The new Microsoft Office Suite is extremely cool. It’s the most radical change I can remember since the move from DOS to Windows. There are no menus. Nothing but tool strips, which are toolbars on steroids. Instead of having two separate concepts of menus and toolbars, they’ve been merged into one new entity.

I started using Word 2007 today and my first impression was that I absolutely hated it. I never used toolbars in Office 2003, and didn’t appreciate them being forced on me in this new version. I want my damn menus back. But then something clicked in my head – this really isn’t any different than having menus. Look at the tab strip above the fancy new toolbar. See the Home, Insert, and Page Layout tabs? Think of them as menus. Clicking one of them changes the toolbar options that are displayed, just like clicking different menus used to display different sub-menus.

Say I want to insert a table into a Word document. In Office 2003, I would click the Table menu, and select “Add Table”. In Office 2007, I click the Insert tab, and select Table. It takes the same number of clicks, except in 2007, my second click has a big graphic on the Table button which makes it easier to find. With old-style menus, they appear and disappear which is a no-no in UI design. These new “menus” always show up in the same place. Microsoft also rethought the menu flow so instead of having to think Table, Insert we now go Insert, Table. Maybe not a big difference but it flows better and maps more closely to natural human thought processes.

Tool strips are awesome!

There’s another big improvement: The C-Fonts. Microsoft has included five new fonts with Office that are intended to replace the old standbys (Arial and Times New Roman). It sounds trivial but it’s not. There have been a lot of improvements to the way text is displayed over the last ten years. Most people are using LCD panels; printers print at 600dpi in full color; and we’ve figured out tricky ways to make text look better on computer screens. Check out Microsoft’s ClearType technology if you really want to geek out.

These new fonts have been carefully designed to best utilize all this nifty new display and print tech. So Gates has given us Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina, and Corbel. I’ll bet there’s an inside joke that would explain why they all start with ‘C’. Constantina is my favorite and it can replace Times New Roman.

Here’s a sample:

They didn’t just stop with fonts, creating hundreds of slick new document templates. It always used to bug me that Word’s standard style sheets and default documents were so ugly. 99% of all users never changed the default styles so virtually every corporate document created on a computer in the last fifteen years is that same ugly format. Times New Roman body text with Arial in all the Heading styles — I mean who purposefully uses Arial Italic Bold?

Now our documents are going to look beautiful. Check out the screen shot below, showing the new defaults. Color!

I didn’t mean for this to be a comprehensive review. In fact, I hadn’t been planning on reviewing Office 2007 at all. But there’s one cool new feature I’m going to mention which prompted this post. It can be used as a front-end to all major blog software. We use WordPress software to host this blog. We experimented with others and I’m comfortable that WordPress is the best. But it’s damn clunky.

<whine>

To do a post from a browser, I usually write all the text first. When you type 100 wpm, there’s a noticeable difference when you type into a HTML text box. There’s a very slight delay after you type each letter which drives me crazy. There’s also no spelling or grammar checking and virtually no GUI formatting. And every time I save a post, WordPress will change at least one of my </p> tags to a <br />, so I have to go into the raw HTML and fix it.

After the text is finished, I surf to find clipart and any screenshots I might need. For every single graphic, I do a snapshot with SnagIt, save it to my local hard drive and usually edit it in Photoshop. Then I upload each picture individually via ftp to the server. After they’re on the server I can finally link to them in the message post. If something doesn’t look right, I have to go through the process again.

</whine>

With Word 2007, I create a post like any other Word document. I can drag pictures into the document, format it however I want, edit them, and click “Publish” when I’m finished. In theory, it will magically copy everything up to the server, create the post, and I’m finished. If this works, it’s going to shave fifteen minutes off of every post.

Ok, everything looks good; I’m clicking the magic Publish button now…

UPDATE:

It worked perfectly. The only thing I can’t figure out is how to insert the “Read the rest of this entry »” to break out the first couple paragraphs. I’ll just do it manually for now.

Weird observation: My paragraphs run longer. The sentences too, I think. I didn’t make a conscious decision to lengthen them. I must have been breaking my paragraphs and sentences to match my publishing medium. Creepy.