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Wide screens and Ribbons
Dave Ziffer left a comment in my post asking ‘Do you like the Ribbon?’ with a link to a piece he wrote about it called The Computer Industry’s Usability Catastrophe. There’s some good stuff there, so I thought I’d create a new post rather than leave a comment.
In many ways I agree with Dave that the combination of widescreen notebooks and the Ribbon is not a good one. Vertical space on screen is now more valuable than ever and there’s no way to move the Ribbon. At least Toolbars in Office 2003 could be docked on the side of the screen or left floating as shown on the right.
I also miss the ability to customise the Ribbon as I have my own toolbar in Word 2003 with only the tools I need that fits comfortably on one line. That will be partially fixed in Office 2010 as some customisation will be possible in that version.
Having said that, I think that some of the Ribbon criticisms are a little harsh. The Ribbon can be hidden with a quick double click on one of the tabs and it then acts much like the old menus. And all the old keyboard shortcuts still work although there’s no visual feedback until the command is completed. For more information see the Microsoft Office Keyboard shortcuts in the 2007 Office system training page.
Microsoft Wireless Mouse 2000
The fashion for squeezing as many buttons as possible onto mice has thankfully come to an end. The Microsoft Wireless Mouse 2000 concentrates instead on working as reliably as possible, whatever the surface, with a technology called Bluetrack.
The Wireless Mouse 2000 is certainly responsive on a variety of surfaces that we tried around the office, including the back of a laptop bag, a likely surface when on the move.
A wireless dongle is included and can be attached to the mouse for going on the move but this doesn't automatically turn the mouse off like the Wireless Notebook Mouse 7000. Instead there is a switch on the bottom of the mouse to turn the mouse off. Power is provided by 2 AA batteries
The instructions are very simple: insert batteries, plug in dongle and download mouse software from Microsoft. The software isn't essential for the mouse to work but the Microsoft does add some useful extras.
As mentioned earlier there is a basic compliment of buttons: left, right and a wheel. The wheel can be tilted left and right for sideways scrolling once Intellipoint has been installed.
The Microsoft Wireless Mouse 2000 costs £30, which is very reasonable for a good quality wireless mouse.
Fixing problems without System Restore
System Restore is helpful, but can be switched off to save hard disk space. That doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore when something goes wrong with the computer, which happened to me this morning.
The computer seemed to be working but none of the web browsers would start properly. Internet Explorer, Firefox (ordinary and portable) and Opera appeared in Task Manager but not on the Desktop.
System Restore seemed like the best solution but I then realised that I’d turned it off.
Thankfully there is an alternative that was not disabled along with System Restore. Restart the computer and press F5 or F8 to show the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Press the up key until ‘Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)’ is highlighted and press Enter.
In my case, Windows loaded without any further messages and all the browsers were working again.
Because I don’t know exactly what went wrong I can’t say when this would work or not, but it’s certainly worth a go if there are problems with Windows that System Restore can’t fix.
Time to leave
All good things come to an end, so it’s time to move on from Windows 7RC1. This test version of Windows was freely available (I’ve got it on a notebook) but was limited. You’ve probably noticed that it shutdowns automatically every two hours.
That might be manageable but after 1 June it will show a wallpaper saying that Windows is not genuine and, crucially, not install any updates. The Windows Blog recommends a clean install of a full version of Windows 7. But whatever OS you plan to install on the computer, a proper backup and reinstall is better done sooner than later.
More information over on the Windows Blog.
Windows Browser Choice annoyance
I was a little surprised to see the Browser Choice window appear on my Windows XP MCE notebook the other day.
Asking around the office revealed that it will appear if Internet Explorer is still selected as the default browser. Frankly I'd stopped it from asking and just started browsers with the Quick Launch toolbar or with Launchy.
The annoyance with the selection window was that there was no way for me to tell it that I already had several of the alternative browsers installed and wanted to use one of them as my default.
In the end I clicked on the install button for Opera just to make the window go away and cancelled the download. I restarted the computer and the Browser Choice window hasn't reappeared. Despite the fact I haven't changed the default. I suppose it's the taking part that's important.
Folder Shortcuts and Office
I don’t know how you organise your files, but I keep a folder called ‘Current Work’ for everything I’m working on. It’s been on the Desktop, in My Documents and even the Dropbox folder but it’s become an essential part of my work process.
One disadvantage is that it is always a folder I have to find when opening files from within a program. So I wondered if it is possible to add it to the folder shortcuts on the left of the the Open dialogue box.
The first few suggestions included editing the Registry, which isn’t really a satisfactory solution, and certainly not one I’m happy to suggest to readers. The potential for mistakes just isn’t worth the effort.
As is often the case, the friendly alternative to editing the Registry is to use TweakUI for XP. It provides an accessible interface for these helpful changes.
The change is very simple to make. Once TweakUI is installed and started click on the small plus next to Common Dialogs and then on Places Bar. Select the option ‘Custom places bar’. There are several places already set up that can be selected by clicking on the drop down menu arrows, or you can simply click in the and enter and address by hand. If you’re confident doing this, find the folder in Windows Explorer and copy and paste the contents of the address bar. Click on Apply to save the changes and then OK to close the window.
But Office?
