1. Introducing the Office 2007 User Interface
In This Chapter
- The Ribbon Explained
- Introducing Live Preview
- The Office Button
- Accelerate with the Alt Key
- Customizing the Office User Interface Using the Quick Access Toolbar
- Contextual Text Formatting Using the Mini Toolbar
- Redesigned Status Bar
- Other Useful Office 2007 Enhancements
Just about every new release of Office has changed the user interface, but nothing compares to the drastic changes and innovation offered in Office 2007 compared to previous versions of Microsoft Office. This chapter introduces you to the concept of the Ribbon, the Office button, new accelerator shortcut keys including the new purpose of the Alt button, the new mini floating toolbar, and changes to the status bar.
The Ribbon Explained
The most obvious difference in the user interface is the absence of the traditional Office menus and toolbar. This is initially a huge shock because, for decades, menus have been the cornerstone of the user interface in previous Microsoft Office applications.
If you have spent any time using Office 2007, you have seen the Ribbon, which is essentially one fat toolbar that replaces the menus and toolbars from previous versions of Office. The old drop-down menus are missing because Microsoft performed studies and found that the Ribbon is more effective and intuitive at displaying the large number of features found in Office (see Figure 1.1).
Note
If you are interested in knowing more about the birth of the Ribbon, Microsoft has a funny comic strip describing the development of the new Office interface, including the Ribbon, at http://www.enhancedoffice.com.
Some advanced commands still spawn task panes, such as the Advanced Animation command found on the Animations ribbon tab in the Animations area when you select Custom Animation. But, these are all still launched from the Ribbon, and the goal is that you will be able to accomplish the vast majority of your tasks by just using the Ribbon itself.
Main Ribbon Tabs
The Ribbon is composed of top-level tasks such as inserting content (the Insert tab), setting the theme of the presentation (the Design tab), or giving a presentation (the Slide Show tab).
The standard PowerPoint Ribbon tabs are Home, Insert, Design, Animations, Slide Show, Review, and View.
Smart Ribbon Tabs
Various other tabs appear, depending on the content selected. This is the power of contextual user interfaces: The commands available change depending on what is relevant and helpful to you.
The standard Ribbon tabs mentioned in the previous section are always shown in PowerPoint. Additional Ribbon tabs exist that are contextual, meaning that they appear and disappear depending on what you are doing in PowerPoint at any given time. The appearance of smart tabs keeps the Ribbon uncluttered when you aren’t doing something for which you need specific commands or tools.
For instance, when you are inserting text, the Text Formatting ribbon shows up, offering you various text formatting options. Similarly, you could select a shape, chart, or SmartArt, and the corresponding Ribbon tab for that object appears automatically, providing options specific to that task (see Figure 1.2). These tabs appear to the right of the standard Ribbon tabs described in the previous section.
Figure 1.2 This Picture Tools Format tab appears to the right of the standard tabs when a picture is selected.
Compare this efficient design with the myriad of menu items from previous versions of PowerPoint—menus that would appear and disappear after activating an obscure option and might require assistance from your friendly neighborhood geek to understand. You have the same level of power in PowerPoint 2007. But, there are fewer options to sort through because relevant options appear right in front of you and irrelevant options remain hidden, making it all easier to use.
Ribbon Groups
Inside each Ribbon tab, items are divided into areas called groups. For example, on the main Home tab, groups exist for Clipboard, Slides, Font, Paragraph, Drawing, and Editing (see Figure 1.3). Now you can say “the Slides group,” and other Office nerds will know what you’re talking about.
Figure 1.3 The six groups on the Home tab.
Depending on how wide your window is, PowerPoint fully expands some groups, showing all the items inside, and it shows other groups as just menus that you need to click before the additional commands are revealed. If your window is extremely wide and you have a widescreen monitor, all groups appear fully expanded. Give it a try. Make your PowerPoint window narrow and watch as the Ribbon groups change.
Note
Dynamically changing the user interface based on window size was first tried by Microsoft in OneNote 2003 and is now used by all the Ribbon-aware Office 2007 applications.
