Office Pioneer : User Interface

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

Be Refreshed by The Mini Bar

Jo Carpenter — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:52:00 GMT

The Mini Bar, formerly known as the ‘floatie’ (luckily that got changed) is a new solution to combat the irritating command loops involved in changing simple effects in text documents like font size, type face, font colour etc.

In order to view the Mini Bar you simply highlight a selection of text and it will appear floating above the text as if by magic.

If you move very close to the Mini Bar like I have done in the image above it fills itself in and becomes a miniature toolbar. If you move your mouse pointer away from the edge of the Mini Bar like in the example below it slowly fades away until it disappears.

The only annoyance I occasionally get from this feature is when I select text to read it in a document. Perhaps it’s just me, but if something is important or if I’m distracted by something else I highlight a piece of text to see where I am. On these occasion the Mini Bar can get in the way, particularly if I want to read the line above.

Overall I really like this new functionality and I have actually surprised myself by using the mouse pointer more and more to modify simple effects like changing text to bold more often than I use shortcut keys which I used to rely on in previous versions of Office.

Help!!!

Charlene — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 22:51:00 GMT

Back to the theme of finding those lost little functions in the Beta.

So, with all the new user interface, the ribbon, and fancy super functional buttons , including the snazzy “Office button”. Sometimes, my mind reverts to complex menu systems and I just can’t think where I would go to perform a specific task. In this case, paragraph formatting, which incidentally can be found by clicking the bottom left icon on the paragraph section of the ribbon.

There is some great guidance available, like the “find it” documents that Gill blogged about. But when I am in Word, creating and editing a document, I really want to find help immediately from the location I’m working in. So imagine my dismay when I have absolutely no idea where help is, or where it could possibly be! I have been trying to discipline myself to think about what I want to do and not where I think that feature will be. This has served me well so far… where has “track changes” gone?... into the review tab…… where do I spilt my window?…. In the view tab? These all make perfect sense, but where on earth would help be??

Well, eventually I found it… it’s, fairly obviously when you see it, the little blue question mark on the top right hand corner. And when I did, I found the new help tool great to use. But my favourite part…. the new look Office Online. Everything you need from hints and tips, to document templates and detailed product information, all laid out in an easy to follow way. This site is still in Beta at the moment, but if you are investing time in getting to know the the 2007 Microsoft Office Beta2, it is well worth a look at this site, to make the most of your pioneering….

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.

That's a button?

GillLeFevre — Tue, 30 May 2006 20:03:00 GMT

An embarrassing confession.

I'd spent the morning working on a Word document, and beyond being mildly irritated that the blank document opened up at 10% (why does it do this??), it was all going well. Feeling very pleased with myself, I went to send the document to a colleague.

My colleague doesn't yet have the 2007 beta, so I needed to save my document in the 2003 format. "Save As…" - hardly a technical challenge.

Not so fast. Where exactly is "Save as…"? I can see the save button and Ctrl+S is second nature to anyone who spends any amount of time on a computer, but "Save as" is nowhere to be found.

I love the ribbon (which has made word processing a much more visual activity) but despite combing through each and every tab, "Save as" eludes me.

The solution (when in frustration I ask a colleague) is embarrassingly easy. What had looked to me like a snazzy logo, is in fact the "Office button".

One click and all the key document management functions are revealed. It's more or less the same as the old File menu. "Save as" is now the straightforward task I was expecting, with the added bonus of being able to publish my documents in PDF if I choose.

So yes, apparently, that is a button. Oh sure, easy when you know how. And not something I'll forget in a hurry.