Mac Forum / Applications / Word / November 2005

On 11/21/05 6:05 AM, in article 211120051105315125%nospam@yrl.co.uk,

But how could all that possibly be included in a Control Tip Box? And what
kind of icon could conceivably represent it 'intuitively'?

Regards |:>)

Hi Elliott:

Your response is exactly as mine was when I first saw the mechanism :-)

All I can suggest is:  Use it for a while.  You may even have to "force"
yourself to do it the first couple of times.

Once you get used to it, you may find it becomes habit-forming.  I did.

I find I can change styles with exactly the same precision as before
(because the mechanism uses the same commands and dialog boxes...) but less
guesswork (because I can see what I am doing in WYSIWYG while I am working).

Yes, there are several more tools like this coming down the pike.  And the
reason is that the user interface that you and I are used to was too
difficult for people to use.  I'm not saying it was too difficult for
documentation professionals -- it wasn't.  But we make up less than one per
cent of Word's user base.

It was too difficult for the other 99 per cent.  I watched my ex-boss
starting a new document the other night.  She did it all in Normal Style,
using the Font pulldowns from the Format menu.  Now, she is a power-user who
knows about styles and would use them if she could find them.

There are two fundamental changes coming down the pike at us in the next
version:

*  The first is that the user will be less and less aware of what we know of
as "Styles".  Increasingly, these will be replaced by "Building Blocks",
document components chosen from a gallery containing multiple preformatted
objects, which will include paragraphs.  For example, there will be "chunks"
of documents that users can drag into place.

*  The second is that behind the scenes, "styles" will become the only way
that Word does formatting.  What "looks" like direct formatting to the end
user will in fact be a style behind the scenes.

It's going to represent a change in the way you and I work.  All our old
keystrokes and menu access will go.  The change will not really be noticed
by ordinary users.  I've watched ordinary users playing with the PC version
of the new interface: they "notice" that it is new, but they find their way
around it literally within minutes.

Much more importantly, a huge percentage of ordinary users achieve
"precision formatting" very similar to that created by a document
professional, and far faster than they did in previous versions of Word.
They continue to drive Word the way they always have: hack and chop, point
and plop.  But the code that ends up in the document is tight, clean, and
styled :-)

I could go on for pages without really convincing you.  All I can suggest is
that you decide to suspend disbelief until you've have a chance to use the
thing a bit.

I wasn't convinced immediately.  I'm not entirely convinced yet :-)  The
whole implementation is still under development.  It's far from perfect yet.
But it's already better than what we have now.  Far, far better.

Conceptually, it's a real leap forward.  This is one of the truly "great"
achievements in computing.  This gets us several steps forward in putting
the power of the computer in the hands of the people who need it: the users.
This change is massive and its impacts will be reverberating for years.
Those of us in IT have known about the huge improvement in computing power
in the past ten years: it's been obvious to us.  But not to the ordinary
user.  The ordinary user is not creating documents any faster, better,
bigger, or more reliably than they were in WordPerfect ten years ago!  In
the next version, they can.

This is not just new menus and toolbars.  But there are new menus and
toolbars.  There are also a few new things. This is not just a new file
format.  But there is a new file format, that is a quarter the size and
open-standard and human-readable.  This is not just a more efficient way of
doing things, but it is more efficient: the PC early betas are much faster
than the production release of the previous version.  This is the
convergence of a huge amount of work that has been going on all over
Microsoft behind the scenes for the past five or so years.

We're going to have a lot of fun talking about this one.  The Fat Lady
hasn't sung yet: but when she does, I think we'll like the tune :-)

Cheers

On 21/11/05 10:05 PM, in article 211120051105315125%nospam@yrl.co.uk,