Double Feature

Today I wanted to mention two cool Office 2007 features that you might not have heard much about.

SmartArt

The first one is called SmartArt. Think of it as a way to represent information graphically with about as much work as typing a simple bulleted list.

More than a simple diagramming tool or organizational chart maker (although it does these things great as well), SmartArt is one of the features that was designed from the ground up to take advantage of the new UI. As such, it is very slick and very useful and makes you look like you have a personal graphic designer working for you.

An example SmartArt in Office 2007

My esteemed colleague Matthew Kotler is writing a series over on the Excel blog all about SmartArt, so I thought I would let you know in case you're not following it yet. SmartArt works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (not just in Excel.)

You can read all about it here on the Excel blog. (In case you're wondering, SmartArt is the official feature name for the feature code-named IGX in earlier betas.)

Blog Support in Word

The second cool feature, a new addition in Beta 2, is the introduction of blog support in Word. Word has become a first-class blog editor and publisher, with the ability to write in Word--taking advantage of all of the great features of Word--but outputting totally clean, blog-compatible HTML. And Word can handle publishing the article and pictures to many common blog servers. It even has support to let you edit your existing posts!

Joe Friend has all of the information about Word's blog support over on his blog. The feature is in extremely early stages in Beta 2 (in particular, you UI aficionados may notice that the Ribbon UI is a little rough) but I think it's very promising. Check it out.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  The link for the SmartArt blog entry just gives you the first sentence or so. The correct link is http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/05/15/598254.aspx

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  Is the blog publishing feature extensible? I mean: is it pluggable, or are the expected endpoints documented?
  
  I currently write my website using drupal, and it'd be cool if either Word could be made to talk to drupal, or if drupal could be made to understand Word.
  

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  Jensen Harris discusses a new feature coming with the 2007 Microsoft Office System called SmartArt. The...

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  "[SmartArt] makes you look like you have a personal graphic designer working for you."
  
  Only while no-one else owns a copy of Office2007. As soon as Office2007 actually gets released and everyone and their dog is creating documents with SmartArt, it'll instantly be nothing special again.
  

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  I just tried the blog feature with Blogger and it worked! I didn't expect it to so that was a welcome surprise. I host my Blogger blog on my own server and it even uploaded the new entry to that site. Another welcome surprise!

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  Neat idea, SmartArt. Sounds like it could really simplify corporate design (CD) standards.
  
  The question is:
  Once a company has decided on and created a set of CD themes, layouts, logos, images, and SmartArt, how do they disseminate them?
  
  Will there be some option like a linked style library that includes all of this (possibly located on a network share)?

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  Define "professionalism".
  
  IMO a "professional" look is just something that looks like it's had a lot of time and care spent on its creation. As the bar gets raised and what is "easy" to do encompasses more, people's definition of "professional" will change to exclude things which can be thrown together, and will focus more on that which still takes time and care to make look good.
  
  Remember in the early-mid '90s when rendered lens flares looked professional? When they were rare.
  

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  Sorry, I think I might sound like I'm attacking the feature here.
  
  I don't intend to - I do think that the shots look cool, and I am looking forward to playing with them.
  
  However, I do think that "[SmartArt] makes you look like you have a personal graphic designer working for you" will be a weak position to try and defend once Office2007 comes out.
  

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  I think "SmartArt makes you look like you have a personal graphic designer working for you" is a valid statement. What other piece of software allows you to churn out such nice graphics with as much flexibility as what we'll get in Office 2007? Matthew Kotler's post sums it up nicely.

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  Francis - One of the goals this release is to try to make it consistent where themes, templates, SmartArt graphics, charts, etc go(anyone playing with this in the beta please let us know if you see any inconsistencies here).  By default these objects go in Documents and Settings<user name>Application DataMicrosoftTemplates.  However, there are two registry keys that impact this location.  The first key is a user location that if it exists overides this default location (HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Common/General/UserTemplates).  The second key is really meant for organizational deployments of these files and will merge with the user templates (HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Common/General/SharedTemplates).  Both of these registry keys can either point to local locations (on a hard disk) or to a shared drive (e.g. a UNC share).  

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2006
  How about HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Common/General/SharedTemplates (so the shared templates can be assigned per-machine, rather than per-user)?

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2006
  Gabe - Good question on HKLM.  Using HKCU supports scenarios where there are different users on the same machine that are in different workgroups.  Having it per user allows an admin to set up a different shared directory for each workgroup.  

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  <SmartArt works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (not just in Excel.)>
  
  Did you mean just not in Access?

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2006
  Since David's blog is focused on Excel I wanted to be clear that SmartArt graphics are available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.  You are correct that they are not available in Access as well as FrontPage, Publisher, Visio, etc.

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  yea i recently got a wordpress blog and few days later i hear about the office 2007 and bamm!! i can use word to publish them.  however it always sets the date to 1970's ill have to give feedback. i think its time to download that smiley feedback thingy that i didnt want to download earlier.
  
  but great feature anyway. look here u can clearly see i have used word a couple of times (images) http://levi3man.wordpress.com

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