and a bit daunting. Did you know that in Word alone there are over 2,000 commands? Want to know the most common Word command operating on text? Paste.
Feature usage data is a little more difficult to describe. Let me try. Think of a “feature” as a general capability of Office, like Tables in Word. There might be many commands associated with using tables (e.g., Insert Table, Delete Row, Move Column…). While we might be interested in each of those commands, often we want to understand use of the feature at a higher level. This requires feature usage data—counters that we build into the feature to answer specific, predicted questions:
If you want an interesting exercise, think of an idea you have for improving Office. First, use Send-A-Smile to tell us about it. :) Then, think about what information you would need to know about how that feature is used in order to create and validate your design for all of the users that will be impacted. That’s your feature usage data. And here’s a tip we use with all of our teams: sketch out the graph of the data which you expect to see once implemented—this helps you think about the form of the data to collect and sets your expectations for the final data to help you spot errors in your initial assumptions.
This is just a sampling to give you an idea of the breadth and depth of typical usage data we use across our engineering stages, from initial ‘what-ifs’ to late stage ‘Beta use is showing we have to change this.’
Let’s look at an example. Usage data tells us that Paste is the most frequent editing operation (for instance, it’s used almost two times more frequently than Bold). We also know from our other research methods (field visits, usability labs, focus groups, Send-A-Smile, etc.) that sometimes reformatting pasted content can be painful. We feel it ourselves—it can be hard to get the new content to look right.
As we began working on Office 2010, we wanted to improve the Paste experience. In order to do that we needed to understand more about how Paste is used. We looked to the usage data to provide some context. Below is an example of some of the ways usage data informed the engineering of what would eventually become the Paste Options gallery, which Mirko explains in his post on Live Preview Paste.
Question
Data used
Results
How many users would this impact?
Command Usage:
Paste is used by almost every user in almost every session of Word. In fact, it occurs more frequently per session than other related commands…like Cut or Copy.
How are Paste and Paste Recovery being used?
Feature Usage:
The result was the chart above. Note how frequently content is pasted from a different document or different application—those sources probably have different formatting, explaining the need for the additional formatting options provided by Paste Recovery.
How do users get to the commands?
Predictably in Word, the most frequent is Ctrl-V by a wide margin, with the right-mouse menu next.
We used this data to explore 1) improving the ease of access, the contents, and the interaction model of the Paste Recovery widget for keyboard users; 2) putting the Paste options directly in the right-mouse menu, for those users who are accustomed to pasting via the context menu; and 3) we also thought about how we can expose the improved Paste experience in the Ribbon. After iterating on several designs in the usability lab, you can see the result in the Office 2010 Ribbon, right-mouse context menu, and the Paste Recovery OOUI widget:
What do people do after they paste?
Other than continuing to type, the most frequent commands relate to formatting (changing font size, color, appearance). The next most frequent are another Paste or an Undo.
We used this data to understand what options needed to be available in the Paste Recovery options. It also clearly signaled that people are not satisfied with Paste results since they were often making “manual” formatting changes (or undoing the action) immediately after pasting.
Which Paste Recovery options are most used? Do we have the right defaults?
The result was the chart above. It shows how frequently each Paste Recovery option is used. KeepSourceFormatting is the default and comparing that to the number of times Paste is used versus number of times Paste Recovery is used, we have the right default. Note that the other options in the Paste Recovery widget are arranged in order by frequency:
Armed with the usage data above, we explored different designs, iterated on them, and arrived at the current design that Mirko explains in his post. And now, as we receive usage data from the Office 2010 Beta releases, we continue to analyze the usage of this and the other significant improvements we made this version.
So, I hope this discussion has given you a sense of how we use usage data to improve the Office user experience. It’s been a game-changer for us…thank you for providing us the data.
Tim Briggs, UX Researcher, Office Design Group
Hello, my name is Vikas Malhotra, and I am a security Program Manager in the Office Trustworthy Computer Team (TWC). In this post I will be covering some security changes we made around Data Execution Prevention or DEP for short. DEP is one of the many new defense in depth protection layers we have added in Office 2010.
