Office evolution

Now Microsoft reckons Office has outgrown that interface. The first version of Word had around 100 commands, all easily accessible from the menus. Word 2003 has over 1,500, many of which – in Microsoft’s words – are difficult to find. The other big shock is a change in file formats – again the doc, xls and ppt binary files have been with us for many years. So get ready for docx, xlsx and pptx – we go into the details of these further down.

At the beta 1 stage, it’s still very early days, so not everything you read about here may make it to release, and other features may be added – including, we hope, abundant transitional counselling. But we’re betting that the file formats and the interface transformation are here to stay.

Word
Starting with Word, which is probably the module most used, the new interface comes as something of a shock. Although the File menu is relatively unchanged, you’ll find that you can ‘pin’ recent documents to the list so they stay put.

You’ll also find a button for Word options. The tabbed dialogue, which at 11 pages in Office 2003 was getting rather unwieldy, has been replaced by a simpler two-paned view. You won’t see all the previous options there unless you tick the Display Legacy and advanced settings box, but the developers have rationalised things, incorporating the Customise, Add-ins, Document Protection and other option sets in the same space.

Digging around the File menu reveals a new feature throughout the suite Ð publishing to pdf. This is a catch-up exercise, as Star Office, Wordperfect and Ability Office already have this capability. Going further along the portable document path, MicrosoftÕs open-standard XPS export is also included.

Moving on from the File menu, across the top of the window, there are the familiar Save, Undo and repeat buttons. You might wonder why there are buttons on a menu bar (and we’ll come back to this) but the fun really starts with what appears to be a whole new set of menus Ð Write, Insert, Page Layout, Reference, Mailings, Review and Add-ins.

These are not menus – at least, not as we know them. What they do is act like tabs to change the contents of the toolbar area below, known as the Ribbon. With the Write item selected, you’ll see below areas dedicated to the clipboard, character formatting, paragraph formatting, ‘Quick Formatting’ and search/replace.

Once you’re over the initial shock it all starts to make sense. Most of the buttons and list boxes have the familiar appearance of previous versions, and the Tooltips now offer more detailed explanations about what the buttons do.

Quick Formatting is what we’ve always known as Styles, but the designers have made rather more of the possibilities. For a start, they are displayed in a ‘Gallery’ giving thumbnail previews of the format. As you mouse over the contents of a gallery, the selected text changes to give a preview of the formatting or other effect. Click, and confirm the choice.

This live preview, which is also seen in things such as font lists, makes it easy to see some of the lesser-known Quick Formatting options, such as creating pull quotes or box-outs (see screen 2).

Quick Formatting also ties up with some new features on the Page Layout and Insert ribbons. Going to the former, you’ll see the expected settings for margins, paper size and so on, as well as sections that deal with paragraph settings and graphics placement. The treasure, however, is found at the left of the ribbon – Themes – again presented in a gallery. A theme combines fonts, colours and graphic effects and can be applied to a document globally, rather than having to format piecemeal (see screen 3).

We’ve seen a similar feature in Microsoft Publisher’s colour and font schemes. The current theme will be reflected in the font list – themed fonts appear at the top – and in the Quick Formatting gallery. With any theme selected, you can swap sets of Quick Formats with several variations of ‘subtle’, ‘moderate’ or ‘intense’ formatting.

Moving on to the Insert ribbon, you’ll find dates, symbols, pictures and bookmarks. Page numbering has been given a gallery of its own, including numbers in triangular accents at the top, bottom or centre of the page – again these keep pace with changes to the theme and the Quick Format set. If you want to add graphics embellishments to page numbers in previous versions, it is possible, but takes patience and know-how.

The Insert ribbon also hosts refugees from other former menus – headers, footers and tables – which seems logical enough. Footnotes, indexes and tables of contents are now found in the References ribbon, which again seems sensible, and section breaks seem to have vanished altogether. Finally there are some newcomers, such as IGX graphics and Document Parts. We’ll be looking at the former in the Powerpoint section, and the latter corresponds roughly with Autotext but, as with Quick Formatting, the designers have given it a boost.

As well as Autotext, Document Parts encompasses fields and document properties as ‘Building Blocks’. This has two main advantages. For administrators it makes it easier to enforce practices such as having the document title and author shown at specified places – stick the appropriate building block in the template and this will happen automatically. Second, this makes far more of the fact that Autotext entries can include formatted text and graphics – the gallery approach makes this visible and easier to use.

Office’s current plethora of dialogues are divided into modal – which you have to close before you can continue editing, such as the Word ‘Insert date’ or the Excel ‘Insert function’ – and non-modal, such as the ‘Find and replace’ dialogue. The new interface is far less modal, in that you can continue writing or editing with any section of the Ribbon active. Seasoned Office users will be used to controls that automatically appear when you need them – and often when you don’t – such as the headers and footers, revisions and drawing toolbars. This version extends and focuses that behaviour. Other ribbons automatically appear when you create or select a table or a graphic, for example, offering all the tools you need to format that object. There’s also a ghostly miniature formatting bar (the Minibar) that appears by the pointer whenever you select some text – move the pointer over it and it firms up to offer some basic formatting choices, such as font, alignment and emphasis. This works rather better than it sounds, saving the effort of mousing up to the ribbon, while being unobtrusive enough in its faded state to avoid distracting the user.

