The Office 2007 UI Bible

I've published over 200 posts on this blog since I started it last September.

With all of those posts, it can be hard to remember what you've read and what you haven't… and it can be hard for new people to jump in and figure out where to start reading.

I've been meaning to sit down and create a kind of table of contents for all of the posts here—a starting point for people to read about the Office 2007 UI.

But then, I found out that someone already did the work for me. Patrick Schmid, a OneNote MVP and friend of the Office 2007 UI, put together what he called the Office UI Bible on his blog—a fully organized catalog of many of my posts.

And so with Patrick's kind permission I reprint here the catalog of Office 2007 UI posts (so far.)

I hope you find it useful—and thanks, Patrick!

Why a New UI for Office 2007?

• The Why of the New UI (Part 1)
• Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past (Why the UI, Part 2)
• Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)
• New Rectangles to the Rescue? (Why the UI, Part 4)
• Tipping the Scale (Why the UI, Part 5)
• Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)
• No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)
• Grading On the Curve (Why the UI, Part 8)

Overview of the New UI

• Enter the Ribbon
• What programs get the new Office UI?
• Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI
• Office 12 New UI: The Cat's Out
• Why is it called the Ribbon?
• Outlook and the Ribbon
• Need Some Help with That?
• Through the Looking Glass
• Where Did That Feature Go?
• Running With the Popular Crowd
• Accessibility Begets Usability

Ribbon UI Elements

• I'm In Louvre! (Galleries: Part 1 of 3)
• Visualize Whirled Peas (Galleries: Part 2 of 3)
• Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)
• It's All About Context
• Saddle Up to the MiniBar
• You'll Know It When You See It
• Super Tooltips
• Dialog Launchers
• A Separate Piece
• Rich Menus
• The Future of Task Panes
• Adding Groups to the Quick Access Toolbar
• Lingering Around
• Obscure Options, Meet Super Tooltips
• About About
• You Windows 3.1 Lovers!
• Introducing the Command Well
• Dipping Into the Well
• Recently Used Documents
• The Quick Customize Menu
• A Brief History of the Status Bar
• Status Bar Update
• Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

The Size of the Ribbon, Screen Real-Estate, Ribbon Scaling, and Minimization

• For Sale By Owner
• Scaling Up, Scaling Down
• A Disappearing Act
• The Biggest Loser
• The Size Of Things
• Taking the Minimized Ribbon to the Max
• Nice for Mice: Menu Tabs

Migrating to Office 2007

• Tools for the Transition
• Welcome to the New User Interface
• You Mean I Don't Need To Retrain Everybody? (Real People Study, Part 2)

UI Themes and Visuals

• Beauty and the Geek
• Black and Blue
• March Madness
• Silver Bullet
• Office 2007 Silver on Windows XP Silver
• Which Color When? (Part 1)
• Which Color When? (Part 2)

Keyboard Control of the Ribbon

• Stroking the Keys in Office 12
• The Keyboard At Your Command
• Which Letter Is Better?
• Odds, Ends, Shortcuts, and Accelerators
• An Unintentional Week of Keyboard
• Verklärte Macht: Keyboard Revisited
• A Numbers Game

New Fonts for Office 2007

• Making the Letters Better
• I Guess No One Cares About Fonts
• New Fonts For Documents 

Customizing Office 2007 (Add-ins, RibbonX)

Note that most examples shown in the following posts need to be updated for use with the RTM version.

• Let's Talk About Customization
• It All Adds Up
• Because You Want To, Not Because You Have To
• Hello World, For Real
• Good Service for Add-ins
• Hollywood Meets Office Add-ins
• RibbonX Control Type Tour, Part 1
• RibbonX Control Type Tour, Part 2
• Finding a New Purpose
• RibbonX Control Type Tour, Part 3
• RibbonX Resources
• Ribbon Extensibility: A VBA Sample
• RibbonX Updates for B2TR
• Final Schema for RibbonX-based Solutions

From First Sketches to the Final Design

• Be Willing To Be Wrong
• Formatting: An Act In Three Plays
• Thrown For a Loop
• Beta 1-derful: The 'Top 30' List
• Fast At Any Speed
• The Feature Bob Invented
• The Expert Mode Misadventure
• The Long Road to Contextual Tabs
• Picture This: A New Look For Office
• There's No Place Like Home
• Drawn Together
• Choosing the Contextual Colors
• The Printer is Being Electrocuted!
• Get Your Office 2007 Beta 2 Today!
• Are We There Yet?
• The Spelling Check is Complete
• Iterative Design Process Applied to Charting
• Evolution of the PowerPoint Home Tab
• Reality Check
• Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Tomorrow
• Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Now
• Office 2007 Released to Manufacturing

