Office Themes: Getting Documents To Sing One (Beautiful) Song
Today I present the first of what I hope are many guest articles on Office
user interface issues written by other folks from the product team. This first
series of articles describes the new themes capabilities of Office
12 and how they integrate with the user interface. Look for new articles every Wednesday.
Howard
Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt
group.
My name is Howard Cooperstein my work has been primarily on OfficeArt, the drawing and graphics
features shared across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and FrontPage. I was
also the User Interface lead for PowerPoint 2002. For Office 12 I am the lead
for the Office Themes team.
A big part of the Office 12 user interface story is how fast you can create a
great looking document. This is the first in a series of articles explaining
how we fill up Office 12's galleries with great looking choices.
Office 12 dramatically improves the aesthetic quality of formatting and this
becomes really clear when you look at documents created with previous versions.
In our research we looked at a lot of customer documents and for the most part
they are professional looking but quite plain, relying on the default styles for
text, tables and graphics. Obviously, PowerPoint with its Design Templates has
the most colorful and graphically rich documents. But, even so, the tables,
charts and diagrams on those slides usually aren't as polished as background on
which they sit.
Let's look a little closer at what exactly is going awry with
formatting. As mentioned above default styles are most often used and these
styles are far less than compelling. For example, take the default table and
chart styles (pullease!)
Individually, each has serious visual design issues. Taken together there's
the additional issue that they don't match each other in type face, colors, or
shading style. Office 2003 has some limited capabilities in Word and PowerPoint
to tie content styling together, but for the most part each piece of content is
singing its own style tune. It's easy to see how documents frequently end up a
cacophony of styles.
Default issues aside, Office 2003 can make a great looking document if you
know all the right features to use, in the right ways. We came across some
stunning examples in Word and PowerPoint, in particular. Why do the vast
majority of users fail to create documents like this? Fundamentally it's because
1) very few users are skilled in graphic design and 2) the existing user
interface fails to account for fact #1. Hey, we can't all go to design school!
Our tools should let us focus on our work and make many of these design
decisions for us. Office 12's galleries which insert pre-styled content and
apply multiple formatting settings in a single click are well poised to address
the UI issue, but you still need a way to put that visual design sense into the
galleries.
Enter Office Themes. While similar in name to an existing feature in Word,
Office Themes are an entirely new way to specify the colors, fonts and graphic
effects to be used in a single document.
The Office 12 Ribbon uses this design description to provide galleries of
Quick Styles that always match the Theme of your document. The Themes and the
Quick Styles are created by visual designers. The natural result: people create
documents that sing one (beautiful) song.
In Office 12, Word, PowerPoint and Excel all support the new Theme
architecture. They all read the same theme file format. Not only will the
styling of content match within a document but you can make documents,
presentations and spreadsheets that match each other. And all of your content is
dynamically linked to the theme; change your theme and your entire document will
transform its colors, fonts and graphic effects to match it.
In upcoming posts I'll cover more details about the remarkably compact design
magic inside each Office Theme file and discuss the design goals behind the
Themes and Quick Styles user interfaces.
Comments
Anonymous
February 15, 2006
Very, very nice!!Anonymous
February 15, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 15, 2006
Dude: apostrophes!Anonymous
February 15, 2006
So, do these themes trickle down to embedded OLE objects (i.e. an embedded Excel chart inside of a Word document)?Anonymous
February 15, 2006
Great! My first question is probably fairly obvious: can corporations (or indeed anyone) create their own themes thereby giving their employees the power to produce corporate documents with a consistent look and feel even when not based on a template file? Probably so, but jut thought I'd ask.Anonymous
February 15, 2006
I think there must have been an issue when Jensen copied in the post, because I can't imagine that Howard just refused to type any apostrophes at all. :)Anonymous
February 15, 2006
Really sorry to say this, I'd have let it go but for how the topic is about the design of documents and communication, but there are a lot of typoes and unclear grammar in this one.
I don't mean to offend David but what he says is very interesting, it just takes some work sometimes to see what he means.
WilliamAnonymous
February 15, 2006
I think this is a start, but my primary complaint around themes is that a) they often aren't very good (Publisher has had themes for awhile, but no designer would use them) and b) even if they are good at the time a product ships, there isn't an easy way to keep them up to date (XP themes looked cool when XP launched, but are pretty dated now).
Mr. Gallagher, if you are going to complain about typoes(sic) and grammar, spell typos correctly and learn how to correctly construct a sentence.Anonymous
February 15, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 15, 2006
I am very happy to hear about the theming support. As someone who struggles to keep all their corporate documentation in one "theme", it would seem that this will make my job a lot simpler.
I only have to finally remark that of the 9 built-in themes of Beta 1 of Word, only one has a serifed typeface for the copy. It's a new world I'm told. :-)Anonymous
February 15, 2006
Great post! Howard, can you revive the PowerPoint's blog, please?Anonymous
February 15, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 15, 2006
A good idea all right. My suggestion - simply referring to this feature as "Office Themes" will lead users to think that it is a way of changing the way the programs themselves look. You know, the scroll bar, mouse pointer and so on.
A name like "Office Document Themes" would help to clarify the intent of the feature.Anonymous
February 15, 2006
Peter, you are confusing "themes" with "skins" :)Anonymous
February 15, 2006
Thanks for the comments. Some replies to your posts:
- It's always a risk that Theme-type content becomes stale. Our new themes are more customizable than ever to keep them fresher longer. New Themes will be available from Office online.
- Corporations and users can customize and save their own themes into the gallery.
- OLE: Charts are now edited/rendered using OfficeArt 2.0! They are very richly themed. Existing OLE chart objects update their colors when theme changes in PPT only -- a feature from previous releases.
- Serif Fonts: there will be closer to 50% in our final Theme set.
- "Office Document Themes" is the official long name for the feature. They are stored on disk in a folder with that name.
- Loki: Thanks for your interest in the PPT blog. We're already looking into reviving that. :-)Anonymous
February 17, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 17, 2006
Thanks for the kind words, William, I'm glad you're enjoying the blog--it makes it worth all the work to have readers who care.Anonymous
February 18, 2006
the theming implies a relationship between the colours in the graph and the colours in the table, though as implemented here there is none
also the alternate row colouring in the table imply semantics, when there are none
in short, the colours may be pleasing on the eye but they're not pleasing on the brain - they actually make the data harder to interpret (unlike the "seasons" table in an earlier post which was a brilliant use of colour)Anonymous
February 22, 2006
Howard
Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt
group.
Last week I gave...Anonymous
February 23, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 25, 2006
never heard of the guy but his work looks interesting so I will read up on himAnonymous
March 01, 2006
PingBack from http://paa.auki.fidisk.fi/koyttis/2006/03/01/tyylia-officeen/Anonymous
May 11, 2006
I returned to Microsoft (after a 7 year hiatus) in late 2003 just as the Office 2007 effort was getting...Anonymous
July 13, 2006
Today's post is the first of two parts covering a fairly large and important topic for PowerPoint: applying...Anonymous
September 22, 2006
If you don't want to read this whole post, here's  a quick demo of a document Theme being applied...Anonymous
June 22, 2008
PingBack from http://jaylan.finestmatingstories.com/jensenhoff.htmlAnonymous
October 27, 2008
PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible/Anonymous
May 29, 2009
PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=jensen-harris-an-office-user-interface-blog-office-themes-gettingAnonymous
June 16, 2009
PingBack from http://topalternativedating.info/story.php?id=12213