Eric Hammersley

I have some favorite features that I want to share.  No, it's not the ribbon bar although it is pretty cool.

The first is the addition of the Font Formatting menu to right click and select operation.  Insert some text into Word 2007 and click and drag it to highlight.  The closer you move the mouse to the top of the selection a Font Formatting tool will appear.  I absolutely think this is an awesome addition.  It also appears on right clicks in the current document.  I attached a screenshot below to demonstrate.

The next one is the new Smart Tags.  I love what they have done here.  Suppose you have a document that states a wind speed, say 50 MPH.  How fast is that in kilometers?  The smart tag knows.  Give it a shot, type in 50 MPH in Word, or an Outlook message for that matter and take a look at the smart tag that is formed.

NOTE: the placement of the smart tag dialog is a little screwy, it needs to be below the item taged and not above because it covers the text being linked.  I have 50 MPH in the screenshot twice in order for you to get the full effect.  The one being shown is actually under the smart tag dialog.

As most of you well know the Office 2007 Beta 2 has been release to the public.  Honestly it is so stable I'm running it for everyday use.  This has of course allowed me to uncover a few “issues” if you will.  Being the diligent tester that I am I wanted to submit these bugs, or at the very least find out if they had already been discovered.  My search of MSDN and the Microsoft site itself for a way to do this unfortunately returned no results.  Now, I know you can go to resources from within the program's setting dialog but that isn't really the place for this type of communication.

Out of frustration in not being able to find a place to let the product team know about the “issues” I posted an article over on the Channel9 forum found here.  A kind user was nice enough to post a link to what Microsoft is calling the Smile program.  Essentially it is a feedback application that runs in your taskbar that displays a smile and a frown.  You can click which ever one applies, a smile for positive feedback and a frown for negative feedback.  It will take a screenshot of your desktop and sends it along with the text you submit.  It's not a bug report, which is really what I wanted to submit, but it will work just fine.  I wanted to share in case others are having trouble finding where to submit issues that aren't part of the official beta team.  Yes, it's a silly little program and I don't really like it sitting there running all the time but since I'm not part of the beta it's the only option I have.

The links in the Channel9 article point you to Jensen Harris's blog, a member of the Office UI team.  There he describes the Smile program and welcomes the feedback.  According to him it goes straight to the product team itself.  Top notch.

If you haven't tried it out yet Office 2007 is an excellent suite.  Head over to the Office 2007 beta 2 download site and grab it.  You won't be sorry.  I plan on posting a few of my favorite new features here in a little bit.  I promise, I'm not going to say “The Ribbon Bar is awsome“ although I do like it.  Enjoy.