Box Launcher
Despite the fatness of the Ribbon, Microsoft could still cram only the most popular features onto the main Ribbon. If you’re a power user, you probably want to see more than that. To access features that didn’t make the cut for the default Ribbon real estate, look for a dialog box launcher at the bottom right of the Ribbon groups that offers more advanced options (see Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 All the options are revealed after clicking the dialog box launcher in the Font check. The launcher brings up the Font dialog.
Designing the Ribbon
To decide which features to put on the main Ribbon and which advanced features to hide behind the box launcher, Office periodically tells Microsoft which features you’re using the most. Microsoft can then sum up the totals using an internal tool called SQM (Service Quality Monitoring).
To build Office 2007, the Microsoft Office team looked closely at data gathered about Office 2003 usage. The really popular features ended up on the Home tab, the next most popular now live on groups in the Ribbon, and features that are only occasionally used ended up hidden behind the box launcher or in advanced dialogs.
The data is sent anonymously to respect your privacy, but you can opt-in or opt-out of the “program” by clicking the main Office button. Under PowerPoint Options, choose Trust Center in the left pane, Trust Center Settings, and, finally, Privacy Options. Check the Sign Up for the Customer Experience Improvement Program check box. Read more about SQM here at Jenson Harris’ Office User Interface blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/05/568947.aspx.
Minimizing the Ribbon
If you want to temporarily minimize the Ribbon to give yourself more screen real estate, just double-click any of the tabs or press Ctrl+F1 as a shortcut. This hides the bulk of the ribbon, including the groups, as shown in Figure 1.5, and you can also maximize the Ribbon by pressing Ctrl+F1 again to make it appear again.
Figure 1.5 The Ribbon minimized.
Note
We often use this while reading a presentation when we don’t anticipate making any changes—for example, reviewing a presentation for a friend.
Galleries
One common concept within the Ribbon is called a gallery. A gallery is a bunch of visual previews showing some results you can instantly apply to your presentation or to an object. For example, in the Design tab’s Themes group, the Theme gallery shows visual previews of themes you can quickly apply to the entire presentation (see Figure 1.6). Clicking on a preview in the gallery instantly applies the look to your presentation, including the backgrounds, placeholder layouts, colors, and more.
Figure 1.6 These theme choices appear in a gallery, a new user interface concept in Office 2007.
As you can see, there are always three buttons to the right of a gallery. The top two buttons are scroll buttons that let you scroll up and down to see more items in the gallery. The bottom button expands the gallery to a larger form so that you can see more items at one time.
To get slightly more information about any item in a gallery, park the mouse cursor above the item, and a ScreenTip appears, giving you more information. For example, hovering over a theme in the themes gallery tells you the name of the theme.
Find Any Command
Can’t find your favorite PowerPoint command in the new user interface? Microsoft has a tool that shows you a mock version of the Office 2003 user interface with the old menus and toolbars. You can click on anything, and it tells you where the corresponding command is in the Office 2007 Ribbon-based user interface.
To get help:
1. Go to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint.
2. Then click PowerPoint 2007 Help in the left pane. Scroll down to Getting Help and then click it.
3. From the list, choose Interactive PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 Command Reference Guide.
You can also download it to your machine from the Microsoft Download Center. Here’s how:
1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads.
2. Enter Interactive PowerPoint 2003 in the search box and click Search.
3. This brings up the Results page. Click PowerPoint 2007 Guide: PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 Interactive Command Reference Guide.
Why Another User Interface?
Many people have become increasingly bitter at Microsoft each year for making the user interface more complicated with each successive release of Office. Office 2000 introduced personalized menus that tried to hide some of the lesser used functionality, and Office XP introduced task panes, but neither was completely successful in distilling the sheer magnitude of Office down to an understandable user interface. When Office 2003 was released, it became especially difficult. Finding any particular command required hunting because there were so many places a command could be hidden in Office 2003 (see Figure 1.7). You’d have to hunt through:
- Menus—There were nine top-level menus, a few containing a dozen or more commands, some of each spawned yet another sub-sub-menu containing more choices.
