Discoverability

If past versions of Office were driven mostly by functionality and usability, Office 2007’s catchwords are discoverability and results. For example, studies show that typical Word users use only a fraction of the myriad features contained in Word. Yet, the same studies show that users often employ the wrong feature. For example, rather than use an indent setting, a user might press the spacebar five times (gasp!) or press the Tab key once (again gasp, but not quite as loud).

Microsoft’s challenge, therefore, was to design an interface that made discovering the right features easier, more direct, and more deliberate.

Have they succeeded? Well, you’ll have to be the judge. To some, the new interface succeeds only in being different and in making Office novices out of those who previously were Office experts. Whether it makes things easier for beginners, ultimately easier for casual users, or simply more difficult for veteran users, remains to be seen.

Let’s suppose you want to create a table. Assuming for the moment that you even know that a table is what you want, in Word 2003 and earlier you might choose Table Draw Table or Table Insert Table from the menu. Or, perhaps you would click the Table tool on the Standard toolbar, assuming you recognize the icon as possessing that functionality.

The point is that you had to navigate sometimes dense menus or toolbars in order to find the needed functionality—perhaps not even knowing what that functionality was called. It’s akin to wandering through a hardware store looking for something that will twist a spiraling piece of metal into a piece of wood, without knowing whether such a tool actually exists. You don’t even know what the piece of metal is called, so you wander about, and finally discover, to your utter delight, the perfect tool . . . a hammer. Oops! There’s an old saying: When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Like a hammer, the time-proven spacebar has been used countless times to perform chores for which it was never intended. Yes, a hammer can compel a screw to join two pieces of wood together; and a spacebar can be used to move text around so it looks like a table. However, just as a hammered screw makes for a shaky wooden table, a word processing table fashioned together using spaces is equally fragile. Add something to the table and it doesn’t hold together. Which table? Take your pick.

In the main Office 2007 applications, there are no dense menus and toolbars. To insert a table in Word—again assuming you even know a table is what you’re looking for—you stare at the Home Ribbon and see nothing that looks remotely like a table.

Thinking “insert” may be what you need, you click on the Insert tab, and there you see a grid with the word Table under it. You click Table, move the mouse, and perhaps you see what’s shown in Figure 2-1, as an actual table is previewed inside your document, changing as the mouse moves. Epiphany!

Figure 2-1. Office 2007’s “Live Preview” shows the results of the currently selected Ribbon action.

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Epiphany? Perhaps, or maybe just a new wrinkle. Be that as it may, the new Office 2007 apps bring with them a number of improvements in performance, stability, design elements, interoperability, and document integrity that ultimately can improve the quality of your documents and make them faster and easier to create. Whether the new interface excites you or annoys you, the fact that the new format makes it harder to corrupt documents should make you smile.

If you’ve ever spent endless hours wrestling with a document because its numbering is haunted by ghosts that won’t let you do what you need to do, you will find relief in Office 2007. More on this in Chapter 3, but for now, you might be happy to know that some of the proprietary file formats in Office applications have been replaced by formats that use XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is an open format in the public domain. At its heart are plain text commands that can be resolved by Office applications and a variety of other programs. The bottom line for the user is that the mysterious so-called binary format is gone, meaning that Office documents are now harder to corrupt. When and if they do get corrupted, your work is easier to salvage.