Office Pioneer : Office system

Say goodbye to Beta 2; say hello to the 2007 release

GillLeFevre — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:03:00 GMT

I know, I know, as bloggers we've really fallen off the wagon. I could bore you with my excuses but I don't want to test your patience any further!

This is however the last official post of the Office Pioneers. From today, the 2007 Microsoft Office system is now publically available to companies and consumers worldwide. If you've enjoyed the Beta experience then you can now either run out and buy a copy for yourself or sign up for a free 60 day trial.

A couple of technical things to note:

1. You'll need to re-save any document created by the Beta products in the 97-2003 format. The 2007 release is NOT able to open documents created by the Beta code.

This is a pain, but essential because of point 2:

2. Uninstall the Beta code before trying to install the 2007 trial.

The catch of course is, if you skip step 1 and go straight to step 2, you can't open any of your Beta documents and unless you've kept your Beta installation files, you've got no way of reinstalling it. Don't say you weren't warned!

You also need to act quite fast on this - the Beta program starts to "time-bomb" on Thursday 1 February. If you didn't install the Technical Refresh patch, then your Beta products will only operate in reduced functionality after this date. And among the other things that "reduced functionality" won't let you do, you can't save documents. So don't delay!

If you did install the Technical Refresh patch, then you have until the end of March before your product time-bombs, so you've got a bit longer - but to be honest, now that the finalised product is available as a free trial, I'd be switching over straight away.

Biased though I might be, the completed product is a joy to use. I've been running the 2007 release (in one form or another) since November 2005 and, while there have been plenty of ups and downs on the journey, I wouldn't go back to Office 2003.

If you've enjoyed the postings from our blog, please sign up to the free Microsoft "At Work" newsletter - it's published monthly and is full of hints, tips and how-to articles to help you get more out of Microsoft Office (whichever version you have).

Thanks for joining us on this journey into the unknown! Today the Office Pioneers reached their destination.

Reaching the Pioneers

Charlene — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:03:00 GMT

Forgot to let you know, if you do have any Beta hints, tips or stories about how it is changing the way you do things, please drop an email to atworkuk@microsoft.com to reach Gill and me :-)

Undoing my work, one step at a time

GillLeFevre — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:21:45 GMT

This is a B2TR bug-bear of mine (I can't remember whether or not it was a problem in plain B2).

I'm typing away, powering through some work, and then I need to make a change. Say, I think of a word that better expresses what I'm trying to convey. So I hit undo (ctrl+Z because I'm working on the keyboard) and start to continue typing.

Not so fast. Undo hasn't undone. Or at least not completely. It's canceled the last letter I typed. I hit undo again and another letter disappears. Not such a problem when I want to replace "talk" with "presentation", but when it's the other way around, it's a real pain.

What does Create Document Workspace mean in Office?

Jo Carpenter — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:44:00 GMT

If you are unfamiliar with a Microsoft product called SharePoint Services then it is unlikely that you will know about the functionality that is available with the ‘Create Document Workspace’ feature included in Office.

The Create Document Workspace description included on the button informs that it can be used to ‘Create a new site for the document and get the local copy synchronised.’ In my opinion this is probably not the best description to entice you to click on it, especially when nothing is going to happen if you don’t have the associated product necessary to use the feature.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a brief description about what the integration of Office and SharePoint Services can offer. It’s also worth mentioning that SharePoint Services is already integrated in both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Small Business Server 2003 . So if you already use these products and don’t utilise SharePoint then you can do so for free.

SharePoint Services offers a solution for collaboration within the workplace. It enables teams to work more effectively through increased use of electronic communications.

Businesses increasingly ask teams to work together across geographical boundaries. This task has proven difficult using traditional methods to manage communication, schedules, and file sharing. Office 2007 products are designed to integrate collaboration techniques into the main interface to enable ease of use.

Collaboration facilitates effective teaming to make the most of corporate knowledge. Information that is locked away in one part of a company might be of great benefit to another area. Traditional file share systems inhibit sharing this knowledge, but the Office System has the tools to unlock it.

Instead of placing files into directories, Windows SharePoint Services supplies Web sites with document storage and retrieval options. It enables users to check-in and check-out documents which means that only one document needs to exist instead of many documents and people can make alterations without the risk of work being over-written. Other functions include version history, and flexible, customisable views.

The purpose of the ‘Create Document Workspace’ button is to reduce the steps that are taken when saving a document and then putting it on a file share and having the difficulty of announcing the location of the share. Instead you can simply publish the document to a SharePoint web site and employees within the organisation can search and access the document depending on the permissions given to the site.

