Tell Us What You Think About Office 2007 Beta 2
We're two days into the public beta 2 of Office 2007, and so far 500,000 people have downloaded the beta. I have to say I'm a bit astounded that we're at a number that high after only two days... it's scary but awesome to think about so many people out there giving it a try.
Anyway, I'm sure if you've started to use the beta that you've got something you want to tell us. Maybe you're having trouble finding something in the new UI. Maybe you have a specific suggestion on how we can improve a feature. Or, maybe there's something you love and you want to make sure we know about it so that we keep it in the product.
The best tool to use to give us feedback on Office 2007 Beta 2 is called Send a Smile. Install the Send a Smile tool and two icons are added to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a happy face to click when you want to give us positive feedback and a sad face to click when there's something you don’t like.
Send a Smile is the best way to send feedback about Office 2007. Believe it or not, your feedback goes directly to us on the product team--directly to the people responsible for making decisions about the product in every area. In some cases, if you choose to give us your e-mail address (which is optional) we might contact you to follow-up and get more information.
It's important that we hear both what you like and what you don't like. The constructive feedback is incredibly valuable, but I’ve also been involved in decisions in which we've said "no one has really said that they like this new thing, so we should take it out" only to discover that people really did like it once it was already gone. So anytime you have a thought about Office 2007, positive or negative, please let us know using Send a Smile. Thanks for helping us to make Office 2007 a better product.
Download the Send a Smile tool to start sending us Office 2007 Beta 2 feedback now.
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Comments
- Anonymous
May 26, 2006
Jensen,
I'm really enjoying Office 2007, it's a great leap forward. What has most amazed me are the improvments in Outlook: the color coding, the to-do bar, etc. It's really amazing!
However, I really hope you could reconsider the UI of the Outlook shell. The asymmetry with the other Office apps, and more importantly, the Outlook e-mail/calendar windows is terrible.
My main argument for this is the fact that even in the Outlook shell, most of the time you're doing the same as in an Outlook content window. Most of the time I'll have an e-mail message open in the preview pane. So why can't I reply or flag that message using the ribbon as I can if I had opened that message? The same goes for the calendar and the tasks.
Also, you're pitching "shared" Office UI elements for the first time ever to the user, such as the "Office menu" instead of the File menu and the "Home" ribbon tab, which should communicate a "universal" home across all application. However, I think the message will be lost if the application that is used most of the time doesn't share these unified concepts.
Again, thanks for this great release. - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
I don't think it is you to ask this one, but I don't have anyone else to ask, so...
I mistakemly exited SaS (by pressing the exit option on the bottom of the screen) how do I return to it once it diiapeard? - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
The Office 2007 team have a cool feedback-collection tool for their beta (reminiscent of the old "Report a bug" window heading from the WinXP betas).... - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
LGFN:
On the Start menu, go to the Startup folder and click Office Information Worker Feedback Tool. - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
Jensen --
The only thing I miss from the old version are the tear-away drop-down menus that used to be on the toolbars. Specifically, the ones that set cell/table borders and cell/table shading. I find myself going back and forth to the drop-downs rather than to an easier to access (and fewer-clicks required) tear-off.
I also think that having tear-aways would not conflict with the goals of the Ribbon: They are entirely optional and not necessary to access the functionality (just making it easier to access) while reducing the number of clicks required to perform a common/repeated task.
My two cents...
-Dave - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
PingBack from http://www.kennethverburg.nl/2006/05/26/send-a-smile/ - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
Why OLD editing/formating shapes in Word? - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
Very cool idea for the feedback system its self! Always there and fun too! I hope this idea is used in other Microsoft betas. :) - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
mentas:
The Word team didn't implement the new graphics engine for drawing shapes in Word for this release. Word does support the graphics engine for Charts and SmartArt. - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 26, 2006
I just saw Jensen Harris' post about the Office Send a Smile tool.  Pretty much you can install... - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
I'm stunned. This tool is just cool, the concept...
The Office team is the best team at Microsoft! - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
I've been concerned about MS Office 2007 for quite a long time. But I noticed that there still is a problem with "Symbol Instert" in beta2 which has just released.
(Actually, that problem had come with the first pre-release version.)
