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Tips and tricks: New MS Office
Microsoft is all set to unleash the latest software of its Office suite — the Office 12. This development is unlike any other we have experienced since Office 90s, 2K and XP, as the version will accompany Windows Vista, the next major operating system.
Hence, some major changes are on the cards. Now let’s take a quick look at some of the new features Office 12 is expected to offer.
Redesigned user interface
User Interface (UI) is at the heart of any application, particularly in a productivity suite. The same is true of Office, but interestingly enough nine to 10 features requested by customers are already there in the existing Office package.
Chris Capossela, a Microsoft vice-president says, “They simply don’t know it’s there… It’s just too hard to find it.” For example, MS Word has got over 1,500 commands! Moreover, the core menu driven UI has remained unchanged for the past 20 years.
All this has pushed MS to divert from traditional system of toolbars, task panes, and dialog boxes to what is termed “Ribbon” and “Command Tabs”. These tabs display the most common commands and allow users to access advanced features with ease. Then there are “Contextual Command Tabs”, which display only what is relevant to the current task being performed, for example, chart options if a chart is clicked in MS Excel.
“Galleries” is a new feature. The idea behind this template-like option is to ensure that users spend productive time in creating informative stuff, rather than trying to make the document look the way they want. Galleries will contain styles and formatting to create professional-looking stuff on the fly.
A brand new technology named Live Preview is being introduced that will change formatting of the document as the user hovers mouse over different font names or Gallery entries. This will reduce the pain of applying and re-applying formatting to a large document until a suitable one is found.
Reducing reliance on help
Office 12 is introducing a feature code-named “Super Tooltips”. The concept behind this is simple — users often do not know what a feature is called, so how on earth can they type in a help query?
“Super Tooltips” aims at providing detailed help at command/feature level so that extensive searches are minimized. Automation has also reportedly taken a big leap forward.
For instance, in Power Point, MS is said to be working on auto graphics for sleek looking auto designing. And just as Info Path was added in the last Office release, One Note, the modernlooking and feature-rich note-taking tool, might find itself as part of the suite.
Enterprise-level enhancements
Since end-users now want, along with personal productivity, the ability to share, collaborate and manage documents horizontally and vertically in an organization, Office 12 is banking on pushing ahead with advanced features of Share Point and other collaboration services. Along with this, work flow management and digital rights management providing document security are high on the agenda, which corporate world is sure to embrace with great zeal. For this reason, Office 12 may introduce new server applications to harness the potential power of well-rooted customer base in enterprises around the world.
Rumours of Excel server software are also circulating as traditionally spreadsheets and workbooks have been file-based giving limited visibility into trends. Now dashboards and scorecards are being introduced for visual representation of business flow.
With regard to security, Information Rights Management tools are going to play an unprecedented role. Users will have complete control over who has got what type of access to the documents they create. For example, one could specify readers and editors and even set an expiry date. The downside obviously is the inability of non-MS products to access restricted Office documents — something the user community has enjoyed until now.
This seems to be a well thought out business strategy, as Matt Rosoff, an analyst with “Directions on Microsoft” puts it, “Microsoft would love people to use Office and only Office. They made very sure that Office has these features that nobody else has.”
This might create troubles for Office 2003 users without rights management capabilities. To solve the issue, MS will introduce a browser-based (IE) plug-in to open restricted documents having permissions (copy, print etc) as granted by the document creator.
Writer’s email: nizar.ali@gmail.com
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