Listed below are some of the measured benefits of a collaboration solution taken from a number of case studies. This has been referenced using the following article - Business Value Document

Benefits measured in the area of Collaboration and Portals included:

§ Shorter Project Cycle Times – Cycle times reductions averaging 34% were projected for document creation processes.

§ Reduction of Meetings – Meeting time was reduced by an estimated average of 35% due to enhanced visibility into project status.

§ Reduced Travel Expenses – Travel expenses are expected to be cut an average of 37% due to improved access to information.

§ Increased Productivity – Productivity increases of 0.2% to 4% are expected from reduced rework, improved access to information, better knowledge capture, and automation of status reporting.

I’ll aim to provide further details of the integration of Office and SharePoint in a later blog.

Links

Windows SharePoint Web Site

Windows SharePoint Feature Guide

Windows SharePoint Partners

Top Ten Reasons To Deploy Windows SharePoint

Free Windows SharePoint Templates

Hat wasn’t quiet what I waned too right

GillLeFevre — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:52:00 GMT

Sorry… that wasn't quite what I wanted to write.

One of the drawbacks with the spell-checker in Office 2003 was that it could only check words on an individual basis. So while the title of this post makes no sense whatsoever, each word is correctly spelt. As such, if you were to rely solely on the spell-checker to proof-read a document, you could submit it with a lot of "correctly" spelt typos.

If this sounds familiar, then you are going to welcome the arrival of the wavy blue line. In the same way that the red line identifies spelling mistakes and the green line grammatical errors (although I've never been a huge fan of some of the "rules" the grammar checker wants to enforce), the blue line looks for correctly spelt words, that don't fit the context of your sentence.

So my title in Word looks something like this:

Easy to spot, easy to correct! This should definitely save me some red-faced moments in the future!

Note: the more eagle-eyed will have spotted that "too" and "right" are not underlined in the example above. Clearly, the "word choice" checker has some limits. In this particular example the incorrect usage of "waned" means that the rest of the sentence can't be accurately checked.

When you correct "waned", the checker immediately points out that "too" is incorrectly used.

Correcting "too" leaves us with:

But "right" will never get picked up, because it could, albeit unusually, be correct:

That [particularly sentence] wasn't quite what I wanted to write.
That [particular injustice] wasn't quite what I wanted to right.

Lost and found

GillLeFevre — Wed, 31 May 2006 18:53:00 GMT

The learning curve for the beta, for the most part, appears to be short and sharp!

I feel like I'm getting up to speed pretty quickly (I'll certainly not forget where "save as" is located) and although a couple of features have gone walkabout, they've usually been pretty easy to track down.

The User Interface team over in Redmond are a step ahead and have created some useful tools to help Beta 2 users track down favourite features.

They've called it the "Interactive Command Reference Guide", but I much prefer "Lost and Found" :-)

Word 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

Excel 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

PowerPoint 2003 to 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide

These only work if you have already installed the beta! (If you haven't and you just want to check out the new look, visit the preview site and view the product demos.)

I got these links from Jensen Harris's excellent blog and while I was there came across another excellent "getting started" resource - a one page hit-the-ground-running introduction to Office 2007: http://officeblogs.net/UI/WelcomeToOfficePDF.zip

Looks like my learning curve might flat-line very soon.

First impressions in 10.2 seconds

GillLeFevre — Fri, 26 May 2006 20:21:00 GMT

After much anticipation, Beta 2 has arrived and is now publicly available. Anyone can visit the Preview site (this is the UK link), download the programs and take the 2007 Microsoft Office system out for a spin.

So, first impressions... If, as with people, we form an opinion within a minute of meeting them, how does 2007 Office shape up?

1. It’s different. This is a big change from the 2003 version. A lot of the talk on the Preview site, is about the new “user interface” (horrible expression). What it boils down to is that 2007 Office looks very different from previous versions. Nobody will be asking “so how exactly is this new?” – it hits you straight in the face (not literally, clearly).

2. It’s sort of the same. Sure, it looks different and you could tell from 10 yards whether someone was using 2007 or a previous version, but it’s still somehow familiar. The button for bold hasn’t changed and ctrl+s still saves your work. I could sit down and write a letter without really having to think about it – this isn’t a case of starting from scratch.

3. Darwin would be proud. 2007 Office embodies the survival of the fittest – well, the most used :-). Everything you used to do is there, but better – easier, simpler, and much more visual. And the stuff you do the most (according to vast amounts of usability testing) is easiest to find.

If this was a party, 2007 Office would be the old school friend who’s got a new haircut and finally discovered fashion; the person you’ve known for ages but who’s only just coming out of their shell. You'd definitely be going over to say hello!