Since Office 2007 has been in its public preview phase, many users have asked why certain features don’t exist in a product, especially in regards to OneNote. Designing, implementing and testing features for an Office application is a very complex process, which the following blog posts by current and former Microsoft employees explain:

• Why Doesn’t OneNote have Feature X?
• Thinking through a feature
• There’s no such thing as a simple feature
• The anatomy of a bug

My all time favorite though is:

• How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

I don’t expect to post any RibbonX related articles this month. I’ll continue my RibbonX discussion in September again.

The AOL search query database is now available for searching online:

• AOL Stalker
• AOL Search Logs

Someone at Slate also did an analysis of the data and identified seven user profiles.

Today seems to be a day for scandals.

10 days ago, AOL Research released search queries spanning 3 months from 658,000 randomly selected subscribers. The 2.12 GB of data were released as a 439 MB download on AOL Research’s website. While the data uses anonymous user IDs, it is possible to identify a user based on his or her search queries (for example, a lot of users search for their own name). AOL has since pulled the data and apologized for this privacy scandal. I commend them for making this valuable data available to researchers, but couldn’t they have done this in a less public manner that respects privacy concerns? If you haven’t downloaded a copy of the data yet, you can get it from this mirror.

The second scandal is a photo scandal at Reuters. Apparently a freelance photographer working for Reuters, Adnan Hajj, has either doctored (edited on a computer) or staged pictures from Lebanon. Some of his pictures were featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The scandal started when a blog identified a picture as clearly doctored via Photoshop, which Reuters has pulled since. After more allegations surfaced, Reuters removed all 920 pictures by Adnan Hajj from its database. It seems to be rather obvious that his pictures are no longer credible. For example, two pictures of the same destroyed bridge (according to the caption) showed two completely different bridges. Or, the same building was destroyed in an identical manner twice in two weeks. The Power Line blog covers this particular scandal closely.

The Internet world seems to move a lot faster than mainstream media. The New York Times finally picked up on both scandals:

• AOL article
• Reuters article

edited 2006-08-09 to include NYT articles

Today, I am releasing the first alpha version of my RibbonCustomizer add-in. As it is alpha, it still has bugs. Some of which are listed as known issues. For a discussion of this add-in, see my RibbonCustomizer overview post.
In this alpha version, you can use it to swap groups among tabs, create your own tabs and remove any existing MS group or tab. In addition to that, you can also load any RibbonX XML file.

The RibbonCustomizer add-in will appear on the View tab in Excel, PowerPoint and Word, but on the Add-in tab in Access and Outlook. In its current form, it doesn’t show you actual labels for tabs and groups (the labels you see normally in the Ribbon UI), but rather the internal Microsoft IDs (the idMso’s of RibbonX). This is a limitation only for this release and will be different in the final version. In Excel, you’ll actually see labels for some tabs & groups. The main feature of the add-in is to provide you with a UI to customize the ribbon.
In addition to that, you can use it to load any arbitray RibbonX file into any of the ribbon applications. This is not only useful for Office users who want a specific customization currently not supported yet, but also for developers who want to see what a particular RibbonX file will look like when loaded.

The RibbonX package file format is not an Office file format. It is rather a file format used by my add-in. With a normal RibbonX XML file, it is not possible to ensure that the RibbonX is actually being loaded into the right application. The RibbonX package file includes a check to ensure that users can only use it in the correct application. I see its usefuleness in distributing customizations via websites. The format is currently undocumented and still subject to change.

This is an alpha version. Therefore, please do not install it in a production environment. Please make sure to follow the installation instructions.

You can download it from my Office 2007 customization page.

Please post all issues and bugs as comments to this post.