Microsoft Office System Behind-the-Scenes Interview

Mor Hezi, Senior Program Manager, 2007 Microsoft Office system

Do you have a favorite new Office Excel 2007 feature? If so, what is it? I have two favorite features. The first one is to convert a range of cells into a table and then use quick formatting. Personally, as an Office Excel user, I used to spend a lot of time formatting tables—making the headers stick out, separating rows, changing cell colors, etc. Now it is amazing how Office Excel 2007 recognizes a table, even if you click on only one cell within the range. The gallery of table styles is quick, simple, and makes my spreadsheet look great, even if I want to paste it in a Microsoft^® Office PowerPoint^® 2007 slide. My second favorite feature is the new PivotTable™ tools. I have always been “afraid” of PivotTable views. I thought they were for geeks. Now, not only are PivotTable views easy to use with drag-and-drop tools but it is also easy to understand why and when I should be using PivotTable to analyze my information. It is also fun to toggle between fields and see how the table gives me different results, which provide me with different insights.

In what ways does this version of Office Excel 2007 connect with what business users have been asking for? First of all, most customers tell us that business users barely use 10 percent of the features in Office Excel 2003. Even if we do not expect every user to use all the features available, we have made significant investments to make sure users will find the features they need, when they need them. We also wanted to lower the bar with some other features that today are reserved for “power users.” Other big challenges our customers have today have to do with sharing spreadsheets with others and keeping one version of the “truth.” They get lost in multiple versions, and it is hard to gain control over the information. The integration with Excel Services to save spreadsheets on the server providing Office Excel Web Access will make many customers happy.

This release has a number of great features that give us more ways to visually represent our data: icon sets, data bars, chart improvements, and more. What do you know about the average user that led to the inclusion of these features? How do you think they will be received? So far, these have been the features that got the most applause in product demos. Data bars, icon sets, heat maps, and the other conditional formatting capabilities are easy to understand and are easy to use. The bigger the data set you are analyzing, the harder it is to identify trends, gaps, or red flags on which to make business decisions. I do think that users will start overusing these capabilities at the beginning, mainly because it brings color to the spreadsheet, but with time, I do believe it will make a big difference for decision making. Charts are very commonly used to communicate the analysis to others. They are pasted in Office Word documents and Office PowerPoint slide decks. People love presenting good-looking reports. It makes them look more professional and helps them communicate results. Our new charts with 3-D and shadowing effects are customer-ready quality and the colors automatically update according to the document theme.

What’s it been like for you to be so involved with this major release? I am extremely proud and happy to be a part of the Microsoft Office system 2007 release. The biggest advantage is to be able to use it ahead of everyone else. Office Excel 2007 in particular is probably one of the most-used software products in the world. Working with the program management and the developer team is very rewarding. You learn something new every day and the customer reactions are very rewarding.