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Office "14" slips further

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:39

Simon Jones is proved right about the launch date of office "14", finds quince useful for UI design, and creates a whole new save icon.

Depending on the amount of add-ins, available memory and hard-disk speed, Outlook 2007 SP2 should start up in about half the time of the previous version. However, the first time you start it after upgrading your PST or OST files have to be updated to the new structures, and you'll see a progress dialog while this happens, but this is a one-time-only affair. Expect this process to take a minute or three depending on the size of your mailbox. Also, the first time you use a view of a folder after installing SP2, Outlook will build a new index for the data, which may take a second or two, but thereafter switching to that view or folder will be noticeably faster. Alongside these performance and reliability enhancements, there are more than a hundred individual bug fixes and enhancements to Outlook alone. If the other apps - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on - get similar attention (as well as adding native ODF support) Office 2007 SP2 looks to be a significant update that will be well worth installing.

Live Workspace updates

Microsoft has just announced updates to its Office Live Workspace service, increasing the amount of storage per user from 500MB to 5GB and providing standard Cut/Copy/Paste actions for managing files rather than the non-standard File Move command it used previously. This should help new users get to grips with file management far more quickly since it mirrors what they're used to on their own PC. The biggest improvement, however, is the ability to create your own folder structure within each workspace, which was by far the most requested improvement from all the users (and a surprising omission from the original service).

There are still some unusual restrictions, however: for some unfathomable reason you can't put a list into a folder. If you cut a list of any kind, move to a subfolder and click Paste, you'll get a little dialog that says "Lists cannot be put in folders", and the list gets pasted into the top level of the workspace, which is very strange. Perhaps this restriction will disappear in time.

Microsoft has also updated the Office Live Workspace Community site with a new look and new features like a wiki of hints and tips, and an area where you can ask questions and get answers. If you need personal help there's still the option to send an email through the website to get assistance from the dedicated team of support professionals.

Worth a thousand words?

Why do most applications still use a floppy disk icon to illustrate their "Save" command? PCs haven't had floppy disk drives for years now, so it's increasingly confusing, illogical and anachronistic. Imagine trying to teach a child how to save a file who probably will never have even seen a floppy disk, let alone know what they were once used for. Nowadays, removable media more usually take the form of memory sticks, or CDs and DVDs for larger files, but saving to removable media has been the exception rather than the norm for more than 20 years now, because even before the death of floppy drives only a minority of files would be saved to removable media.

Once hard disk drives became ubiquitous, most documents were stored on the local hard drive or onto a remote network server, both of which are effectively "invisible" destinations to the user. All that the user now sees are the electronic folders into which the documents are saved. The Open command is often represented as an open folder with an arrow indicating the action of opening, and the Close command is depicted as a closed folder, again with an arrow indicating the action. As the Close command should always ask whether you want to save any changes you've made, perhaps we need a new icon for Save that extends this metaphor.