MS-Next

In my previous post, the focus of attention was our new Office 2008 User Experience.  For this post, I will turn the focus to another area that I am deeply passionate about — Microsoft Word 2008.  At MacBU, many of us have the great fortune to work on multiple areas of interest. So when I’m not “pushing pixels” in our new Office UI, my other role is Lead Program Manager for Word for Mac.  Together with my passionate and dedicated  team, we’ve been hard at work on a feature that has been three years in the making.  With this new post, I am pleased to talk about one of our latest labors of love — the new Publishing Layout View.

     + click to enlarge

First, some background.  For those using Word for Mac, you may already be familiar with Notebook Layout View from Word 2004.   Notebook Layout View is a specialized notebook-like environment optimized for quick note-taking.  By adopting the appearance of the familiar spiral paper-based notebook — with notebook tabs and rule lines — you can quickly capture thoughts and information as you would in an actual paper-based notebook.  Notebook Layout View represented a new design philosophy in the development of Word for Mac.  The premise of this new approach was to present a minimalist and “task-based” user interface in which 90% of Word’s typical UI is hidden and only exposing features relevant to the task at hand, in this case note-taking.  Our customers have responded positively to this approach because the user interface is more approachable and less “bloated”, thereby making relevant features easier to find.  I’m pleased to say that we’ve further streamlined and improved this popular feature in Word 2008, but that’s a subject for another blog post. 

Now let’s fast-forward to Word 2008.  For years we have known that Word is used to create a wide spectrum of documents that fall under two basic categories:

• Text-centric documents — these include manuscripts, reports, resumes, letters, etc.
• Layout-rich documents — these include newsletters, brochures, flyers, greeting cards, business cards, among others

Word has long provided a full complement of the features necessary for the creation of these two different categories of documents.  However, given that all of such features were presented all at once with a single “one-size-fits-all” user interface, users found it difficult to find the right features for the right task.

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