SubscribeThe Office UI Bible
Office 2007 has been the most open Office release ever. Never before has any comparable amount of information about an Office release been made available so long before its release. More importantly, never before have the Office teams given the public so much insight into their design, development and testing philosophies and processes, as well as responded this actively to comments and critique. The main communication medium has been a collection of blogs (a full list is due in a later post). Among all of them however, one blog stands out. It has been by far the most active one, as well as the most informative one: Jensen Harris - An Office User Interface Blog.
The title is not very exciting, and could easily be mistaken to be a blog by an Office user. I personally like to think of it as the “Office UI Bible” or the “Ribbon UI Bible”. Jensen’s blog is the definite resource and word on the new Ribbon UI. Jensen is the program manager in charge of the Office UI team. You want to know why Office 2007 has a new UI, why the colors of the three Office UI themes are the way they are, or are simply interested in the design and development process of the Ribbon from the first sketches to the final look? Jensen’s blog answers all those questions. It is a must-read for everyone interested in UI design, a should-read for everyone developing add-ins for Office and a recommended-read for everyone. The number of posts though has been so voluminous, for several months e.g. there was a new post daily, that it is difficult for someone just joining the Office 2007 frenzy to find the pieces he or she is interested in. With this post, I’ll attempt to provide an index to the most important posts on Jensen’s blog. Whenever I have a post that talks about a particular category, you can get to it by following the link behind the category title itself. You will also see many references to the Office UI Bible in my posts going forward. Please let me know if any of the links are wrong.
Update: Jensen Harris adopted my list in this post as the official categorization of his blog.
Why a new UI for Office 2007?
- The Why of the New UI (Part 1)
- Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past (Why the UI, Part 2)
- Combating the Perception of Bloat (Why the UI, Part 3)
- New Rectangles to the Rescue? (Why the UI, Part 4)
- Tipping the Scale (Why the UI, Part 5)
- Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)
- No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)
- Grading On the Curve (Why the UI, Part 8 )
- Enter the Ribbon
- What programs get the new Office UI?
- Mythbusters: The Office 12 New UI
- Office 12 New UI: The Cat’s Out
- Why is it called the Ribbon?
- Outlook and the Ribbon
- Need Some Help with That?
- Through the Looking Glass
- Where Did That Feature Go?
- Running With the Popular Crowd
- Accessibility Begets Usability
Ribbon UI Elements
- Dialog Launchers
- I’m In Louvre! (Galleries: Part 1 of 3)
- Visualize Whirled Peas (Galleries: Part 2 of 3)
- Results-Oriented Design (Galleries: Part 3 of 3)
- It’s All About Context
- Saddle Up to the MiniBar
- You’ll Know It When You See It
- Super Tooltips
- A Separate Piece
- Rich Menus
- The Future of Task Panes
- Adding Groups to the Quick Access Toolbar
- Lingering Around
- Obscure Options, Meet Super Tooltips
- About About
- You Windows 3.1 Lovers!
- Introducing the Command Well
- Dipping Into the Well
- Recently Used Documents
- The Quick Customize Menu
- A Brief History of the Status Bar
- Status Bar Update
- Zoom, Zoom, Zoom
The size of the Ribbon, screen real estate, ribbon scaling and minimization
- For Sale By Owner
- Scaling Up, Scaling Down
- A Disappearing Act
- The Biggest Loser
- The Size Of Things
- Taking the Minimized Ribbon to the Max
- Nice for Mice: Menu Tabs
Migrating to Office 2007
- Tools for the Transition
- Welcome to the New User Interface
- You Mean I Don’t Need To Retrain Everybody? (Real People Study, Part 2)
UI Themes
- Beauty and the Geek
- Black and Blue
- March Madness
- Silver Bullet
- Office 2007 Silver on Windows XP Silver
- Which Color When? (Part 1)
- Which Color When? (Part 2)
Keyboard control of the Ribbon
- Stroking the Keys in Office 12
- The Keyboard At Your Command
- Which Letter Is Better?
- Odds, Ends, Shortcuts, and Accelerators
- An Unintentional Week of Keyboard
- Verklärte Macht: Keyboard Revisited
- A Numbers Game
New fonts for Office 2007
Customizing Office 2007 (Add-ins, RibbonX)
Note that most examples shown in the following posts do not work in B2TR or the RTM version.