- Toolbars—There were 20 of these.
- Task panes—There were 16 task panes in Office 2003.
Figure 1.7 “We had some options in there that literally did nothing.” —Paul Coleman, Microsoft product manager.
The name “Ribbon” comes from the fact that in original Office 2007 designs, there weren’t any tabs. Instead, all the Office commands were just placed side-by-side in one super long strip that you could quickly scroll through, which was like one long Ribbon. Read more from one of the Office user interface designers: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/07/478214.aspx.
Introducing Live Preview
One feature that goes hand in hand with galleries is Live Preview. Those of you who are as indecisive as we are will rejoice when you see this new feature in action. Live Preview allows you to see how formatting changes could look without actually having to apply them.
To give this feature a try, do the following:
1. Insert some text and select it.
2. Click the Format Tab.
3. Hover your mouse over one of the WordArt styles. The WordArt styles are in a gallery, similar to the Theme gallery shown in the previous section.
4. Even though you didn’t click yet, notice that you now see a preview of what that change would do (see Figure 1.8).
Figure 1.8 Live Preview shows a change without committing to it, so you can see what it would look like first.
This is useful not only for text, but also when applying styles to entire documents, single pictures, shapes, diagrams, charts, and tables, as well as just about anything else you can think of.
Live Preview allows you to preview style changes without actually making any changes.
Note
With the excellent undo features available in Office 2007, even if you apply a style that you don’t like, you can always go back to a previous state. Learn more about styles in Chapter 11, “Dissecting Themes.”
Under the Covers
Technically, this is what happens when you hover over something and Live Preview kicks in:
- Live Preview makes an invisible clone of your presentation.
- It applies the command you’re previewing to the invisible copy. So, say that you’re hovering over the WordArt style, as in the previous example. The style would be applied to the text in the clone document.
- PowerPoint takes a screenshot picture of the clone document and displays it for you.
- When you move your mouse off the object to kill Live Preview, the screenshot picture disappears and the clone document is destroyed.
Because the operation is only happening to this clone document, nothing happens to your actual document during a Live Preview.
Tip
If this feature slows down your computer, go to PowerPoint Options from the Office button, and, under the Popular tab, uncheck the Enable Live Preview check box.
The Office Button
Having redone all the toolbars from the User Interface, some leftover buttons/options from previous versions needed a place to live. Thus, the Office button (see Figure 1.9) was born.
Figure 1.9 The Office button.
What Lives Here?
If you ever find yourself looking for something pretty generic that used to be under the Tools drop-down menu in previous versions, try looking under the Office button first. Most importantly, the famous Options item under the Tools menu from previous versions of PowerPoint now lives under the PowerPoint Options item at the bottom of the main Office button menu.
In addition, the Office button menu contains many of the actions you perform at a document level—for example, Save, Save As, and so on, which were in the File menu of earlier versions, are found here.
The Save options reside here in addition to things such as Prepare, Send, and Publish. Options such as these produce flyouts that contain additional features such as those that allow you to send your presentation to Word as handouts, assign digital-rights management, or send the presentation as an email message or attachment. You’ll be able to create a Document Workspace, publish slides to a Slide Library (via Publish Slides), or use Package for CD to publish to a CD. You’ll also find the Printing options, which haven’t changed much other than the cool new Quick Print option.
Caution
Be careful! If you double-click the Office button, it closes PowerPoint! Even though the Windows Start menu doesn’t have this behavior, this is similar to what happens in other Windows applications when you double-click the icon in the top left, a holdover from the early days of Windows when there wasn’t an “X” button at the top right of every window.
The File Menu in Disguise
Technically, the Office button is just the File menu with an extreme makeover. Hold down Alt+F, and the button opens, just like the File menu did in previous versions of Office. Beta test versions of Office 2007 called the Office button the “File menu” when you hovered over it, and even earlier betas had the word “File” in the upper left instead of the Office logo.
Despite its similarity to the File menu, we’ll refer to this as the Office button throughout the rest of the book.
