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Outlook 2007 email controversy
One of the major changes in Outlook 2007 had nothing to do with the Ribbon but that Word was used to display and edit emails.
On the face of it, there are good reasons for this, though mostly if the majority of emails are sent between people using Office2007 (a fair assumption in an office). You can include SmartArt, charts and formatting is easier with the Mini Toolbar.
The problems start when emails start to come from people who don’t use Outlook 2007, myself included thinking of our weekly newsletter. In fact I’d been doing some unrelated research work and the feature comparison between Outlook 2003 and 2007 doesn’t look kindly on the new version.
With Office 2010 on the way, Microsoft confirmed that Word 2010 would be used for emails, prompting an online campaign at fixoutlook.org, complete with a Twitter feed.
Microsoft responded, claiming that Word is “the best e-mail authoring experience around” and linking to a white paper explaining the benefits.
What caught my eye in the paper were the features that won’t be available if Word 2007 is not installed on the computer: auto-formatting, native table functionality, background spell checking, thesaurus, grammar checking, autotext.
Personally, it’s the results that count, and I’m not happy that quite a few CSS standard formatting marks aren’t supported such as background-image. Perhaps the answer is to improve Word.
Great free fonts from Smashing magazine
I wrote a feature recently on installing new fonts. The problem is not so much the how but the what. It can be quite tricky to find good quality fonts to use in projects. Smashing Magazine has just published a list of some very attractive fonts, along with links too previous articles.
Well worth a look if you have any design projects planned.
How quickly a productive window can change
Regular readers will no doubt remember several posts about customising the toolbars in Word to save screen space and keeping focused on the words I’m writing.
Sadly, in the space of a fortnight or so, my Word windows are looking more like this, thanks to the installation of Office Live, Zoho and gDoc Fusion. All worthy programs but taking up quite a lot of space. It could be worse. At one point, Word included an icon to my phone via Bluetooth. I’m still trying to work out why and how.
Given my frustration at the greater amount of space needed by the Office 2007 Ribbon, it actually prevents this problem. The add-ons get their own tab in the Ribbon. Though what happens when there are more add-ons than can be fitted in the Window width might be interesting.
Hopefully I’ll persuade Word to return to my normal toolbar setup very soon
Office ribbon – helpful advice
My thanks to Dave who offered some helpful advice about the Office ribbon over the weekend. In case you missed the comment, here is a quick repeat.
“I love the ribbon. I'm a pretty hardcore office user: word, excel, and
powerpoint are essential components of my daily life.
1) When the mouse cursor is in the ribbon region, you can flip through
all of the ribbon categories with the mouse wheel. This essentially
makes every ribbon menu option a 1-click option. The classic menu
sometimes requires up to three clicks (unless you're willing to wait
for sub-menus to pop up on their own). 1-click is better than 3-clicks;
therefore, the ribbon is an improvement on the interface.
2) I hate clicking through menus! If you're using the mouse at
an angle then it's way too easy to "slide off" the menu option you're
trying to select. The assortment of differently sized buttons on the
ribbon solve that problem perfectly. This is another improvement.
3) The largest complaint I've heard here is that its not intuitive and
you have trouble finding things. Well, if you have trouble finding
things, then spend the 20 minutes and learn the interface first. It's a
different interface; it's something that you have to learn. The fact
that it's so easy to learn (it's very visually oriented) is what makes
it "intuitive". “
I’ll just add on Dave’s last point a link to the Interactive Guide: Word 2003 to Word 2007. It’s a clever little Flash app. Find the option you want in the Office 2003 menu system and it will show you where to find it in Office 2007.
Problem indents in Word
We had a problem earlier with a Word cell whose text was being obscured by the cell to the right.
It turns out that the cause of the problem was the Right Indent, that had been set beyond the cell limits. Clicking and dragging it back to the cell edge fixed the problem.
Microsoft Office templates
I was asked to find some exciting Excel spreadsheets today for some screengrabs and it didn’t take long to realise that none of mine really fit the bill.
If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, there are lots of good quality templates to be found on the Microsoft Office website.
I rather like the Lawn and garden budget sheet for example.
It all makes me think I should work at improving the look of my spreadsheets
Chandler 1.0.3 released
There's a new version of the Chandler task management software just released.
It's a great way to stay organised and can share information with other people over the internet even if they use alternative services like Google Calendar or iCal.
If I sound like a fan that's because I am. Chandler fits my working style and has helped me get through some very busy times at work, even though I'm only really scratching the surface.
My biggest frustration is that I don't have Java no my home server so I can't run the server side software myself for calendars. Still there's really no need as the Chandler Hub service is very good.
The story of the Office Ribbon
My thanks to Anthony for passing me this video link, “The Story of the Ribbon”. Having read Dreaming in Code a little while ago, I found the video fascinating as explaining how the interface was created and why. It doesn’t pull any punches with criticisms of user interface either.
The screenshot history of Word was something of a nostalgia trip for me. What I hadn’t realised was that the menus used for Word for Windows 2.0 didn’t change all the way up to Word 2003!
Edit Zoho documents with Microsoft Office
Editing documents in the cloud is great when you are on the move, but online editors are rarely as capable as their online equivalents. The Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office lets you sign in to Zoho with Word or Excel 2000 and later to edit documents.
Word 2007 asked me how I wanted to open the document with options including HTML (the choice I made) or rtf and others.
Once the document has been imported it is just like a normal document on the local computer but you do have to remember to save it back to Zoho using the Zoho buttons.
Strongly recommended.
The Office Ribbon revisited
Well, there’s nothing like some controversy to keep life interesting and my posts about the Ribbon keep attracting comments. Anna left a comment that caught my attention yesterday evening.
I hate the ribbon! It takes up way too much screen space and it is not intuitive at all. I consider myself an advanced excel and word user and it takes me three times as long to do things than it used to because of the ribbon. Why did Microsoft go to this silly design? Maybe it's good for graphic artists, but not hard core Office users like me. The prior tool bar had everything you need in one view; with the new one you must toggle between the various ribbons to get what you need, and many basic functions are "hidden" behind what simply looks like a masthead icon! Please Microsoft, with Office 14 bring back the old view!
I think what irritates me about 
the Ribbon is that lack of choice. That’s partly timing. About two months before Office 2007 came out I worked hard at customising the Office 2003 toolbars to my tastes (partly following the advice of Designing the Obvious author Robert J Hoekman, Jr.). As you can see I’ve pared it down to only show the icons I actually need*.
Sadly this isn’t possible in Office 2007. This doesn’t mean I don’t like the Ribbon. Nothing has got me using Styles like Office 07 and that’s a good thing.
I don’t think it’s quite as bad as Anna finds it. There’s a certain logic to the Office button and it is possible to pin some icons to the area just to the right of it. I’ve also found the automatic tab switching to work quite well.
Where the Ribbon doesn’t work for me is that it takes up a lot of vertical space. Given that the trend is towards widescreen monitors it isn’t always the best use of space, especially on a notebook monitor. Of course, I can minimise the Ribbon by double-clicking on one of the tabs, but then there’s less on screen than there was with the toolbars.
So, yes, I’m hoping that Office 14 will come with the ability to go back to the old menu system. But I’m not letting my hopes get too high.
