What if Microsoft were to buy Firefox?

Check out the MS Firefox page that lets you download MS Firefox 2007…well, it actually ends up downloading IE7

Lots of things have happened in the past week. Instead of me blogging about every single one, I’ll just do a weekly review post.

Released products

• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox 2
• Windows Desktop Search 3 (not recommended with Office 2007 B2TR)
• Windows Defender
• Fedora Core 6

RibbonCustomizer Update

I have spent quite some time on my RibbonCustomizer add-in. It now works with Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word B2TR. I am still working on adding Outlook support. One of the questions I am struggling with right now is what to include in the Freeware version of my add-in, and for what features I should charge something. If you have an opinion on this, read the overview of my add-in and post a comment here. Thanks!

Noteworthy things

• If you are developing a .NET add-in for Office 2007, and want to test it under Vista, you have to use Vista RC1 (build 5600). Office 2007 B2TR is only supported with RC1 and any .NET add-in will simply not load if you use a later build (like I did for several frustrating hours). I haven’t tried this, but you might alternatively able to install Visual Studio in a later Vista build and compile the add-in with it. That might make it work with a later Vista build as well.
• Office 2007 does not install the .NET framework. If you are developing a .NET-based add-in for Office 2007 that has to run under Windows XP, keep in mind that your users might have to install the framework to even be able to use it.
• Jensen Harris has returned to blogging the Office UI Bible. In his latest post, he posted the final RibbonX schema.
• Microsoft released a Junk Email reporting tool for Outlook 2003 and 2007. If you want to report email that the Junk Email filter of Outlook does not classify as spam to Microsoft so that it can be included in future updates to the Outlook Junk Email filter, download and install the tool today. If you use the tool for a spam message, you receive the following email from Frontbridge (an MS affiliate). I don’t think I really like the idea of receiving one email every 24 hrs (can’t this just happen quietly without me getting another message to delete?). Also, it’s not clear from the email how this will affect the Outlook Junk Email filter, as it talks about the “Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services”:
  “This is an automated reply from the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, Spam Analysis Department – no additional correspondence will be sent to you.
  We appreciate your spam submission. You will receive this auto-reply message only once per day if you submit multiple emails for evaluation in a 24 hour period. Some additional information is as follows:
  * Spam submissions are processed seven days per week and blocks for new spam become effective on the following day.
  * The best way to report spam is to send the offending message as an attachment along with the full original Internet headers.
  Thank you for assisting us in controlling unwanted email.
  

  Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services”

Quick Links

• The new Ribbon UI
• Designing with statistics
• Office UI Bible: Official story on customization

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If you ask me about the customizability of the new Ribbon UI in Office 2007, my answer would be: too little, too difficult. Compared to previous Office versions, especially Office 2003, 2007 simply has a serious customization deficiency. In fact, most users will probably conclude that the Ribbon cannot be customized at all.

In contrast, Office 2003 is the most customizable Office ever. You can locate your menus and toolbars anywhere you want on the screen, create your own menus and toolbars, change icons and labels, modify toolbars and menus, and so on. There is almost no limit as to what components of the UI a user can alter. Customizing Office 2003 is also easy to do, as alteration can be achieved with a few mouse clicks.

The Ribbon UI of Office 2007 though is a completely different story. Static with very limited customizability is probably the description most users would give this new UI. Most users probably only discover the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) and then conclude that this must be it. Is that really all there is? How did we end up with such a lack of customization?

Why Office 2007 has a customization deficiency

Microsoft had to create the Ribbon UI completely from scratch. If you have read through some of the Office UI Bible, you can get an idea of the huge amount of resources that went into creating this new UI. However, even at Microsoft resources are limited. Therefore, the need for every feature of the new UI had to be justified. Real customizability was unfortunately a feature that didn’t make the cut.

As the Office UI Bible explains, the UI team could not make the case for customizability, if only ~1.9% of the Office 2003 sessions of roughly one hundred million users were with customization. The case is even weaker, as 85% of those customizations involve four or fewer buttons. Therefore, Microsoft decided to support the case encountered by 99.7% of all users: no customization or four or fewer buttons. That left the remaining 0.3% in the rain. Those 0.3% represent around 1.35 million people ,as there are 450 million paid Office customers, and are also the ones who are most likely to participate in the Office development process, e.g. through participation in the beta. My opinion about this approach can be found in my designing with statistics post.