In Word, for example, in the “Insert” Ribbon, insert symbol is just alright. But if you click the "More Symbol" which is on the bottom of the gallery of "symbol", you might know the problem that the opened dialogue got something wrong. - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
I just installed the beta and one that came to my mind was that I couldn't notice any way of choosing where to install it. I have a system where I install programs on a different partition from my Windows partition. Did I miss it, or is there no such option`? - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
I was asked the pther day about the number of different Microsoft sites that are available for providing... - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
Hej folkens
Faldt lige over dette blog-post af Jensen Harris, som omhandler at man kan installere et... - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
Hej folkens
Faldt lige over dette blog-post af Jensen Harris, som omhandler at man kan installere et... - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
Here's something I really do not like about the new GUI:
Some of the items on the QAT can't be found anywhere on the Ribbons. Especially Undo and redo are those. The user can remove those icons and they are gone. That's hard to support for the service desk!!!
Those and also Open, Save as, Print should really be on tabs. So they would be on a defined place and the GUI would be more consistent. - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
I'm dissapointed that Excel is still a MDI style app. I often find myself referring to multiple spreadsheets and don't like having to do a bunch of extra window management (maximizing Excel, restoring the current spreadhseet. Dragging the two spreadsheets I want to view into position). I've got a big monitor (and am considering adding a 2nd), and usually run my apps at less than full screen. I'd like to be able to just drag my spreadsheets into the position I need at any time. I also don't want to have to explicitly launch separate instances of Excel to get around this.
I do, however, like what you've done with the close buttons, once I figured out how it worked. - Anonymous
May 27, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2006
Love the new UI, especially the Live Preview!
However, the Floaty doesn't seem to support Live Preview yet. For example, if a select text and then scroll through the fonts in the Floaty, there is no Live Preview for the currently seleced font.
Hope you'll add this until the final. - Anonymous
May 28, 2006
If you like Office 2007, send a smile. If you find something you don’t like, send a frown. After complaining... - Anonymous
May 28, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2006
OK, Office is not allowing me to add any accounts. Keep getting a bunch of errors. Also, can't add the send a smile app. It says I don't have the authority, which doesn't make sense since my account has admin. authority and even after I disable the antispyware and firewall, it won't let me. FYI: I'm also beta testing Windows Live OneCare - Anonymous
May 28, 2006
Just to say I think the Office 2007 beta is awesome. It by far improves on Office 2003 which was the best office suite around yet - and the new improvements to graphics - particularly on Powerpoint - is great. Can't wait to the final product; although the existing Beta 2 is already excellent! - Anonymous
May 29, 2006
Jense
Jensen Harris has a post on his site entitled “tell us what you think of office 2007 BETA 2”.... - Anonymous
May 29, 2006
Can anyone tell me what's that "Remember Me?" on the bottom of this blog? - Anonymous
May 29, 2006
I gotta say I really like in general most of the UI improvements in Office 2007, but I'm really disappointed in the inconsistent way that the Office Apps act as hybrid MDI/SDI apps - and are not even inconsistent between themselves. And I think it's gotten worse, not better.
Specific annoying features:
- Double-clicking on the upper-left-corner button doesn't close anything, unlike everything else in Windows. I guess it should do OfficeSymbol->Close. Note that in Office 2003 and previous this is very inconsistent - double-clicking the control menu closes just the document you're working on in Word (correct) but close everything in Excel.
- Word is somewhat SDI (with caveats below) but Excel is still MDI - except that it still creates a taskbar button per document, thus breaking the Taskbar button = Window paradigm. Note to mention it makes Window management with Excel a pain, especially if you're working with multiple Excel and, say, Word documents.
- Inconsistent behaviour on the OfficeSymbol->Close button. If you have more than one document open, it will behave as expected, closing the window. But for a signle document, it will leave the window open and you have to use the "Exit word" command to actually close the window.
It would be really great to at least provide the option (maybe it's already there?) to have these things behave consistently. It would be great if they could just act maintain the simple document=task=window paradigm of, say, Notepad.exe.
I'm guessing it's too late (perhaps just way to difficult without a rewrite?) to turn Excel in a proper SDI-paradigm application but if you could make the Close/Exit/double-clicking behaviour consistent with normal Windows 95 UI conventions (which have been around for more than 10 years!) I think that would be a great improvement. - Anonymous
May 29, 2006
PingBack from http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060529/3371/ - Anonymous
May 30, 2006
PingBack from http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/05/send-a-smile-give-feedback-on-office-2007-beta-2/ - Anonymous
May 30, 2006
I would prefer that Office apps remain MDI. Otherwise, working with multiple documents at the same time can be very unwieldy.