I will begin by telling you what DEP is all about and how it can affect you both as an IT professional and as a developer.
DEP is a security feature that was introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows 2003 server, service pack 1. More general information on DEP can be found in this Microsoft knowledge base article.
When a program is launched, memory pages are allocated for that program. These pages in memory will have a ‘marker’ to indicate if they are executable or not. If a page is marked as executable, then code within that memory address will be allowed to run. If the page is not marked as executable, then it will not be allowed to run. When DEP is enabled, if code attempts to run from within a page that is not marked as executable, then a DEP exception is raised and the process that is running is terminated.
Now, when malware infects your computer, the first thing it will try to do is write its ‘bad code’ into your computer’s memory areas that are marked as writable and executable. Next, the malware will try to run that malicious code. When this step happens, and DEP is enabled, all you will see is your Office application crashing. From a security perspective, what occurred was Office had stopped potential malware from executing and shut itself down in order to help keep your computer safe.
The easiest method is to use Task Manager. In Task Manager, make sure the column “Data Execution Prevention” is visible. Now, every process that is running with DEP enforced will have the label “Enabled” beside it. To illustrate, the figure below shows winword.exe is running and DEP has been enforced for that process:
Office applications, when booted, will call into the GetSystemDEPPolicy function to determine your computers DEP policy. This API will return one of the following results, and will behave as follows:
If it is determined that an Office application needs to run with DEP enabled, the application will then call into the SetProcessDEPPolicy to ensure DEP is permanently enabled for that processes lifespan. By doing this, we ensure all other binaries loaded into the Office process will have DEP enforced too.
For 64-bit installs, DEP will always be enforced for Office applications. On 32-bit installs, you can configure if you want DEP at the application level within Trust Center. For applications that support Protected View, you will find the option to configure DEP in the Protected View tab. For all other Office applications, you will find the setting in the DEP tab, as shown below:
Figure: Configure DEP Settings for Office Applications that support Protected View
Figure: Configure DEP Settings for Office Applications that do not support Protected View
If the option for enabling DEP is grayed out in the trust center, this is because either the AlwaysOn or the AlwaysOff has been set for your computer.
The option to configure these trust center options is also available in the group policy templates as shown below for Word:
In most cases, your code will not be affected by DEP. If however, your code requires writing into memory locations that are not marked as executable, and then tries to execute that code (such as JIT compilers do), then you will have a few options. The first option is to rewrite you code to no longer execute in this manner. If you do not have access to the source code, or getting newer add-in is not possible, then you can disable DEP using the instructions provided earlier. The last option is to use the VirtualProtect function. VirtualProtect let you write your code into memory into a page that is marked as Write and Execute. Once you are done writing, the Write attribute can be removed. This ensures that you can execute your code at a later time and an exception will not be raised. By removing the Write attribute ensures malware will not be able to infect your memory location.
In the majority of cases, a DEP failure will occur for add-ins you have installed, and not within an Office application. When an add-in triggers a DEP exception, the Office application will terminate and appear as if a normal crash had occurred. When the Office application is restarted, you will be presented with a dialog similar to the one below:
In this example my add-in, the ‘my vc test com add-in’ had caused Office to become unstable. At this point in time I am given two options. The first option is to disable the add-in from loading, and the second is to try reloading the add-in. My recommendation would be to disable the add-in and let Office boot up normally. Once the Office application starts, I would look in the add-in manger for my add-in and the reason why it was disabled.
In the illustration below, I am able to see that my “add-in was disabled by the user after a Data Execution Failure” had occurred.
At this point, I would keep the add-in disabled until I was able to get a newer version that is DEP friendly.
In conclusion, Office 2010 now ships out of the box with DEP enabled. Data Execution Prevention is a feature that helps keep your computer safe by making sure code that is not intended to execute, never gets that chance.