In addition to this argument, a highly customizable UI unfortunately presents a massive support issue. You can see this, if you try to remember how many times you accidentally moved a menu or toolbar in Office 2003, or customized it otherwise by accident. You probably know how to undo your accident, but many, many users do not.

Why do I keep calling it a customization deficiency?

Microsoft decided that in order to make those 99.7% of all users happy, one toolbar was enough. In order to prevent accidental customization and make sure users always have that toolbar accessible, it became non-floatable. Born therefore was the Quick Access Toolbar. That is not the end of the customization story though. There is also one Ribbon tab that you can hide or show, namely the Developer tab. You can also customize the status bar fully. Toolbars and menus created in a previous Office version and by legacy (meaning non-Office 2007) add-ins can also be used, but not created, in 2007. Last, but not least, galleries can be customized. Some “customize” themselves automatically, e.g. the recent document list or the shapes gallery. Others can be manually customized by, especially in Word. For example, the galleries for page numbers, headers and footers can be customized by the user.

But that’s it. Seriously, that is it. Everything else, especially the vast majority of the Ribbon, is static and cannot be customized. Therefore, describing Office 2007 as having a “customization deficiency” or complaining about the lack of customization in it, reflects appropriately the state of affairs in 2007. (To be fair, there is a way to customize the Ribbon itself. Keep reading, I’ll get to it).

Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)

The QAT is the main component of the Ribbon customization capabilities. In fact, 10 out of 15 major customization capabilities listed in the Office UI Bible revolve around the QAT. You can add everything except an entire Ribbon tab to the QAT. That includes any control, entire groups, galleries, menu items, macros and any command that is not present in the Ribbon. You can add commands in three ways. Either by right-clicking on any command or group in the Ribbon directly, by using the Customize tab in the Options dialog as shown in the first screenshot below, or by using the Quick Customize menu as shown in the second screenshot.

There are up to 40 spaces on the QAT. You can add separators to the QAT to structure it better as well, and determine your own order of commands. You are probably thinking now: “it’s a toolbar, why wouldn’t I be able to have separators and reorder commands?” With Office 2007 everything you can do is worthwhile pointing out, because what is not mentioned, won’t work. So the QAT won’t float, but can either be in the title bar of the window, or below the ribbon as shown in this post.

A feature that didn’t exist before with a toolbar is the automatic assignment of keyboard shortcuts to every item in the QAT. The screenshot below shows you what the keyboard shortcuts are if you add a whole lot of items.>

Adding a group to the QAT is rather useful, as it allows you to make more than 40 commands accessible via the QAT while at the same time keeping some level of organization. Additionally, a group added to the QAT and then opened makes for a cool screenshot, as you can see below.

Developer Tab (does not apply to Access)

The Developer Tab contains all the features mostly relevant for developers which includes everyone writing in VBA, everyone integrating XML into an Office application and everyone working with content and ActiveX controls. Note that in Excel, PowerPoint and Word the functionality to view and record macros is not only on the Developer tab, but also on the View tab (PowerPoint 2007 does not have the ability to record macros). Therefore you do not need to display the Developer tab, if all you need is the Macro related functionality in those three applications. In Word, the Developer tab looks like it does in the following screenshot.

To activate the Developer tab, go into the Office button menu, Options, and choose “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon” in the Popular tab.

Status bar

The status bar is fully customizable, which means you decide what to include in it. To customize the status bar, right-click anywhere on it, and you’ll get the following menu

Legacy menus and toolbars

If you created your own menus and/or toolbars in earlier Office versions, where do they appear in 2007? What about menus and/or toolbars created by legacy (meaning non-Office 2007) add-ins? All of them appear in the same spot, namely on the “Add-Ins” tab. The “Add-Ins” tab will only be displayed, if there are any legacy menus/toolbars in existence, either from your own customizations or from add-ins. The following is a screenshot of my Word Add-Ins tab with the legacy add-in EndNote 7 installed.

Unfortunately, you cannot add any command from a legacy menu or toolbar to the QAT. What you can do though is add the group containing all legacy menus and/or the group containing all legacy toolbars to the QAT. You’d do this by right-clicking in the appropriate group on the Ribbon, as shown in the next screenshot.

