Office 12 - you got it first at PDC

At the day one keynote they also gave the first public preview of Office 12. Here's a list of random observations ( I still have to go over all of my notes - but this will already get you pretty excited):

General remarks

Vista and Office 12 will be released at the same time - release is expected for the second half of 2006

They completely reengineered the user interface - the "File, Edit,..." menu's have gone and are replaced with the "Ribbon". The "Ribbon" is a collection of tabs which instantly display your most commonly used functions - the Ribbon will show different options for Excel and Word. Next to the standard tabs which appear also context-driven menu information will be available through the Ribbon. The goal of Office12 is to create a result-oriented UI and I think they have succeeded pretty well. Other new stuff:
      - Galleries
      - Live preview - when you are selecting a new font or other formatting options, you get a live preview when hovering over the possible options.
      - Quick Access Launch - special area in the ribbon with your most commonly used functionality
      - Great zoom in & out for all Office types - with a very UI from within the new statusbar
      - New XML model to create customisation for the UI - RibbonX
      - Floatie - when you select a certain part in your Word document - text or image - a new UI will appear called floatie. This will show the most commonly used functions and is kind of a replacement for the right click menu.

Word 12 - new features and enhancements

More possibilities to create great looking text: better handling of margins, better options to insert images into a text

Great tool to add nice looking borders round portions of text

... and much more

Excel 12 - new features and enhancements

Excel has a pretty neat feature which allows you to visualize the data in a very nice way - with color schemes (red,green, orange,...) or with color gradients

An interesting feature for Word was the Document Inspector - this allows you to scan your Word document for hidden info, comments, track changes and lets you remove them before you want to publish your document

Powerpoint 12 - new features and enhancements

The nicest feature for Powerpoint was the "text to graphics" tool - this tool can convert your typical bulleted lists to graphical elements

Lots of new galleries with templates

Synchronisation with a new type of library in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - a powerpoint resource library. When you send a powerpoint to a WSS3.0 library it will split up the presentation into multiple slides (items) in the library. You can then reassemble easily a new presentation based on the info in this WSS library.


Outlook 12 - new features and enhancements

New UI element added - Todo side bar

Enhancements of tasks in Outlook - explicit assignment and duration added

Preview of attachments

Possibility to overlay multiple calendars

RSS reader and aggregation of feeds in Outlook 2003

Outlook 12 can be used as an offline storage for WSS3.0 document libraries

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