Symbolism (Office 12 Coolness, Part 5)

In every phase of my life in which I've been required to create documents, a
different set of symbols has been important to me.

For instance, in high school, I studied Spanish, which meant figuring out how to
type ñ and ¿.  In college, as I repeatedly flirted with
flunking German, I inserted a lot more of ä, ß, and ö.  And now that I work
at Microsoft, my symbols of choice are © and ®.

That's one of the reasons I appreciate the Symbol gallery on the Insert tab
of Word 12.  When I want a symbol, I just pop open the gallery and choose
the one I want. 

And why is the one I want in there?  Because the gallery keeps track of
the twenty most recently inserted symbols and offers one-click access to those. 
As a result, I hardly ever have to visit the Symbols dialog box in Word.

Just another lightweight timesaver in Office 12 that keeps my focus on my
document instead of on the user interface.

Edited: Somehow the symbols got lost in the automatic publishing...

P.S. Is ß really going away in common practice? I
always felt that the Eszett was an important part of what makes written German
distinctive...

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  Where are those characters you're talking about in paragraph 2? They disappeared upon publishing?

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  The Eszett will not go away, it is just substituted in several cases with a ss.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  I think the international characters aren't displaying because the HTML behind this blog doesn't contain any character encoding directives...

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  I think this is a great feature. I had an algorithm analysis work to do and let me tell you that it is really painful to get this Symbol interface which is very far away, to add Omega, Alpha and Teta. So painful that I just write (Ome) and then do a global replacement.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  Back in college, I took Spanish. My approach to the accent problem in Word (2.0, IIRC) was to define a macro that would look at the character immediately preceding the caret and change it to the appropriate accented character. Spanish made this easy since there's only one type of accent for each letter that might be accented.
  
  "I think this is a great feature. I had an algorithm analysis work to do and let me tell you that it is really painful to get this Symbol interface which is very far away, to add Omega, Alpha and Teta. So painful that I just write (Ome) and then do a global replacement. "
  
  This is why some people prefer markup based systems like TeX. To enter Omega, you just type $omega$ and it renders correctly in the final document. It also works for equations.
  
  Word's point and click is good in that it's easy to discover if you don't know how to use it, but once you have to start using it all the time it starts to fall short.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  " My approach to the accent problem...was to define a macro"
  
  I forgot to mention that I bound the macro to a key.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  Jensen, congratulations on another interesting article. What a shame that the blog software ate your German and Spanish special characters.
  
  I just recall that Word 2003 already has a list of recent used symbols. It struck me as funny that it's already filled in the first time you use Word.
  
  At that time I noted that the symbols chosen (for me) were reasonable. It's good to see that the good idea (the symbols list) is preserved, and further developed in a more useful direction.
  
  I really like the idea to make the symbols immediately available, and from your previous postings, I can see that it's a general principle in the new Office 12 interface.
  
  For instance, this is the same type of immediate feedback as the "instant preview" (that Jacob Nielsen also recently noted)
  
  Other example I enjoyed are the Excel sum and average in the status bar.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  About the eszett in German:
  
  There has been a controversial orthography reform which mandates that the eszett gets replaced by a double s if it's following a short vowel.
  
  But in all other cases, it's still there.
  
  Btw, can anybody think of a good reason to have an eszett in the first place? For a real orthography reform, I would have preferred to get rid of the eszett alltogether.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  What if you want to use 21 different symbols, in the same order all the time? That will be interesting... cache trashing at it's best :)

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  In MacOS, you can type pretty much all of that from the keyboard using the Option key. The problem is that Apple got rid of the KeyCaps program, and now it's really hard to find which character you're looking for... what a pain.
  
  Not really related to the subject at hand, though.
  
  Could you go back and edit all those characters back in? I'm curious as to what's supposed to fill in the blanks.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  I am curious as to how well O12 will work over Remote Desktop/Terminal Services. I do quite a bit of work over RDP, much of which is over slow data lines, and it drives me up the wall to watch RDP freeze up for 10 seconds become a splash screen did an alpha-fade or something like that. (Um, every Adobe product I've used comes to mind.)
  
  The O12 updates look pretty slick, but the Ribbon looks rather RDP-hostile. Is testing being done to look into tuning it down for RDP?

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  The problem didn't appear to have anything to do with encoding or anything else, actually.
  
  The web service used to automatically post articles caused the symbols to get lost along the way.
  
  I fixed them by hand and things look OK now.
  
  Sorry for the mess up!

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  Well that is basically the same as in all the other Offices: They also remember the last symbols.
  
  If a symbol is NOT in that list it is always very hard to find them (mathematicall symbols).
  
  BTW: There is one thing with office that is as BAD as everything else is great: Formulars and scientific texts.
  
  Can't MS get on par with TeX or LaTeX?? Latex is a pain to use, but there's no other choice to get good formulas in text.
  
  Even the pro-version of MathType is a joke.
  
  Have a look at "Maple" and include some basic layout functionality like that in Office!
  
  
  Once a friend of mine had a very bad experience: She had to use PowerPoint for a presentation and choose a dark background theme with white text on it.
  
  Guess what? The formula editor of PowerPoint can only produce black text!!
  
  A N Y improvements in this area for the next Office??