Why the Funny Button in the Corner? (Fitts Law)
From a marketing perspective, Microsoft wanted Office 2007 to look visually similar to Windows Vista. Windows Vista has a round Start button, so we guess they figured Office 2007 needed a round button of menu options.
There’s also a sound technical reason for putting the button in the corner. Most Office users maximize their windows so that it fills the entire computer screen. So, putting the Office button in the top-left of your window essentially puts it at the top-left corner of the entire monitor. It’s a lot easier to click a target in one of the four corners of the screen than it is to click something, say, in the middle of the screen.
In research concerning the topic of computer mice, there exists a famous theory called Fitts Law, essentially stating that things on the computer screen are easier to click when the mouse is close to the target and when the target is large in size. When something, such as the Office button, is in the corner of the screen, it’s essentially of infinite height and width because you can never overshoot it when you’re trying to click it. So, it’s really easy to click when the button is in the corner. This is the same reason that Windows puts the Start menu at the bottom left of the screen and Apple puts the Apple menu at the top left of the screen.
Read more about Fitts Law’s impact on the Office 2007 user interface on the Jenson Harris: Office User Interface Blog website at http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.aspx.
Accelerate with the Alt Key
Shortcuts are an important and interesting aspect to any application. The Alt key has always been used for finding shortcuts to certain menu commands (known as hotkeys). We’ll show you what has changed and what hasn’t with respect to these handy little time-savers.
Finding New Shortcuts
After you get used to them, using the keyboard shortcuts is normally a little faster than using the mouse. These shortcuts let you quickly access pieces of the Ribbon without ever touching the mouse.
In previous versions of PowerPoint, one letter in the name of each drop-down menus is underlined, which indicates that when that key is pressed in combination with the Alt key, the menu is expanded.
In PowerPoint 2007, try pressing the Alt key once by itself and notice that another set of small characters are immediately brought up underneath each tab (see Figure 1.10).
Figure 1.10 The new Alt key accelerators let you access parts of the user interface without ever leaving the comfort of your keyboard.
Now press one of the letters associated with the Alt key. If the group itself is a drop-down menu or exposes a gallery, pressing its letter reveals its contents and also another set of letters to access the subcommands (see Figure 1.11). This gives you a much faster way of accessing pieces of the user interface (UI) without using the mouse.
Figure 1.11 More little letters appear to help you select items within one of the Ribbon groups.
Using Old Office Keyboard Shortcuts
If you have used previous versions of Office 2003, you might have become accustomed to a few keyboard shortcuts that help you through the day and prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. After reading the previous section, you might be thinking that all this training will have been for naught, but don’t worry because Office 2007 has taken this factor into consideration.
Select from a Menu
Most keyboard shortcuts from previous versions of Office still work. For example, to select something from a menu, simply press and hold the Alt key and begin the shortcut combination, just as you did in PowerPoint 2003.
For example, to insert a Picture from a File, you would do this in PowerPoint 2007: While pressing Alt, press the I key, the P key, and then the F key. This corresponds to pressing the Alt key in 2003, and then pressing I for Insert, P for Picture, and F for From file. This all still works in PowerPoint 2007, even though the menu items associated with the shortcut keys are no longer there.
Simpler Keyboard Shortcuts
Other simpler shortcuts, such as Ctrl+C for copy or Ctrl+B for bold, also work just as they did in PowerPoint 2003. All your favorite PowerPoint 2003 keyboard shortcuts should still work in PowerPoint 2007!
Cycling Through Panes Using F6
Have you ever tried to press F5 to enter Slide Show mode? Okay, that’s an easy one; have you ever missed the F5 key and accidentally pressed F6? If you use F6 on purpose and can explain what it does, you are way ahead of the game.
F6 is a navigation shortcut that cycles through various parts of the Window to save you some time and relieves you of the stress of moving your mouse around so much.
The various parts of the Window that it cycles through include
- The Ribbon—With Accelerator keys highlighted
- The Thumbnail pane
- The Outline pane
- The Main slide
- The Notes pane
Customizing the Office User Interface Using the Quick Access Toolbar
Do you remember customizing all the toolbars in previous versions of Office? Do you remember how long it took you each time to customize each of the thirtysomething toolbars, adding buttons you wanted and removing the useless ones taking up valuable toolbar real estate?