[For the sake of consistency] why not implement what IE and other browsers have, tabbed browsing? Only here it would be "tabbed editing" for the child windows. The tab bar need only appear when more than one document is open in the given application. - Anonymous
May 30, 2006
So far very impressed. The only issue i have encountered is that with Windows Desktop Search 3.0 installed Outlook never closes. Instead it stays open in task manager taking up more and more resources. I can't see why this would happen. Can anyone advise? - Anonymous
May 30, 2006
Binnen een paar dagen zijn er wereldwijd meer dan 500.000 mensen die de Beta 2 versie van Office 2007... - Anonymous
May 31, 2006
Sometimes I find stuff like this that we do and I just smile - which is ironic given the functionality... - Anonymous
May 31, 2006
I like the Office 2007 Beta but am having a problem with Outlook. My old emails imported fine (except for an extended rendering delay) but any new emails delivered to me now are have the message body of the email removed. Anyone else see this? - Anonymous
June 01, 2006
Reading Jensen's blog, I found out about a couple of new Office 2007 resources which I thought I would... - Anonymous
June 01, 2006
This is such a simple concept and such a great way to offer feedback. Simply press the faces if you... - Anonymous
June 05, 2006
I miss speech recognition.
they shudnt have removed it cos i use it alot!!
:( - Anonymous
June 05, 2006
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June 05, 2006
ringtones free - Anonymous
June 07, 2006
Please give us your feedback (suggestions, bugs, wishes) for Beta2.  Here are a few ways: ... - Anonymous
June 18, 2006
PingBack from http://tatham.wordpress.com/2006/06/19/providing-feedback-about-your-office-2007-beta-2-experience/ - Anonymous
June 19, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 20, 2006
Persone los pioneros non rabata. Great... - Anonymous
June 20, 2006
http://www.ringtones-dir.com/get/ ringtones site free. Free nokia ringtones here, Download ringtones FREE, Best free samsung ringtones. From website . - Anonymous
June 21, 2006
Nice simple one:
Why can't Excel and Powerpoint use the same windowing UI as Word? Specifically, their use of a semi-MDI interface for handling documents, with a fudge to make each MDI child have a task button.
This is a real pain if you ever want to open two documents in two seperate windows on a multiple-monitor system :-( It's also very confusing for users...
Thanks,
Daern - Anonymous
June 22, 2006
Jensen,
it would be interesting to learn how much feedback you have received via Send a Smile so far. It must be in the thousands of comments by now. - Anonymous
June 22, 2006
Best of all people w can talk... - Anonymous
June 23, 2006
Over the last month, you've sent us thousands and thousands of comments about Office 2007 Beta 2 using... - Anonymous
June 23, 2006
This seems like nifty idea/implementation of a feedback system. Any chance of releasing source code or opening things up in such a way that we could take advantage of this for our own usability tests and the like? Even totally unsupported source code would be fine. - Anonymous
June 26, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 26, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 28, 2006
I have only tried Outlook so far and it keeps crashing - it omes back again quickly but its a bit annoying. Also, I can't read the content on some messages - they just come through as blank pages! - Anonymous
June 29, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 30, 2006
Asaspal. Memrano tu es besta. Amigo. - Anonymous
July 01, 2006
PingBack from http://makeourlifebetter.com/620/the-best-microsoft-blog/ - Anonymous
July 02, 2006
Today's Guest Writer: Rich Grutzmacher
Today I present guest writer Rich Grutzmacher, Program Manager... - Anonymous
July 04, 2006
This little tool missed me - hence I am guessing it missed others. If you are running Beta 2 and would... - Anonymous
July 06, 2006
PingBack from http://daep.dyndns.org/2006/07/07/jensen-harris-an-office-user-interface-blog-tell-us-what-you-think-about-office-2007-beta-2/ - Anonymous
July 11, 2006
Today's Guest Writer: Rich Grutzmacher
Rich Grutzmacher is a Program Manager on the Office User Experience... - Anonymous
July 16, 2006
Powerpoint older version files are not
displaying properly in the Slide Show. - Anonymous
August 08, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
September 14, 2006
This morning, the Beta 2 Technical Refresh of the 2007 Microsoft Office system became available for download.... - Anonymous
September 30, 2006
PingBack from http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/01/48 - Anonymous
January 24, 2008
The comment has been removed