Design Tenets

• Most People Are Not Trained In Geology
• I Am Your Density
• The End of Personalized Menus
• The Myth of Ideal Organization
• Flea Market of Functionality
• Going Gray
• Set In Our Ways?
• Not So Set In Our Ways After All
• Which menu items get icons?
• Breathing New Life Into Old Features
• Catching the Plane

Design Ponderings

• The Importance Of Labels
• Help Is For Experts
• The 50/50 Rule
• Designing Against a Degrading Experience
• Giving You Fitts

An Inside Look Into UI Design, Usability, Development and Testing at Microsoft

• More Than Just the Two-Way Mirror
• Usability Redux
• 1000 Card Pick-Up
• Paper Prototypes
• The Myth of the Orange Dot
• Quality Is Usability
• Obsession to Detail
• Measuring Results
• Prototyping With PowerPoint
• Usability Stockholm Syndrome
• The Wall of Ribbons
• Tell Us What You Think About Office 2007 Beta 2
• Where do the Smiles go?
• Usability: Art and Science
• Real People Doing Real Work with Office 2007 (Part 1)
• You Mean I Don't Need To Retrain Everybody? (Real People Study, Part 2)
• Putting the Feedback to Work (Real People Study, Part 3)
• Computers Can Do That? (Real People Study, Part 4)

Office Themes

• Office Themes: Getting Documents To Sing One (Beautiful) Song
• The Elements of Office Style
• Variations on a Theme by Office

New Features in Office 2007 Involving the New UI

• Cover Pages: Cool Things In Office 12 (Part 1)
• For Trembling Hands (Office 12 Coolness, Part 2)
• Know Your ABC's (Office 12 Coolness, Part 3)
• Math On Demand (Office 12 Coolness, Part 4)
• Symbolism (Office 12 Coolness, Part 5)
• A Better Box Of Crayons
• Drop Me A Line (Office 12 Coolness, Part 6)
• It's Gonna Be A Hot Summer
• Don't Forget To Check Your Filters
• Double Feature
• Every Which Way But Loose
• No Longer Spellbound
• The 96,000 New PowerPoint Slide Designs
• Things of Beauty

Miscellaneous

• Learning From the MVPs
• Decoding Office Build Numbers
• Thanksgiving on a Wednesday
• Introducing the 2007 Microsoft Office System
• Icon Explosion
• Try Office 2007 Without Installing It
• New Product Icons for Office 2007

The Office 2007 UI team

• Hello World
• It Takes a Village
• It's the Reason for Being

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2006
  With all of those posts, it can be hard to remember what you've read and what you haven't… and it can...

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2006
  I take this opportunity to thank both You and Patrick for providing the online community with good information and knowledge when it comes to the new UI. Now it's up to us developers to take it further 'down the road' Kind regards, Dennis

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2006
  This is such an amazing resource. Thank you for taking so much time to communicate this with us. At this point, I think you need a Wiki. There's an interesting balance between blogs and wikis, and a number of bloggers that I read now have both. Blogs are great for time sensitive material, and wikis are great for structuring material. Just a thought. Thanks again,

• Andy

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2006
  Wow, amazing resource! You should release this in book form!

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2006
  There's a book in the development process of the Office UI, and someone on your team should really write it. You did quite a lot, not only by throwing out know UI designee, but how you researched and refined it. It should be more then just your blog posts, you need a narrative to it ala "Show Stopper!". I think it would be a fairly interesting story.

• Anonymous
  November 12, 2006
  Thank you for this alternative information access. Interestingly, it works far better than tag clouds, recent posts, and whatever (at least under certain circumstances, that is).

• Anonymous
  November 13, 2006
  Last week Microsoft released Office 2007. For those of you who haven't tried it yet, this is probably

• Anonymous
  November 13, 2006
  Last week Microsoft released Office 2007. For those of you who haven't tried it yet, this is probably

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2006
  RibbonX (Office 2007 UI) and Customization

• Anonymous
  November 17, 2006
  Everything you ever wanted to know about the new UI. http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.asp

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2006
  Office 2007，VS 2005 之Office工具，以及VS 2005 SharePoint扩展

• Anonymous
  November 24, 2006
  Recunosc, sunt un Office 2007 ribbon freak. I love it, I think it's great. Deci în concluzie sunt abonat

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2006
  Ich hatte versprochen, die Ressourcen für meine beiden Vorträge auf der Office, Vista und Exchange Launch

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• Anonymous
  August 03, 2007
  I've started reading a lot about UI in the last couple of months. During the Office 2007 beta process

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2008
  I&#39;ve started reading a lot about UI in the last couple of months. During the Office 2007 beta process