December 17, 2007

Steven Sinofsky

If anyone is passionate about Office, it's this week's Office Hours columnist, Steven Sinofsky. Although he's spent years in Office product development, it's as an Office customer that has Steven so excited about many of the new features of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

How could I resist the chance to talk about how I use Office 2007  — after spending more than 12 years working on Office I've had a lot of time to think about using the products and doing my small part to make them better. But I'm just one of many happy Office customers and thought I'd share with you a couple of things that are new in Office 2007 that I am a really big fan of using. Of course I could go on and on about the whole Microsoft Office system and talk about how each program, server, and service make things easier for me just about every day, but let me stick to the bread and butter Office programs in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Working with the Fluent user interface

All three of these programs have the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface which I can't say enough positive things about in terms of how it has made my day-to-day work easier. What I love most about Fluent user interface turns out to be the fact that I didn't need to teach my fingers anything new. After so many years using Office all those shortcuts and accelerators turn out to be buried in my autonomic nervous system and the fact that the new user interface just let those work is really great. And at the same time I find myself looking at the new Alt accelerators tooltips and I'm gradually building up a repertoire of those as well. The second most valuable aspect of Fluent user interface is that I just love is the availability of live previews. I can't get enough of seeing the changes to my document before I apply them. So gone are the days of do-undo-redo and endless cycles of modal dialogs to change colors or styles.

Working with shared style elements

Across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint I have really come to value the common style elements that you can use naturally. I do a lot of documents that are combinations of multiple data types (tables from Excel in Word, charts from Excel in PowerPoint) or groups of related documents (a detailed document in Word with a summary in PowerPoint). So having easy access to shared colors and styles is very valuable. I really like how graphics have been extended to have different levels of "snap" as well, since sometimes I am focused on on-screen and other times I need to have documents look good in print. For those times when I am screen-focused or printing in color, I find it super helpful to use the built-in color themes so that I can count on professionally matching colors and the days of me trying to find a low intensity yellow and a blue that kind-of, sort-of match are over.

Word

Of course there are specifics for each application as well. Word for me is about writing. While it might be a secret within Microsoft, I've been known to write a few memos or a blog post or two every once in while. On a daily basis I benefit from all of Word's improvements as a writing tool — improved spelling and grammar, especially the improved AutoCorrect, for example. I'm really big into "structure" in the documents I write and use outlines all of the time and the new Ribbon for outlining is something I really like as well since the outline toolbar used to float around and sort of get in my way. Something that I just finished doing with Word that got much easier for me was the yearly holiday card mailing label mail merge, and even though we've redone this one about 4 times over the years, I can safely say the ribbon made this one even easier this time around.

Excel

I've also been known to be a big fan of analyzing data — whether it is the occasional product schedule, resource allocation, or just trying to figure out who is working on what in Windows. I live in Excel. I get a lot of data that is raw CSV export from various tools inside of Microsoft. What I do automatically now is export the data to excel, open up the file, and then just hit ^L (ctrl+L) and I get a List. Not just a plain list, but a nicely formatted list with filters on and everything. I usually click "Analyze in PivotTable" on the ribbon and just rock with the new user interface for PivotTables. I really just love it. Whether it is the ability to easily select subsets of data, page fields, or quickly format for pasting into a mail message as a low-bandwidth friendly table, I am saving tons of time with the combination of new features and new user-interface for PivotTables.

PowerPoint

And finally, there's PowerPoint. Believe it or not I am not one of those people that does all their work in PowerPoint — I save using PowerPoint as a way of expressing all the stuff I got together in Word and Excel. But boy, the tools in PowerPoint 2007 make this both easier and infinitely more expressive. It goes without saying, but the new SmartArt is a major improvement for me. I love showing relationships between concepts graphically and find the ability to take a bulleted list and try out different expressions not just fun (and easy with live preview) but also valuable. I find it super helpful that I can take one shape and color it differently or move it around, since I often have the "this layout... almost" experience. My favorite SmartArt diagrams are the ones with images since I do that a lot to show relationships between different people, packages, or concepts. I'm also the kind of person that is never quite happy with the standard templates, and what I love about the PowerPoint 2007 is the infinite express-ability of the Ribbon Design tab. Wow — by choosing colors, font pairs, backgrounds, and so on (all with preview), I can make every presentation look like I designed it just for that audience. And finally, I can't say enough about the improvements in tables in PowerPoint as those are a major time saver and express ideas super well, especially when the tables are pasted from Excel (finally!).

Those are just a few things about the new Office 2007 that I use pretty much every day. Perhaps in a future column I'll get the chance to talk about Visio, SharePoint, Outlook, Project (we're remodeling our kitchen!), or some other parts of the 2007 Microsoft Office system that make my computing experience better every day.

About the author

Steven Sinofsky is the senior vice president for the Windows® and Windows Live™ Engineering Group — the user experience of Microsoft® Windows and Windows Live services. Read more about him here.