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Office 12 and Assistance

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We've started unveiling some of the features in the new upcoming version of Office, code-named "Office 12".  One of the big ones from my team is a new help interface for Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

We introduced in Office 2003 the idea of connected help, which I've written about before here - the notion that the most complete and up-to-date content is on the Web (https://office.microsoft.com) and the Office applications will automatically look there first if an Internet connection is available when a question is asked of help.  I've also described how sending the questions to the Office Online site helps us write better content because for the first time we have a real-time view of what customers are looking for and asking for help on.  We've introduced hundreds of new articles in response to this, and in other cases just done a better job of linking customer questions to existing content.

We've heard from customers though that they don't like the thin "task pane" window of Office 2003 for reading help.  They also would like more control over whether they're going to the Internet for help or relying on the local content installed with the application.  And they'd really like to get the benefit on their local help of the updated content we're putting on the web site.

We're addressing all of these with "Office 12" help.

  • We're introducing a new help viewer which is resizable and running in a separate process (so you're not prevented from going to help when you have a modal dialog up in the Office application).  The viewer can be "pinned" so it stays on top of the application window, but it will stay on top of only that application window, not other applications you're running.  This is handy if you're trying to follow in the application a step-by-step process described in the help topic.
  • The viewer clearly shows whether you're getting content from the Internet or This Computer and the control allows easy switching with a click.  While it was possible in Office 2003 to set Office to "prefer offline content", it required finding the right settings dialog box - now it's right in the lower right corner of the help window.
  • We're going to update the offline help files regularly and make the updates available on Microsoft Update.  The schedule hasn't been yet been set, but it will be at least with every Office service pack release.  We still won't make all the content available on the web site available offline (we have a lot of content on the web site) but we'll make a reasonable and growing subset available, and that which is available offline will get updated as we learn to improve it from your feedback.