Note that you can also see in this screenshot the “Delete Custom Toolbar” command, which allows you to get rid permanently of legacy toolbars you do not want anymore (there is a similar command for menus). This is not the same as not displaying a toolbar or menu in earlier Office versions. This option deletes the menu or toolbar forever. As the only way to recreate a toolbar or menu (except if an add-in is providing it) is to create it using a previous version of Office, you should be very careful with this delete command.

If you add the menus group to the QAT, it will look like the following.

Selecting the EndNote 7 menu, gives me

The toolbars group added to the QAT results in the following

Galleries

As mentioned above, some galleries, e.g. the recent document list, “customize” themselves. A lot of other galleries though can be customized manually. How a gallery is customized depends often times on the particular gallery itself. For example, the Themes gallery on the PowerPoint Design tab can be customized by browsing for themes on the computer or adding themes from Office Online. A new SmartArt though, for example, requires that it be created manually as an XML file.

Word has the greatest flexibility for customizing galleries. All galleries that insert some kind of text element in Word can be easily customized using the Quick Parts feature. To access it, select Quick Parts in the Text group of the Insert tab. The Building Blocks Organizer there, shown below, lets you edit and delete existing gallery content. If you want to add a new element to a gallery, then you have to create it in Word first, select it and use Quick Parts, Save Selection to Quick Parts Gallery. Alternatively, you can search for elements on Office Online as well.

Summary

Compared to Office 2003, Office 2007 has a serious customization deficiency. The new Ribbon UI is mainly static and only a limited number of elements are customizable, most notably the QAT. I personally think that this level of customization is sufficient for most users, and hence Microsoft has met its goal in this regard.

But..that’s not enough for me

If you want to move the entire Ribbon somewhere else on the screen, e.g. float it or dock it vertically, which would be beneficial for widescreen monitors, then you are simply out of luck. The Ribbon is where it is in Office 2007 and that cannot be changed.

However, if you are a power user, an add-in developer, an administrator charged with adding items to the Ribbon specific to your company, or a creator of templates that come with a customized UI, then what I have outlined so far doesn’t cut it for you. Microsoft did realize though that it has to provide some mechanism to customize the Ribbon itself. The rather large ecosystem of Office add-ins and templates simply depends completely on the ability to modify the Office UI. The UI team provided therefore the ability to (almost) completely modify the Ribbon using an XML language called RibbonX. The customization is created in RibbonX, which is then either embedded into an Office 2007 document or template, or is loaded into Office via a COM add-in.

If the Ribbon is indeed fully customizable, then why did I even bother writing this post? The answer is simple: Office 2007 does not ship with a user interface to customize the Ribbon. RibbonX however, as simple as it may be, poses a significant hurdle for anyone who wants to customize the Ribbon. In effect, it represents a barrier of entry to Ribbon customization, and requires that users learn the basics of XML, RibbonX and how to load RibbonX into Office. None of this should be a problem for an add-in developer, but for someone who simply used to create templates with a custom UI with a few mouse clicks (and might have never seen HTML, XML or any programming language), this is a significant challenge.

How can I learn RibbonX?

There are several ways for you to learn RibbonX:

• You can subscribe to and read my blog.
• You can buy a book on the subject. If you want to learn how to customize the Word 2007 Ribbon, then you can get a Word book for which I wrote a chapter on that topic (more on that in another post).
• You can read the “Customizing Office 2007″ posts in the Office UI Bible.
• You can utilize the MSDN Ribbon Developer Center.

I don’t want to learn RibbonX

If you simply don’t want to learn RibbonX, don’t have the time to learn it or consider XML to be out of your league, but still want to able to customize the Ribbon, you will have to turn to third parties. One of those third parties would be myself, as I am working on an add-in called RibbonCustomizer that allows a user to customize the Ribbon with a simple to use UI directly in an Office program. I made an alpha-version of the program available for Beta 2 (it won’t work with B2TR or RTM), and will provide the final version closer to the release of the OEM and retail versions of Office 2007. In the meantime, you can read an overview of RibbonCustomizer.

If you are working on something that allows the customization of the Ribbon, please email me with details and I will feature your project on this blog.

Conclusion

While Office 2007 has some built-in, easy to use customization feature that will satisfy most users, the more advanced form of customization is difficult to use. Microsoft raised the bar to customization with Office 2007 significantly, and I would not be surprised if this won’t stop some users and companies from adopting Office 2007. I hope though that via my blog and my add-in, I can lower the bar somewhat and put full UI customization back into the reach of most users.