Thanks. Vikas Malhotra Security Program Manager Office Trustworthy Computing
Hi, again, I’m Tucker Hatfield, a Program Manager on the Office Graphics team with another post on improvements for using pictures in documents in Office 2010. This time we’re looking at the improvements to cropping pictures in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.
When planning our new features for this version of Office, we did a lot of research to find out more about the common tasks people do with pictures in Office. Cropping was overwhelmingly the most-used bit of editing used on pictures, so one of the first things we started work on was making cropping an easier-to-use and more powerful tool.
First of all, we wanted crop to allow you to see both what you were keeping and what you’d cropped out of an image. As an example, let’s say I wanted to insert this picture in my document, but I wanted to emphasize the flower by cropping out the leaves.
To do this, I would go to the Picture Tools contextual tab and select Crop to go into cropping mode.
In previous versions of Office, when you moved the crop handles anything outside of the crop rectangle became invisible, which can make it hard to quickly find the best cropping for a picture.
As you can see below, now when you move crop handles on a picture the full picture is shown with the portions outside of the crop area grayed out.
Positioning the crop area is easier now, too. You can click on the picture and “slide” it around behind the crop frame or grab the crop frame and move it around over the picture. This makes fine-tuning what you want to be visible much easier.
Normally when you go into cropping mode the cropping rectangle starts out the same size as the original picture. We realized that there are going to be times when you want to trim a picture to a specific ratio, so we added a drop-down menu to allow you to choose the initial proportions of the crop frame.
Choosing a size will make the original crop rectangle start out at that proportion, fitted to the bounds of the picture. Note that we’ve included 16:9 and 16:10 in the Landscape section, in order to make formatting pictures to fit widescreen easier.
Once you’ve chosen an aspect ratio, the crop rectangle can then be resized freely or you can press Shift while you resize from the corners to retain the aspect ratio. Below is an example where I’ve selected the 1:1 aspect ratio.
But what if you don’t want a simple rectangle? You may know that you could apply a shape to a picture using Picture Shape in previous versions of Office. However, when you did, getting the shape oriented the way you wanted it relative to the picture was usually a matter of editing numbers by trial and error in crop section of the Size dialog.
In 2010 we’ve moved the shapes gallery to the Crop button, where making an image fit in a shape can done very easily visually by choosing Crop to Shape.
Since you can resize the shape and move the shape relative to the picture, getting exactly the result you want is now very easy.
Of course, then you can add shape effects to make the result really pop.
Another common source of frustration for our users occurs when they insert a shape and put a picture fill in it. The normal behavior is that when the picture is filled in the shape it gets squished down to fit inside the shape. We’ve preserved that as the default behavior because we know some customers rely on it not changing, but we’ve made fitting pictures in shapes easier by allowing you to use the crop mode on filled shapes, too. By going into crop mode you can manually resize the image to the proportions you want. To make things even easier we’ve added options to automatically Fill or Fit pictures into the shape. Simply click on one of these options and Fill will scale the picture to completely fill the shape while retaining the proportions of the original picture, while Fit will scale the picture so that it fits entirely within the shape. The examples below show the difference.
We’ve also enabled cropping for pictures in SmartArt graphics. If you’ve ever tried using pictures in a SmartArt graphic and been frustrated by the way the image fits, you’ll find that fixing that is much easier now. You can resize and reposition the picture to make it look the way you want. Just to make sure you don’t accidentally change the layout of the shapes in your SmartArt graphic, we lock the shape so it can’t be moved when you’re in cropping mode. You can still easily move or resize the picture shape when not in cropping mode, of course.
With all of these changes we’ve made the most common task you’re likely to do with pictures easier as well as more powerful. We’re confident that they will help you find new and more creative ways to include pictures in your documents, especially when you combine cropping with the many other improvements you’ll find in Office 2010.
Until next time…
In the meantime, we’d love to hear any questions or comments on how these features are working for you. Please let us know if there are any specific topics you’d like to see us write about.
Tucker Hatfield, Program Manager, Office Graphics