Breathing New Life Into Old Features
One of the most startling and consistent pieces of feedback we've received from the early deployments of Office 2007 Beta 1 (and Beta 1 Technical Refresh) has been: "It's great that you added the drawing tools to all of the Office programs! Now I don't need to create the drawings in PowerPoint and copy them into Word/Excel/Outlook..."
Surprised? I certainly was.
While the drawing and graphics engine has certainly been massively improved in Office 2007, the same basic drawing capabilities have been available in Word/Excel/PowerPoint since Office 97. Yet, again and again we hear stories about people assiduously creating drawings in PowerPoint and copying them over piece by piece into their Word or Excel document. I remember during a site visit watching a man create a simple flowchart in Excel which should have taken 3 minutes actually take 15 minutes because of all of the cross-application, clipboard, and windowing work it took to keep moving shapes between the apps.
Why do many people believe the drawing tools are only in PowerPoint? Quite simply, PowerPoint is the only application which shipped with the Drawing toolbar turned on by default.
Of course, one could access the Drawing tools in Word or Excel in a couple of different ways: there is an unlabeled 16x16 icon on the Standard toolbar which toggles the Drawing toolbar on, for instance. Or, if you happen to be poking in the Picture submenu of the Insert menu, you might come across the AutoShapes command which floats the AutoShapes toolbar on top of your document content. Or, you could manually turn on the Drawing toolbar from the View Toolbars dialog box. or by right-clicking a different toolbar and clicking Drawing in the popup menu.
The result of these tools being split up and buried in so many places in the UI? Many people don't find them.
Furthermore, because the Drawing toolbar is on by default in PowerPoint but isn't in Word/Excel, some people intuit that the features don't exist. (After all if they did exist, the toolbar would be there at the bottom of the screen, right?)
With that in mind, I shouldn't have been shocked to hear from people pleasantly surprised to stumble across the drawing tools in the Office 2007 UI.
In fact, because there's less UI to scan through (just six tabs to click on), we expect that a lot of people will find new features that save them time. And when we get feedback from people raving about "new features" that were actually added a decade ago, we know we've achieved one of our goals of helping people get more out of the capabilities that are already there.
The drawing area is unique in a few ways, and it's one in which we've received a lot of feedback.
Tomorrow, I'll discuss some of the tweaks we've made to the drawing UI along the way (and for Beta 2) based on this feedback.
Comments
Anonymous
April 24, 2006
As I recall, one of the reasons for breaking file format compatibility with Office95 was that the new format was needed to allow things like drawing directly integrated into the application (as opposed to OLE objects). It's nice to know that the feature will now finally be obvious.Anonymous
April 24, 2006
Jensen, another GREAT blog entry
I'm still on Easter break from my school so I've been sifting through various Office 12 blog sites and this is by far the best and most comprehensive, so congratulations =D
Any news on the release date of Beta 2? I'm all signed up and eagerly awaiting it, so please try and give a ballpark date...(by the way, i don't consider "sometime in the 2nd quarter of 2006" a ballpark ;))
Anyway, keep up the great work!Anonymous
April 24, 2006
I use PowerPoint or Excel to do my drawings, then paste them into Word, because the Word drawing canvas thing is not at all easy to understand. So much easier to draw the graphic in the other programs, then paste it inline as a picture or grouped object.Anonymous
April 24, 2006
You can do drawings in Excel??
[I do all my drawings in Visio, exporting them as WMF/EMF before including them into Word. Why? Because the Acrobat PDF plugin can't reliably create PDFs from Word documents with embedded Visio Diagrams. Every other while, visio text elements will get get scrambled all over the page. In earlier versions, the color palette was sometimes mixed up when printing or PDFing.]Anonymous
April 24, 2006
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April 24, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
April 24, 2006
You say there's 6 tabs to choose from, so the drawing tools will be easily found.
That may well be the case, but remember not all the tools and options are shown if the window's horizontal size is reduced. How does the new UI account for that?Anonymous
April 24, 2006
@Comrade: The window scales in such a way that the tabs are still available, and groups shrink down to a single button which pop up their contents.