The reason for including Office in the title of this post is that the open dialogues in Office 2003 and the beta of Office 2010, don’t use these settings. As most of my work is in Word, you can imagine my disappointment.
If anyone knows of a fix, I’d be very grateful to hear it.
Be a Ribbon Hero!
As the comments on this blog have shown, the Office Ribbon has not met with universal approval. In a move to get people to explore the Ribbon the Office Labs has developed the Ribbon Hero
It appears in the Ribbon in Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 and shows your current score out of a total of 420. With just 48 points I’ve still got some way to go. The scores don’t carry across the different programs so there’s plenty to learn.
Points are given for completing version tasks in three categories: Working with Text, Page Design and Layout and Getting Artistic. Up to 44 points are awarded for basic tasks when using the Ribbon.
It’s aware of some of the new tools in Office 2010 like Text Effects and screen shots. Challenges for all versions of Office include working with SmartArt, Charts, watermarks and line numbers.
Once the tasks have been completed you can share you score using Facebook.
Even if you’re not interested in proving your prowess with Office, the Ribbon Hero is a useful learning tool.
Office 2010 preview
I had a meeting with Microsoft to have a look at Office 2010 and some of the changes that are being made.
Sorry to disappoint those who don’t like the Ribbon, but it’s staying. Some consolation might be found in the fact that it can now be customised.
One change that had immediately caught my eye in the Technical Preview of Office 2010 is that the Office button has had a makeover. It’s no longer in the top left corner of the screen; instead it is slightly below with an old style program icon above. I still think that this is something of a step backwards in terms of User Interface design; corners are considered infinite in size (you can’t miss them) and the new one is also smaller.
Chris explained that the user feedback had shown that some people hadn’t even realised that it was a button and had contacted technical support asking how to print from documents. It’s a reasonable justification, but I still preferred the button from 2007.
There are some small changes to the file format but this shouldn’t give any problems to anyone using Office 2007. Chris followed up by saying “The compatibility pack for Office 2003 will be updated to support the version of Open XML supported by Office 2010. Office 2007 users should also update their installation with the latest updates to ensure their version is aware of the new formats in Office 2010. The delivery method of these updates has not yet been decided.”
Office Starter
Most of the computers we see arrive in the office have a trial copy of Office that lasts for 60 days, sometimes with a copy of Microsoft Works. Works is being retired in favour of Office Starter, limited versions of Word and Excel that should be enough to get by if someone sends you a docx or xlsx file. There’s a separate PowerPoint Viewer.
Microsoft has also made some effort to make getting started easier. Instead of having separate icons for the different Office programs in the Start menu when a new computer arrives, there is a single Office icon. Selecting this displays a window with the option of entering or buying an activation key for the full versions of Office or using the Starter versions.
I might have happy(ish) memories of using Works at university, but I think that this simplification is a great help.
Backstage
As well as changing the Office button the menu that appears has changed as well. Menu is selling it short slightly as it takes up the whole screen. Called Backstage it takes care of all the publishing tasks such as printing, saving or posting to blogs.
Multimedia
There are more tools for making presentations more exciting in PowerPoint with some basic video editing possible without having to use a separate program. These can be used to crop videos and are non-destructive for the most part so you can go back to the video later.
Given that this can lead to so fairly large presentations there are also tools for preparing the presentation for emailing. Depending on how aggressive you want to be, this can discard cropped sections of videos.
YouTube videos can be embedded into presentations but they’re not saved within them, so an internet connection is essential during the presentation. I wasn’t able to insert an flv file from my computer into a presentation in Powerpoint 2010 Beta.
Custom Ribbon
One of my frustrations with the Ribbon was that the layout in Office 2007 is completely fixed. I’d just created my own taskbar in Word 03 the week before I heard about the Ribbon so it felt like a step backwards. It is now possible create a tab in the Ribbon with your own selection of icons, along with macros.
Working together
Office Live is going to improved to make it easier for several people to work on a document at the same time. The ideal is to use the normal Office programs, and I found that they will open automatically when trying to edit a document online if available. The online versions won’t have all the functionality of their desktop equivalents. If there’s is a section of a document that cannot be changed with the online editor it will be left alone.
Microsoft has also acquired office.com so there’s no need to use office.microsoft.com.
Versions
More good news is in the simplification of the different versions of Office:
Office Home and Student: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
Home and Business: All of the above with Outlook
Professional: All of the above with Access and Publisher
I predict some controversy over the end of upgrade versions although this may depend on the pricing of the full versions.
Overall
Office 2010 looks like it has some genuinely useful improvements on 2007, especially if you want to work on documents with other people and don’t have access to an Exchange server.
Windows 7 and network file storage problems
At first glance an article about getting Windows 7 to work with the Samba file server software might seem overly techie. But this software is often used by network attached hard disks.
If you have been having problems this article from LinuxPlanet.com has some helpful hints on how to fix problems in Windows 7 by changing network settings. It seems a shame that the solution is to turn off some Windows 7 security features but, as Charlie Schluting points out, it is often not possible to upgrade the software on network attached storage devices.
Fonts video
Fonts can be a contentious subject. Is there any place for Comic Sans in the Post Modern Age and are the Calibri and Cambria fonts with Office 2007 and Vista good enough?
FontShop has an interesting interview with Simon Daniels from Microsoft about fonts and the various standards that are competing online.
