Word 2007: sneak peak
Now don't get me wrong, I take no special credit for the great things that are in store for you in Word 2007. The timing of my arrival was completely serendipitous. But it was all very exciting to me none-the-less. The entire Office organization was all excited about creating a mind blowing version of Office that challenged a lot of people's assumptions about what Office could be.
As the project got underway our efforts began to focus on a few key ideas. I'm going to give a quick overview of these below. It's a bit of a tease, but helps set the stage for a more detailed discussion of all the work that has gone into Word 2007. If you're head is spinning at the end and you are wondering if we added/changed [insert your favorite feature addition or change here], just hold on and we'll get to the details in future posts!
Dramatic improvements in document authoring
Let's face it, Word 2003 is too hard for many of us to use. It's powerful and it's complicated. The new user interface in Word 2007 is a vast improvement for us all. I'm sure you're reading Jensen's blog to catch all the details on the new UI. Things that were hard to find before are now discoverable and tasks that used to take you many clicks now take you just a couple. For example, inserting a complex cover page is as simple as selecting one from a visual gallery.
Not only is Word 2007 easier to use, but you can get better looking results too. We have new defaults that create better looking, easier to read documents. We've added wonderful new fonts. Document themes let you get the perfect color, font and effects combinations for your document. Document building blocks (designer created document parts like the cover pages I mentioned above) are built on top of styles & themes so that they always match the document in which you use them.
Lots to talk about here to say the least.
Powerful, easier to create Word templates & solutions
The new Open XML formats alone go a long way to enable more powerful and easier to create (read less code) solutions in Word. Brian is doing a great job of covering all the technical details in his blog. We've added content controls which allow you to structure your solutions/template in a way that helps guide the user as they author a document with the solution. Think of them as super placeholders (for starters). And, finally the Open XML format supports an XML data store. You can bind to data from a variety of sources (SharePoint is one example) and present that data on the document surface.
The power in these new features isn't captured in my one sentence overviews above, but when you combine these new features with those in point #1 you get a lot of muscle for creating good looking, flexible and powerful solutions on top of Word. Oh yeah, and I didn't even mention the new RibbonX extensibility model that comes with our new UI!
Key improvements for our legal and academic customers
Each release of Word provides us the opportunity to focus a bit extra attention on one or two unique groups of Word customers. This release legal and academic customers won the feature lottery. (Of course, it isn't a lottery but it probably feels that way to everyone reading this.) I could list out the features that we've done for each of these customer groups, but I'd rather keep you guessing. I think you'll be pleased. Each is a significant enhancement to Word and, while they are targeted at specific customers, they will be useful for many people.
And…
That's not all. Those are just the major areas. We've improved reading mode, improved our integration with Outlook, added PDF support and a lot more. Next week we'll start jumping in to the details.
Tomorrow look for an interesting post about a feature that will make its debut in the upcoming public beta. Very few people have seen or heard about it.
Oh, and tomorrow will definitely come this time.
Comments
- Anonymous
May 11, 2006
Woohoo, posts on two consecutive days!
I'm definitely waiting for tomorrow now, you've got me curious. And I didn't even have to read the "tomorrow" link, I remember those posts quite well. :P - Anonymous
May 11, 2006
"Word 2003 is too hard for many of us to use. "
Care to explain that a bit? That seems overly gratuitous, or plain PR. - Anonymous
May 11, 2006
I'm not very good at PR speak, so that certainly wasn't my goal. I didn't offer any explanation because I honestly think it is self evident (unfortunately). I think the Jensen's posts on "Why the New UI" are the best explanation. Not sure that I can improve on it. See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/category/11720.aspx - Anonymous
May 12, 2006
Will Word 2007 support revision control between multiple authors? As an alternative, can Word 2007 auto-link several user partitions (chapters) that can be stored as separate files?
thanks - Anonymous
May 12, 2006
I have been a word user for many years. One thing i dont understand, is why there are no better tools/functions to save a word document in HTML - including be able to save the document to multiple files and then have a table of contents generated too. Actually i recall word 97 having this feature and it then being removed. Is there anything being added in word 2007? - Anonymous
May 16, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 17, 2006
Two no-cost options for creating "better looking results" in Word:
1. Enable kerning (Format-->Font-->Character Spacing)
2. Enable "Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows" (Tools-->Options-->Compatibility)
I hope these options are turned on by default in the Word 2007 normal.dot.