Well, you will be pleasantly surprised with Office 2007 because the new Quick Access Toolbar, or QAT (pronounced “KWAT”), saves you the trouble of customizing multiple toolbars, letting you automatically create your own toolbar (see Figure 1.12).
Figure 1.12 Quick Access Toolbar.
Customizing the QAT
To begin customizing your toolbar, click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options. Click the Customize section on the left, and you are greeted by a dialog box of two panes next to one another vertically (see Figure 1.13).
Figure 1.13 The pane on the left side allows you choose which command you want on the Quick Access Toolbar in the pane on the right side.
Tip
All the sections beginning with Customize and below, underneath the horizontal line, are the same in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. Learn about these once, and you should be able to use your skills across Office.
Click toolbar buttons from the left side of the dialog, and then click the Add button to add it to the QAT. If you accidentally choose one you don’t want, you can remove it by selecting it on the right and clicking Remove.
Another easy way to modify the Quick Access Toolbar is to simply right-click on parts of the Ribbon and click Add to Quick Access Toolbar.
Customization Limitations
Two notable deficiencies of the Ribbon exist when you compare it to the Office 2003 toolbars:
- The 2007 interface can’t be heavily customized.
- The Ribbon tabs can’t be torn away and made floating.
Note
The Ribbon cannot be customized through the PowerPoint user interface, but if you’re a developer willing to write some code, Office does offer Ribbon customization capabilities. It’s easiest using XML and a .NET language such as C# or VB.NET. Read more on MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338202.aspx. Third-party tools also might be of some help, so definitely check those out. One is called Ribbon Customizer.
Finding Hidden Commands
The QAT is useful not only for accessing certain features more quickly, but also for accessing some features that are not available from the standard user interface. If you find yourself unable to find a feature that existed in previous versions of the product, first check the QAT commands to see if you can add it there before you go searching to see if the feature was left out of the product for this release.
Customization Tips and Tricks
Here are some tips and tricks you might find useful as you manipulate the user interface to the way you work:
- If you find yourself using a piece of the Ribbon frequently and want to add it to your QAT, simply right-click it on the Ribbon and select Add to Quick Access Toolbar.
- One thing we like to do is to put the QAT below the Ribbon. This is how you do it: Right-click on the QAT and select Show Quick Access Toolbar Below the Ribbon, which moves it down below to make it resemble the screen shown in Figure 1.14. Try it out; you’ll find that you have less screen real estate, but the QAT will be faster to reach and might not be in the way as much. (You won’t need to move the mouse past the Ribbon each time you want to access it.)
Figure 1.14 Example of the QAT below the Ribbon.
- Using the Alt keys in combination with the QAT can produce some useful results. Pressing the Alt key assigns a number in ascending order to the items from left to right in your QAT. So, if you have an action that takes four or five Alt key combinations, just add it as an item to your QAT. You will automatically get the next higher number for that action. For instance, if the number assigned is 4, you can access this QAT item with a single Alt+4 combination key.
Fun and Useless Fact: If you installed Beta 2 of Office 2007, the game Solitaire was available under All Commands, and you could add it to the QAT in Excel.
Contextual Text Formatting Using the Mini Toolbar
Another new addition to the user interface is that of the mini toolbar, which is often referred to as the floatie.
What’s a Floatie?
The floatie, also known as the mini toolbar, is a little toolbar that appears when you’re editing text. Shown in Figure 1.15, it contains the most popular and useful text editing buttons, which makes it easy to format your text without actually having to go to the Ribbon.
Figure 1.15 The anatomy of the floatie.
The floatie is contextual, meaning that it shows up when PowerPoint senses that you need it, such as in the following instances:
- It appears after you paste, alongside the Smart Tag (more on that in the beginning of Chapter 9, “Inserting Content into PowerPoint”).
- Simply hover over some selected text, and you’ll see it.
- Simply double-click on a word or another object or right-click on just about anything.