You get all sorts of posts in the Microsoft community newsgroups: users asking for help or submitting suggestions, users bashing Microsoft, and so on. Occasionally, there is a hilarious post as well, like the following one. So, without further adue, I give you:

Shut the windows and Open the “GATES”

Greets,

It is nice to communicate to ALL this way.I am sharing my brain wave with you which I think,if AGREED BY MICROSOFT BOARD MEMEBERS will be a fitting tribute to the great man who founded MICROSOFT.I wish to humbly state that Mr.BILL GATES in spite of his richness , power and the aura ,has not yet got his full due for the wonderful contribution he has had gifted to the mankind.

From the inception ,MSFT’s software were serving as the “WINDOWS” TO THE WORLD OF COMMUNICATION. Now,MSFT is on the verge of introducing the new MS WINDOWS 2007.

Therefore,this new soft ware should aptly be named or christened as “MS GATES 2007″ as this will open up flood gates of new computing tools.

Therefore,it is time for the WINDOWS to shut and open the “GATES”.

All these years,we have seen the OFFICE only through the “WINDOWS”.Now,we should see and enter this OFFICE through the “GATES”!

History and posterity should always UTTER THIS GREAT MAN’S NAME!

The power of recital of the man’s name by millions of people world wide would catapult MSFT into further enviable position and position Mr.Bill Gates as the FATHER OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING.

I want the internet user community to vote overwhelmingly for my above proposal and idea so that the MICROSOFT DECISION MAKERS will introduce the newer version of MSFT as MS GATES 2007.

Source newsgroup thread

P.S.: I am still laughing

Quick Links

• Office UI Bible: Customer Experience Improvement Program (aka SQM) - Part 1
• Office UI Bible: Customer Experience Improvement Program (aka SQM) - Part 2
• Office UI Bible: Customer Experience Improvement Program (aka SQM) - Part 3
• Office UI Bible: Overview of UI design process for pre-existing features

Office 2007 is the first Office ever in Microsoft’s history designed with statistics. That means, real world data from lots of real world users was used to design it. In contrast, previous versions were designed using educated guesses of Microsoft employees, partners and selected users. The amount of data collected is staggering: “About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)” and “over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.”

The data collection mechanism

The data collection mechanism is internally called “Service Quality Monitoring”, or just SQM. It was introduced in Office 2003, and presents itself to the user as “Customer Experience Improvement Program” (CEIP), or you might also see it under the heading of “Help Make Office Better”. SQM collected some basic data about your computer (e.g. screen resolution or CPU speed), and everything you do in an Office program that wouldn’t violate your privacy. That means, none of the actual characters you typed in Word were recorded, or any of the names of your Outlook mail folders, but it recorded all keyboard shortcuts you used, how your UI was customized, how many mail folders you had in Outlook, which buttons you clicked how frequently, etc. An excerpt of what the data revealed can be found in this Office UI Bible post.

The impact of the data

What did Microsoft do with the data? It turns out, a lot. The data combined with human judgment was the basis for the placement of all commands on the Ribbon. The Home tab in all programs is a great example of the statistics at work. The commands on the Home tab represent the 80% most used commands of that particular application. Some commands there are of course not as frequently used, but rather belong together with a frequently used command. For example, strikethrough was probably not in that 80% list, but we would all expect to find it near the frequently used command bold.

The statistics approach though doesn’t mean that frequently used features were strictly placed prominently on the Ribbon, while less frequently used features were always buried. Rather, features that people at Microsoft judged to be valuable to users, but underused according to the data, were made more accessible in the Ribbon. A revealing example of this is that some people discovered during the private beta phase of Office 2007, that Word now had drawing tools. Revealing about this is that Word has had those drawing tools since Word 97.

The SQM data was also used to decide whether to keep a feature in Office 2007 or cut it. Most of the time, the Office team had to make such a decision when a feature was judged not to be good enough for 2007. That means, in order for a feature to remain in 2007, development resources would have to be invested into it. One of the features that ended up on the chopping block was “Insert from Scanner or Camera”. It wasn’t good enough for 2007 and it wasn’t frequently enough used to justify spending resources on it. Instead, the Office team decided that users would be better off using the camera and scanner support provided by Windows, or shipped with a camera or scanner.

