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MS Office Beta Notes This is a side-blog where I intend to keep all of my notes from Beta testing new versions of Office. This will keep them all in one place for future reference. I started this with Office 2003, and am bringing it back for the 2007 version. This is not an official Microsoft site, this is just the ramblings of one IT guy.
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| Thursday, June 15, 2006
Preview Attachments I've got to say, maybe the biggest time saver that I've seen so far in Office 2007 is the ability to preview attachments within Outlook itself. Now, when someone sends you a one-page agenda in Word format attached to an email scheduling the meeting, instead of opening the attachment and waiting for Word to open to see the agenda, you can preview it in Outlook. It doesn't give you many options to do anything with the document like you'd get by actually opening it, but when you just need to look at something briefly, this is so much quicker and easier! Tags: Tuesday, June 13, 2006
One more thing about the ribbon One thing about the new GUI that absolutely will cause confusion is that the change isn't standard. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access all have the new GUI. Outlook has the old menus on the main screen, the ribbon when you open or create an email. OneNote, Publisher, Visio and Project 2007 betas all have the old style menus. Microsoft has, obviously, created a distinction between it's standard Office Suite and add-on programs like Visio and OneNote, but they can't possible tell me that they don't have plenty of customers using Word, Outlook and Visio. Or OneNote, Word and Excel. Think it might have been nice to have a consistent GUI across those programs, like we've had for years and years? Tags: More on the GUI Steven Vore today: (follow the link, he's got a bunch of screenshots and more to say, this is just the part that caught my attention.) For starters, gone is Windows' "system menu" - the top left-hand corner menu that's always held options for the window itself; Minimize, Maximize, Close etc. Though it's still available via the Alt-Space keystroke combination, it's not obvious and it's different from other applications and from the OS itself. In it's place is a large circular area with the Office logo inside. That, believe it or not, is the File menu! I can't believe how long it took me to find it, to figure out how to open an existing file. Interestingly enough, I figured that out in no time flat. As soon as it occurred to me to look for the File menu, I went to the upper left of the screen. Habit, I guess. On the other hand, the first time I tried to insert my signature in an email, I had the hardest time figuring out where that is. Silly me, thinking it used to be on the insert menu, thought it would be on the ribbon when I was in the insert mode. Nope. It's on the default ribbon. I actually would have seen it quicker had I not gone looking for it. :) More from Steven: I think that's going to be a huge problem for users, that helpdesks are going to be flooded with "how do I open an existing file" calls. I fear that he's right. As I said before, the ribbon makes more sense for "experts" and brand new users who will go looking for things. Most business users fall somewhere in between, and they generally will call the helpdesk when something isn't in the first place they look, usually where they're used to looking. Lots of things in 2007 aren't in the first place I look. It seems our choices when it comes time to rolling this out across an organization is to spend enough time training users so they find things in the first place they look, or spend a lot of time answering questions about where things are. More than likely, we'll be doing both. Tags: Monday, June 12, 2006
Blogging from Word
This is a post from Word 2007. I know this has been a much-discussed feature in the blogosphere, but I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Microsoft is a little late to this party? Certainly being able to use Word is nice in terms of having a spell check and other formatting feature that it brings to the table as opposed to composing in the browser or another blogging tool, but it’s not how most of us have gotten used to blogging. Personally, I don’t see as much benefit from Word because I’m already using the Google Toolbar in Firefox to spell check. I’m using Greasemonkey scripts to do things like add Technorati tags, the Blogger interface is much easier to create links with, and I can use Flickr to post pictures directly to my blog. All of this goes on in the browser. In fact, since I don’t remember the exact code for Technorati tags, I’m going to have to go back and add them in after I post this. Basically, the fact that they finally cleaned up the HTML you get from Word is nice, but I’ve grown so accustomed to using other tools to post to my blog, and spent so much time getting things set-up exactly the way I like, that it’s going to be very difficult to switch now. That’s why I’m wondering if they’re too late? Of course, there’s a whole lot of people out there who haven’t started a blog yet, so maybe they really aren’t too late. The other issue about this feature concerns how much it’s going to keep businesses from upgrading. I know our firm has a no blogging policy. Basically it says that you’re at work to work, and you aren’t to be posting to or maintaining your personal blog using firm resources. You’re free to have a blog but you must maintain it on your own time using your own tools, and you should be very careful about discussing the firm’s business publicly. Given that, why would I roll out software with a specific features for bloggers? Is MS betting that businesses will embrace blogging, therefore making this feature in Word part of their website maintenance? It’s certainly not out of the question that our firm will be maintaining a blog for our clients in the future, which would certainly change the way I’m thinking about this now. I guess we shall see. Tags: Sunday, June 11, 2006
Outlook speed One of the things I've first noticed about Outlook 2007 was that it is slow. Many people have complained about how slow 2003 is when you first open it and it goes through checking for new mail, and while it is slower than 2000 I never thought it was that big a deal. 2007, at least for me currently, seems even slower. It is completely impossible to do anything within Outlook until the whole program loads and it downloads all the new mail. It doesn't seem too bad after that, but having to wait for it to go through all of this before I can check something like a contact phone number or a meeting location in the calendar is a pain, and it makes me very weary of testing out the built-in RSS reader. I can't even imagine how long it'll take before I can do anything if I have to wait for my 230+ feeds to update too! That being said, I'll probably give the RSS reader a run through with a few selected feeds before I make any final judgments on the speed. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. Tags:
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