Notice that as you move the mouse away from the floatie, it becomes more and more transparent until it disappears entirely. As you move closer to the floatie, it becomes more opaque (see Figure 1.16).
Figure 1.16 Here is the floatie in different opaque states.
Hate the Floatie?
The floatie can’t be customized, but if you happen to find this feature cumbersome, you can turn it off completely by clicking the Office button, PowerPoint Options Popular (section in the left pane) and unchecking the Show MiniToolbar on Selection check box, which is the very first check box.
Redesigned Status Bar
The area at the bottom of your PowerPoint windows might look new to you. This area is known as the status bar.
What’s a Status Bar?
The strip of real estate at the bottom of your PowerPoint window contains a ton of information about your presentation and has more features than the status bar from previous versions.
In earlier versions of PowerPoint, the status bar would show you what slide you’re on, whether you’ve saved the presentation, and what Slide Design was applied to the document. The 2007 release adds new information to the status bar.
Anatomy of the Status Bar
Figure 1.17 shows the new PowerPoint 2007 status bar. Table 1.1 describes what each piece of the status bar does.
Figure 1.17 The PowerPoint status bar.
Table 1.1 The Status Bar
Customizing the Status Bar
Don’t like the default items on the status bar or want to add more? Right-click the status bar to bring up the status bar customization menu. Check items you want to keep, and uncheck the ones you don’t like.
Other Useful Office 2007 Enhancements
The following are a few interesting features that can make your presentation-authoring experience more enjoyable.
What’s That Noise?
Maybe you didn’t notice because it’s usually so quiet, but Office can do sounds. To activate them, go to the Office button and select PowerPoint Options; then choose Advanced in the left pane, scroll to the bottom of the right pane, and check the Provide Feedback with Sound check box. Press OK. You’ll probably get prompted to install the Microsoft Office Sounds add-in. Go ahead and do so.
Note
Okay, so this isn’t really new. The Office sounds add-in has been available since PowerPoint 2002, but you probably haven’t tried it out yet.
After the add-in is installed, crank up your computer speakers, try a few operations, and listen to the sounds. For example, you’ll get a sound for each of these operations:
- Creating a new presentation (Ctrl+N)
- Inserting a slide (Ctrl+M)
- Undoing (Ctrl+Z)
- Redoing (Ctrl+Y)
- Clicking a button on a toolbar
- Closing the presentation without saving (Ctrl+F4)
If you find the sounds annoying, go back to PowerPoint Options and uncheck the Provide Feedback with Sound box to disable them.
Enhanced ScreenTips
ScreenTips are great. You love and use them, especially when a button itself is more generic than a shirt from the Gap. When you hover over a button with your mouse pointer, ScreenTips help you figure out what a button does. New to Office 2007 are Super ScreenTips, which have the same functionality as the regular ScreenTips, but are much larger and provide more information and sometimes pictures that are helpful (see Figure 1.18).
Figure 1.18 A big, fat enhanced ScreenTip.
If you find that these giant ScreenTips annoy you, click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options. Choose Popular in the left pane and look for the ScreenTip Style drop-down. Choose Don’t Show Feature Descriptions in ScreenTips to make them smaller or Don’t Show ScreenTips to make them go away altogether.
Note
In development, the giant ScreenTips were called “Super ScreenTips.” Eventually, the “Super” moniker was dropped, and in the final product, Office just calls these extra large ScreenTips “Screen Tips.”
Changing PowerPoint Skins
One of the first things we did after installing Office is change the skin, which Office calls a color scheme. The three main color options that you can use for Office applications—which recolor the background, the toolbars, and the look and feel—are Blue, Silver, and Black.
Note
More information about Office 2007 color schemes can be found on the Web from Microsoft Office’s user interface guru: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/08/14/699304.aspx.
The default Office color scheme is blue. To change the scheme, click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options, and then click Popular in the left pane. Find the Color Scheme drop-down and pick your favorite color.
Note
It’s incredibly confusing that Office calls these “color schemes,” but these have nothing to do with PowerPoint colors, schemes, or themes used to style your documents. You’ll learn more about those concepts in Chapter 11.