- Let’s Talk About Customization
- It All Adds Up
- Because You Want To, Not Because You Have To
- Hello World, For Real
- Good Service for Add-ins
- Hollywood Meets Office Add-ins
- RibbonX Control Type Tour, Part 1
- RibbonX Control Type Tour, Part 2
- Finding a New Purpose
- RibbonX Control Type Tour, Part 3
- RibbonX Resources
- Ribbon Extensibility: A VBA Sample
- RibbonX Updates for B2TR
- Final Schema for RibbonX-based Solutions
From first sketches to the final design
- Be Willing To Be Wrong
- Formatting: An Act In Three Plays
- Thrown For a Loop
- Beta 1-derful: The ‘Top 30′ List
- Fast At Any Speed
- The Feature Bob Invented
- The Expert Mode Misadventure
- The Long Road to Contextual Tabs
- Picture This: A New Look For Office
- There’s No Place Like Home
- Drawn Together
- Choosing the Contextual Colors
- The Printer is Being Electrocuted!
- Get Your Office 2007 Beta 2 Today!
- Are We There Yet?
- The Spelling Check is Complete
- Iterative Design Process Applied to Charting (links to Meet Sander Viegers, Excel User Experience Designer)
- Evolution of the PowerPoint Home Tab
- Reality Check
- Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Tomorrow
- Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Now
- Office 2007 Released to Manufacturing
- Design Tenets
- Most People Are Not Trained In Geology
- I Am Your Density
- The End of Personalized Menus
- The Myth of Ideal Organization
- Flea Market of Functionality
- Going Gray
- Set In Our Ways?
- Not So Set In Our Ways After All
- Which menu items get icons?
- Breathing New Life Into Old Features
- Catching the Plane
- The Importance Of Labels
- Help Is For Experts
- The 50/50 Rule
- Designing Against a Degrading Experience
- Giving You Fitts
- More Than Just the Two-Way Mirror
- Usability Redux
- 1000 Card Pick-Up
- Paper Prototypes
- The Myth of the Orange Dot
- Quality Is Usability
- Obsession to Detail
- Measuring Results
- Prototyping With PowerPoint
- Usability Stockholm Syndrome
- The Wall of Ribbons
- Tell Us What You Think About Office 2007 Beta 2
- Where do the Smiles go?
- Usability: Art and Science
- Real People Doing Real Work with Office 2007 (Part 1)
- You Mean I Don’t Need To Retrain Everybody? (Real People Study, Part 2)
- Putting the Feedback to Work (Real People Study, Part 3)
- Computers Can Do That? (Real People Study, Part 4)
- Office Themes: Getting Documents To Sing One (Beautiful) Song
- The Elements of Office Style
- Variations on a Theme by Office
- Cover Pages: Cool Things In Office 12 (Part 1)
- For Trembling Hands (Office 12 Coolness, Part 2)
- Know Your ABC’s (Office 12 Coolness, Part 3)
- Math On Demand (Office 12 Coolness, Part 4)
- Symbolism (Office 12 Coolness, Part 5)
- A Better Box Of Crayons
- Drop Me A Line (Office 12 Coolness, Part 6)
- It’s Gonna Be A Hot Summer
- Don’t Forget To Check Your Filters
- Double Feature
- Every Which Way But Loose
- No Longer Spellbound
- The 96,000 New PowerPoint Slide Designs
- Things of Beauty
- Learning From the MVPs
- Decoding Office Build Numbers
- Thanksgiving on a Wednesday
- Introducing the 2007 Microsoft Office System
- Icon Explosion
- Try Office 2007 Without Installing It
- New Product Icons for Office 2007
- Jensen’s index to his blog
Design Ponderings
An inside look into UI design, development and testing at Microsoft
Office Themes
New things in Office 12 involving the new UI
Miscellaneous
The Office 2007 UI team
October 11th, 2006 at 10:50
[…] Patrick Schmid has done a public service for anyone just getting started with Office 2007. He began at Jensen Harris’s superb Office User Interface Blog The title is not very exciting, and could easily be mistaken to be a blog by an Office user. I personally like to think of it as the “Office UI Bible” or the “Ribbon UI Bible”. Jensen’s blog is the definite resource and word on the new Ribbon UI. Jensen is the program manager in charge of the Office UI team. […]
October 12th, 2006 at 1:13
Excellent work, Patrick. I’ll speak for many when I say I’m grateful for this organization, even though I’ve kept up with Harris’s blog for the past year.