For sure it's easier when you see it on a larger window, but everything is still a click away.Anonymous
April 25, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
April 25, 2006
Well...its not exactly true that Word has the same drawing features as Excel and Powerpoint, at least not in the Beta 1 Technical Refresh. Word still seems to be using something that looks more like the 2003 support for drawing objects, rather than the new ones found in Excel and Powerpoint.
For example, compare the shape of the heart, or the fact that the teardrop doesn't exist in Word. Also the default fills/lines/effects are different. Even the way they are stored in the file are different.
Will Word eventually give up on the old shapes and switch to the new ones like the other two apps?
On the other hand, the canvas appears to be gone and for that I'm happy.
BTW I love your blog! Always something new and interesting. I just wish the Word and PowerPoint blogs were as active.Anonymous
April 25, 2006
It's wonderful to hear that the drawing capabilities will be excavated from the depths of the UI.
Will the same go for features that have been, until now, ONLY accessible via the keyboard? What does your usage data say about these features (probably neglected?)
In Word, these include field (F9 key plus modifiers), formatting (e.g. CTRL+SHIFT+J), and editing functions (e.g. the indispensable SHIFT+F5.)
Similarly, in Excel, there are scores of poorly or altogether undocumented shortcuts. Compare MS's rather paltry list at:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP011116591033.aspx
with this:
http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/ExcelKeyBoardShortcutKeys.htmAnonymous
April 25, 2006
It's wonderful to hear that the drawing capabilities will be excavated from the depths of the UI.
Will the same go for features that have been, until now, ONLY accessible via the keyboard? What does your usage data say about these features (probably neglected?)
In Word, these include field (F9 key plus modifiers), formatting (e.g. CTRL+SHIFT+J), and editing functions (e.g. the indispensable SHIFT+F5.)
Similarly, in Excel, there are scores of poorly or altogether undocumented shortcuts. Compare MS's rather paltry list at:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP011116591033.aspx
with this:
http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/ExcelKeyBoardShortcutKeys.htmAnonymous
April 25, 2006
It's wonderful to hear that the drawing capabilities will be excavated from the depths of the UI.
Will the same go for features that have been, until now, ONLY accessible via the keyboard? What does your usage data say about these features (probably neglected?)
In Word, these include field (F9 key plus modifiers), formatting (e.g. CTRL+SHIFT+J), and editing functions (e.g. the indispensable SHIFT+F5.)
Similarly, in Excel, there are scores of poorly or altogether undocumented shortcuts. Compare MS's rather paltry list at:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP011116591033.aspx
with this:
http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/ExcelKeyBoardShortcutKeys.htmAnonymous
April 25, 2006
I agree with the points above. Word's drawing functions are terrible. After so many versions it seems that some of these features have gone backwards in 2003.
When you insert a textbox or another drawing object the default should be to anchor it to the nearest text object and insert a break in the text flow to accomdate the users drawing. Instead we get this (apparantly) random layout changes that causes such a problem when doing some even basic diagrams.
If nothing else is fixed, I hope this one is.Anonymous
April 27, 2006
PingBack from http://www.office12watch.com/drawing-tools-in-word-excel/Anonymous
April 29, 2006
Según el blog de <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/24/582154.aspx" target="_blank">Jensen Harris </a>, la gente suele creer que sólo en PowerPoint se pueden hacer gráficos, y luego hayAnonymous
May 08, 2006
So, by and large, besides cooler-looking graphs and live preview, new Office (Word in particular, since I rarely use other Office apps) is made for reading-challenged ones who are too lazy to look into the online help system?
And by the way, the help system has been degrading since Office 6.0. Word 2002 has (or seems to have) a reference-like pocket version of real good old documentation. Maybe this is another reason for users' unawareness of Office features?Anonymous
May 16, 2006
the main reason why I am using the drawing tool in Power Point is: I can save my drawing as a .png file. which app did you use to create the drawings for your blog: word? power point? paint?Anonymous
May 19, 2006
PingBack from http://www.zuschlogin.com/?p=9Anonymous
October 14, 2006
PingBack from http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/14/66Anonymous
March 27, 2007
PingBack from http://rowan.wordpress.com/2007/03/29/fat-homes/Anonymous
October 27, 2008
PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible/Anonymous
June 07, 2009
PingBack from http://greenteafatburner.info/story.php?id=2921Anonymous
June 13, 2009
PingBack from http://gardenstatuesgalore.info/story.php?id=1646