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  
  Brett's idea reminds me of the show alternates feature in InDesign - not sure if Adobe relies solely on the ‘aalt’ OpenType feature in their fonts or use some programmatic intelligence.
  
  It would be nice to select a character and bring up a palette of related characters available in the same font - maybe even have a tab on the palette that shows the character in range of different fonts too.
  

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  I agree that it shouldn't just show the same 20 characters all the time.
  When I'm working on my discrete math homework, I want to have some common greek letters, set notation (union, intersect, etc.), etc.
  When I'm working on a paper for Spanish, I want accented characters, upsidedown punctuation, etc.
  
  Maybe there could be some way so to do this, like if I insert an accented a, it knows that documents I've typed with that character also usually have other character with accents and the like. But if I insert a "is not in the set" symbol, it knows that documents I've typed with that character also usually have other set notation and greek letters.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  It looks like Microsoft is more and more stealing features from independent developers. See http://www.officeboosters.com/wtmain.htm for an example. When can I receive my 1 million dollar check?

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  Romke: LOL! Would you prefer Microsoft shutting down all extensibility features in Office? Relax, now you can promote your add-ins as bringing Office "12" features to older versions.

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  Hugely off-topic but the links to your blog in your feed are all https? Is this deliberate

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  @Elmar:
  
  if we wert to substitute all eszetts, we would be Swiss ;-)
  
  What would you substitute it with? Sure not "ss", else "Busse" from "Buße" would (a) be pronounced differently (short vowel), and (b) would mean a different thing.
  
  If you use "sz", (a) is still valid as a vowel before a double consonant (which sz would be imho) is a short one.
  
  "Durch seine Maße hat es eine entsprechend große Masse" - write this without 'ß'! This is one of the things the Swiss way of writing looks funny to me ;-)
  
  Christian
  

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  To Romke Soldaat:
  
  Isn't it a bit arrogant to think you are the only one who can think of ideas to improve Office? Isn't it a bit arrogant to think Microsoft has bookmarked your site as its source of new and innovative ideas? Isn't it a bit arrogant to post an advertisement for your "million dollar" product in this forum?
  
  Yep, sure is.
  

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  James Schend,
  
  You can do the same thing on a PC using the Al key and the number pad. For example Alt+0233 produces an e with a grave accent. é

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  Jensen:
  
  The new UI is exciting. This is the first Office upgrade I've really looked forward to.
  
  On the other hand, this (Symbol) is the first feature you've blogged about that got a collective "meh."
  
  Please take Bret's advice, and put in something that can match based on similarity, ideally on the main drop-down. For example, I'd expect "e" to match against the Euro symbol, accented E characters, etc. (The Windows XP Character Map utility partially has this, but with a really clunky interface.)
  
  Kim:
  
  I use Alt-keypad combinations a lot, but have yet to find a way to directly type non-ANSI Unicode characters in arbitrary apps without a utility or messing with the language bar.

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  >http://www.officeboosters.com/wtmain.htm
  
  I think Adobe holds patents on most of these "ideas". Best send a check off to Bruce ;-)

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2006
  Make sure that you tell us how to type these symbols on the keyboard!!! I accept that I have to look at a chart the first time I type Ł, but to say that for every Ł in future I have to (a) take my hands off the keyboard (b) look up at the screen (c) move the mouse to the right area (d) see where my preferred symbol has popped up (e) click on it.... that's madness! After the first Ł, tell me I can type Alt(321) instead. (A tooltip or something?)
  
  By the way, could you add hexadecimal Unicode input as well? All the Charmap and official Unicode® tables report character codes in hex. If I want to type ✔ or ψ then I don't want to have to convert U+2714 or U+03C8 to decimal every time! See http://www.cardbox.com/quick.htm for a convention that you're welcome to steal.

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2006
  @James: Apple didn't do away with the Key Caps app, it's still there in OSX. You just have to turn it on in the International control panel, after which it'll show up on the language dropdown in the menu bar.

• Anonymous
  January 17, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2006
  "And why is the one I want in there? Because the gallery keeps track of the twenty most recently inserted symbols"
  
  So... where do we find the option to disable personalised symbols?
  
  half-wink. ;)
  

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2006
  I think one of the best features of Word is the option to insert (accented) symbols with the ctrl-combinations (pressing ctrl+`, ctrl+', ctrl+shift+: etc. followed by a character). This is the easiest and a very intuitive way to get accented characters in Word, but for some reason it's a rather undocumented feature. So the main problem is that so few people are aware of this real time-saver. I also find it rather surprising that this feature isn't implemented in other (office)applications. This would really make a great improvement... Having to go to a menu/toolbar to insert accented symbols is just not easy and fast enough in day-to-day typing.
  BTW: in my experience the most commonly used way to get accented characters right is by correcting words using the spell checker.

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2006
  PingBack from http://blog.jensthebrain.de/archives/2006/02/13/office-12-word/

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2006
  I was just thinking, would it work to be able to choose the set of extra symbols based on the language/topic of the document.
  For example, if I was doing something mathematical it would be useful to be able to choose maths symbols. Or if it was a document in german, to be able to see all the relevant extra characters. Or is ability already available?
  
  Wonderful blog by the way!

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  March 04, 2008
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