So what?

Basing design decisions on statistics led to a rather well though out user interface. For example, I had to customize PowerPoint 2003 heavily in order to be able to work effectively and productively with it. In contrast, I can use PowerPoint 2007 (after Microsoft incorporated the feedback from the SQM data collected during the beta) pretty well without having to customize it at all.

But, and this is a huge but, the new Ribbon UI shortchanges power users: Power users are the ones who just want to customize the Ribbon UI, but this isn’t exactly easy to do. The new charting UI works great for beginner to intermediate users, and will most likely lead to more users being able to create good looking charts. However, power users now have to dig in more places with more steps to get there than in previous versions. That means, the detailed chart settings are now at least one more click away than in previous versions, and their organization really leaves a lot to desire. These are just two examples of unfortunately too many, but the conclusion is clear: the Ribbon UI was not designed for power users.

What happened?

How can this be though, if statistics were used to design Office 2007? A mathematician once told me that she was asked by her boss to statistically analyze a large data collection. Her reply to her boss was: “what would you like me to conclude?” Or, in other words, she wanted to know which statistics to pick and how so that the desired result would come out of the data. Statistics therefore can lie, and it is easy to paint a wrong picture with them.

As a case in point, I read yesterday about the licensing changes in Vista on slashdot and the later post by Paul Thurrott titled “Windows Vista Licensing Changes - Everything you’ve read is wrong“. Paul spent the entire post outlining how the argument made on the Internet was wrong, especially because it only affected such a small percentage of users:

“What’s more amazing is that the number of people who actually try to do this is incredibly small. Since you can’t transfer a copy of Windows that comes with a new PC anyway, less than 10 percent of all Windows licenses are transferable at all. And of those, only a tiny percentage of users have ever tried to even transfer a Windows license once. The only people that really need to do this regularly are hardcore PC enthusiasts who change their machine configurations regularly. In short, this new restriction isn’t all that new and it won’t affect any mainstream users.”

Nothing wrong with this you might say? If you consider that there are over 400 million installed copies of Windows XP, then this means that ~40 million bought a transferable license (a retail license). “A tiny percentage of those” is then still a sizeable number of people. For example, just 1% of those represents 400,000 users.

Is this what happened with Office 2007? From what I can tell, probably not. It looks like Microsoft used the available data responsibly and has posted relevant data frequently in the Office UI Bible.

Was data collected from you?

What seems to be more the case though is that power users were underrepresented in the data. There is no statistical data to prove this, and Microsoft has tried to demonstrate that power users were included sufficiently in the data:

“Furthermore, because Office 2003 is still relatively new, it is deployed disproportionately among power users–the very people who most likely to customize. In all of our analyses, we try to be aware that the raw statistical data skews slightly towards early-adopting power users. This is probably much less true today than it was more than two years ago when we first compiled customization statistics.

(One metric that causes us to believe that the Office 2003 data slightly skews towards power users even today: Every month, the average screen resolution of people using Office 2003 decreases as more of the core installed base adopts it.)”

All I can bring forth against that is anecdotal evidence. I have not found a single power user yet, who did not switch off the SQM feature. Why? No one likes a phone home feature that sends personal data back to Microsoft. Especially when we have to believe Microsoft that our privacy isn’t being violated. Believing Microsoft that around the same time when things like product activation and related privacy concerns where still on everyone’s mind is difficult. For example, I personally advised everyone to switch SQM off, and even went as far as making sure that every Office I used had the feature switched off (in fact, switching SQM off was often the very first thing I did after opening an Office copy for the first time). It is also likely that many companies didn’t allow SQM at all, or blocked SQM traffic at the firewall. Last but not least, it is also possible that some power users tested Office 2003, but never upgraded their production environment to it, as it didn’t contain any improvements they judged valuable enough to upgrade.

Where you included in the data? Open Word 2003, and pick “Customer Feedback Options” from the Help menu. If you have selected Yes, as shown in the following screenshot, then you were among the lucky ones that had their usage of Office 2003 considered for the design of Office 2007. If you selected No, then you simply didn’t have a voice in the redesign of the Office UI.

Conclusion

Whether the data included a sufficient number of power users or not is a question we will never be able to answer. All I can say is that we have this new UI now as it is, and we have to make the best out of it. The most important conclusion of this post though is:

Always switch on the Customer Experience Improvement Program