The Word status bar has been shuffled around a little to accommodate the view buttons that were formerly tucked – rather awkwardly – into the horizontal scroll bar. It has also been simplified by the removal of some of the more obscure elements such as the line and column numbers, though you can get these back from an almost invisible customisation button. There is, instead a useful running word count, a View menu to show or hide elements such as the ruler or document map, and a slider-style zoom control.

There’s much more that we don’t have room to examine, but a mention must go to the Document Inspector. The spectre of hidden data – such as annotations – being present in a final file is a perennial security headache. An add-in from Microsoft is available for Office 2003 that goes part of the way to rectify this, but the new Inspector checks for ‘hidden or inappropriate data’ in four categories – comments and revisions, hidden text, document properties and headers and footers.

Excel
In Excel the deault ribbon tab is Sheet, where you do most of the entering, editing, formatting and sorting. Insert and Page Layout are similar to their Word counterparts. Formulas contains the function library, cell naming, auditing and calculation options. Data encompasses advanced sorting and filtering, as well as importing and managing connections to external sources; and Review, as with Word, includes proofing, comments and changes.

Excel has expanded Ð the former limits of 256 columns and 65,536 rows in a sheet have been upped to 16,000 and 1,000,000. Charting has been made easier and more versatile by virtue of having its own context-sensitive ribbon, rather than having to dig through various dialogues, and the Excel chart engine can be used suite-wide, although in practice we found the beta version somewhat unpredictable.

Conditional formatting has become much easier and more useful as a result. Say you have a table of figures and you want to highlight the highest in yellow, the mid-range in orange, and the lowest in red.

In Excel 2003 this means setting three rules. In the new version it’s a Quick Formatting option Ð you can use gradients, data bars or icon sets to shade cells with a few clicks. Finally, at long last there is a Wysiwyg page layout view to complement the standard view and the awkward page break view.

Outlook
Outlook is little changed in appearance, but it did get a very thorough makeover in Office 2003. You do, however, get ribbons in the new mail and appointment windows for writing and inserting attachments, graphics or links. The message and calendar views are much the same as in Office 2003, but there is a newcomer in the shape of a ‘To do’ bar that summarises items from the Task list and appointments from the Calendar.

It will also accommodate items from other members of the Office family, such as Sharepoint, One Note and Project. To compensate for the space this takes up, you can shrink the Navigation Pane to tiles rather than the big buttons of 2003.

Searching has been improved – you now get the search result highlighted and can specify other search criteria without having to delve into a separate dialogue. And sharing calendars has been made easier – organisations using Exchange or Sharepoint can send requests to co-workers to view their calendars directly. Others can send a snapshot of their calendar as an e-mail.

Powerpoint
Fairly predictably, Powerpoint has ribbons for Slides, Design, Animations and Slide show, as well as the common Insert and Review. A newcomer to the insertions options, as mentioned earlier, is the IGX graphic. This is a much-improved version of the Office 2003 diagram feature – from a single gallery, you can choose flowcharts, hierarchical schemes, cycles and relationships. The colours of IGX graphics are linked to themes, giving instant harmony with a presentation or document colour scheme.

Unlike Word and Excel, where users can be assumed to know the basics of getting down words and numbers, creating slideshows requires either some artistic talent or a helping hand in the form of design templates. Microsoft has made access to Office Online templates far more seamless – you can access these directly from the ‘New’ dialogue without having to open a browser or explicitly download a file.

Access
For those going for the Pro or higher versions of Office, Access again shows the integration of online resources – instead of the blank start-up screen, you are taken straight to the choice of opening an existing database or using an online ‘tracking’ template such as asset management or customer calls.

It’s also been made easier to copy selected data from Excel tables with ‘schemas’ being created automatically, so on both these counts Access loses some of its ‘high priests only’ reputation. As well as the ribbons changing with different activities and views, the main workspace has been tidied up. The Navigation Pane can be customised and open objects, such as tables or queries, are tabbed together rather than using the rather chaotic free-range window approach of previous versions. Form design has been made more intuitive with interactive feedback and it’s easy to upload reports to a Sharepoint list.

What does it mean for me?
Microsoft has always stressed the opportunities for customisation in Office, but this has now been curtailed at user level. Although the various sections of the ribbons look as if they can be moved around, they can’t. Remember we said that we’d be coming back to those three buttons next to the file menu? This is the Quick Access Toolbar, and this is the only place that you can add or remove commands. And if you’re wondering what had happened to macros, then you need to enable the Developer Tools in Options. This will give all applications a Developer tab, providing access to macros, ActiveX controls, XML schema and custom document properties.

Having recovered from the initial shock, we’ve grown to like the new interface. The ribbons and galleries are certainly a far more elegant and effective innovation than Microsoft’s last interface offering, the waste-of-pixels Task Pane. It’s certainly easier to do many things, and existing possibilities have been brought out into the open. And, to add to the elegance, there’s even a new set of typefaces.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview

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