October 14th, 2006 at 18:19
[…] Office UI Bible: Customer Experience Improvement Program (aka SQM) - Part 1 […]
October 18th, 2006 at 1:59
[…] Office UI Bible: Official story on customization 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? […]
October 28th, 2006 at 3:15
[…] Jensen Harris has returned to blogging the Office UI Bible. In his latest post, he posted the final RibbonX schema. […]
November 10th, 2006 at 17:58
[…] You shouldn’t be surprised if this looks rather familiar to you. Jensen adopted my Office UI Bible index to his blog as his official table of contents (with my permission). I am glad that the work I put into creating this index will now help many more users in finding their way through this awesome Office 2007 User Interface Reference. […]
November 12th, 2006 at 18:25
[…] Office 2007 UI Bible […]
November 12th, 2006 at 20:37
to me becomes dizzy,
this is something before Adam, Eva and the Earth!
November 27th, 2006 at 23:39
[…] It seems that my Office UI Bible post is very popular. First, Ed Bott blogged about it. Then Jensen Harris adopted my categorization of his blog as his official index. The post has until today been hit 3,390 times according to my website statistics, making it my second most popular blog post (the most popular blog post is my B2TR issues one with 12,725 hits). Add to those hits 879 views via RSS. […]
December 4th, 2006 at 23:01
[…] The saga of the Office UI Bible continues (read part 3). […]
January 21st, 2007 at 22:04
[…] Office 2007 UI Bible […]
February 5th, 2007 at 10:29
[…] im Zuge der Veröffentlichung von MS Office 2007 haben einige für die GUI zuständige Microsoft Mitarbeiter alle Artikel zusammengetragen, die Jensen Harris über die neue GUI auf seinem Blog im Laufe der Zeit verfasst hat: Office UI Bible. Jensen ist verantwortlicher “Group Program Manager of the Office User Experience Team“. […]
March 21st, 2007 at 19:57
[…] Office 2007 and More An Office User Interface BlogLiveSide - everything Windows LiveMicrosoft Office 2003 to 2007 Guides:Word 2007Excel 2007PowerPoint 2007Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007Microsoft Office Recent Documents Gadget for Windows SidebarMicrosoft Office Word Team BlogOffice 2007 DownloadsOffice UI Bible (MS MVP Patrick Schmid) –> Return to Index <– Share this post: | | | | Published Saturday, February 24, 2007 10:02 AM by Corrine Filed under: Office 2007, Power Point, Excel, Word Anonymous comments are disabled […]
May 22nd, 2007 at 18:31
[…] Office 2007 UI Bible […]
May 27th, 2007 at 11:12
[…] Patrick Schmid is a OneNote MVP, in his blog there is an entry called Office UI Bible will list down webpages and blog entries (mostly from Jensen Harris) about the How, What and Why of the new Office 2007 UI, especially the ribbon interface and the themes. […]
August 5th, 2007 at 6:11
[…] Der gebürtige Deutsche und MS Office-MVP Patrick Schmid hat ein Inhaltsverzeichnis seiner zahlreichen Weblog-Einträge zum Thema Office 2007 veröffentlicht. In der The Office UI Bible genannten Aufstellung sind seine Veröffentlichungen nach Kategorien wie “Why a new UI for Office 2007″ oder “Customizing Office 2007″ gegliedert. Die Liste gibt es zwar bereits seit Oktober 2006 aber ich bin leider erst jetzt darauf gestoßen. Schade ist nur, dass die Liste nicht aktualisiert wird - so sieht es zumindest aus, da im Inhaltsverzeichnis keine Weblog-Beiträge jüngeren Datums verlinkt sind. 5. August 2007, 12:10 Uhr […]
March 22nd, 2008 at 11:47
[…] http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/09/58 […]
October 27th, 2008 at 17:42
[…] But then, I found out that someone already did the work for me. Patrick Schmid, a OneNote MVP and friend of the Office 2007 UI, put together what he called the Office UI Bible on his blog—a fully organized catalog of many of my posts. […]
June 5th, 2009 at 23:47
[…] Office UI Bible (MS MVP Patrick Schmid) […]