The new document look
The Word team is lucky to have a whole host of very talented people working on it. This is the first of many guest posts where you'll be getting details on the features from the mouths of the feature designers.
Stuart J Stuple is a program manager on the Microsoft Office Word team who focuses on the formatting and editing experience of long or complex documents. His background is in book publishing and education.
One of the things that we hope you notice as soon as you start working with Word 2007 is that the new font, new line spacing, and space between paragraphs give your documents a fresh, more professional look. And when you insert content such as charts, diagrams, or material copied from other documents, that content shares the same fonts and colors as already in use in your document.
As described previously, the new fonts used in Word are based on the ClearType technology that provides a crisper, more easily read display of the fonts on most modern monitors. ClearType is a feature of the operating system and has been available since Windows XP; however, these are the first fonts from Microsoft designed to take advantage of this technology. The new font collection includes six fonts: Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara, Corbel, and Constantia. Calibri was selected as the default font for Word because of its modern look and is appropriateness for onscreen documents. To complement the look of Calibri, Cambria was selected for use in headings.
For more information on fonts and typography see the team's fontblog,
The new spacing also contributes to the readability of your document. This new spacing comes from a combination of three things. The new font chosen is more “open” than Times New Roman, the font previously used. We also added a bit of space between each line within the paragraph. Though some folks have described this as “double-spaced,” it is actually 115% of the line height (double-spaced would be 200%). You could call this one-and-about-a-sixth spacing if you’d like. Finally, we added space after each paragraph. That means that rather than having to press Enter twice at the end of a paragraph in order to make the start of the paragraph noticeable, you simply press Enter once and we add the space for you.
While most documents look better with this new spacing, some documents require a “tighter” look and some people simply prefer less space within the paragraphs or are so used to pressing Enter between paragraphs, that they’d prefer the old spacing. If your preference is for the spacing used in previously versions, you will be able to easily obtain that by selecting the “Classic” look from the Style Set gallery on the Change Styles control of the Home tab. Style Sets not only change the appearance of the standard paragraph but also any text that has been formatted with the styles from the Styles gallery.
(NOTE: I’m sad to report that there’s a bug in the Beta 2 release that prevents the "Classic" look from working. For now, to get a document with the classic spacing, use the New command from the Office menu, select Installed templates at the left, and then double-click on the Office Word 2003 Look template.)
Comments
- Anonymous
May 22, 2006
It's funny how my documents already look like Word 2007's new default style :) Except that I like serif fonts for my document's text and sans-serif for the headings (find it easier to read on print.)
I'm glad this change in style is being done, because, although I have my templates I use to get similar results, most people simply don't know how to create presentable Word documents... Even though it's as simple as Format > Paragraph.
I'll admit that the meaning of the settings in a lot of dialogs might not obvious for many Word users out there, but I do think that Word should force everyone to take a "Using Styles" tutorial before the first use...
I really look forward to installing the Office Beta to get to test all these new features I keep reading about in your blogs... - Anonymous
May 23, 2006
To my eyes, that text looks a little too over-antialiased (verging on blurry.) It's much easier to read the Verdana of this blog. - Anonymous
May 23, 2006
I agree the spacing is a better default for people who will never grapple with styles.
The font itself looks awful, although that may be an artifact of rendering it into a picture. See Francis comment on anti-aliasing. Not only is it definitely blurry, it is thickened and horizontally crowded. - Anonymous
May 24, 2006
Et voilà mon premier post en utilisant Word 2007 Beta 2… Chose assez surprenante : désormais, les retours-chariots... - Anonymous
May 25, 2006
The new fonts and things look shiny and all, but have the math fonts been updated? Has anything been done with the Equation Editor, yet? - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 01, 2006
This is a blogging comment, but i could no longer post a topic on the blogging topics.
I am using moveable type from sixapart and host my own blog and my own pictures so I have run into a few problems and wanted to know if they had been looked at yet.
1) I upload with FTP so I eed to be able to supply a username and password along with the destination folder for my image uploads to work.
2) When I type html code into the post it is twisting it around a bit. I type this: <img src=”Images/MenuSample.jpg”>
and I get this: <img src=”Images/MenuSample.jpg”> in the post if i go online to edit it.
3) I also cannot select the category for my post currently
(assuming this has to do with the blogging software I am using).
Thanks for the help! - Anonymous
September 26, 2006
In an effort to live up to this blog's 'All things Microsoft Office Word...' subtitle, here are some... - Anonymous
September 27, 2006
PingBack from http://dancmorgan.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/word-2007s-new-look-for-documents/ - Anonymous
July 17, 2007
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/12/11/switch-and-change-back-to-office-2003-default-font-and-style