Office 2003 SP2: Lots, but not much new

Microsoft released a service pack for Microsoft Office 2003 this week. It contains security enhancements, stability improvements, and performance improvements -- in all several hundred bug fixes, but you may already have some or most of them installed because they've been released in separate updates. SP2 combines the previously released fixes into one update.

If you haven't kept up with the Office updates or you don't have all of them in place, now would be a good time to obtain SP2 (50 to 100 megabytes, depending on which of the 2 update choices you select.)

The update includes an anti-phishing filter for Outlook and some stability improvements garnered from user-reported crashes via the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis tool. This is the alert box that asks if you want to report a problem to Microsoft when an application crashes. The company collects the information and analyzes it to determine what is causing the crash.

According to Microsoft, "SP2 provides updates that address top customer experience issues, as well as support for upgraded applications, security improvements, and significant stability and performance improvements for Office client applications as well as servers."

SP2 makes changes to all Office 2003 application -- Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It also updates other applications that you may have installed such as FrontPage, OneNote, and Publisher.

Outlook's new junk e-mail filter tries even harder to protect people from their own errors by storing all "Junk" messages as plain text and disabling all embedded links in messages identified as "Junk". The user can still turn on the images and activate the links, but responding to a dangerous message now requires two user errors and possibly three.

This is the first system-wide update for Office since July 2004.

Office 12 is on the way

At last week's PowerPoint Live, Lead Program Manager Ric Bretschneider talked about the future of PowerPoint 12. Some remarkable advances are on the way for the Office Suite, including the ability to apply a "style" across many applications.

That's a remarkable feature. Imagine being able to use a style for Word documents and then to have that style (think "corporate identity") apply to materials prepared with any other Microsoft application. This is an ambitious undertaking and one that has lots of challenges: Word documents, for example, are usually dark text on light paper while PowerPoint presentations are usually light text on a dark background. Word documents use typefaces in the range of 10 to 12 points while PowerPoint uses typefaces in the 20 to 30 point range. Images in Word or Publisher may have to be printed at high resolution while images in PowerPoint or FrontPage will be displayed at screen resolution.

Ric Bretschneider has been at Microsoft since 1993 when he was hired to work on PowerPoint IV for Windows and the Macintosh. He was lead program manager for PowerPoint 2003 and represents Microsoft at PowerPoint Live, this year joined by Program Manager Rebecca Levine.

Alpha testing

Except for being seen at programs such as PowerPoint Live, Office 12 has been seen only at Microsoft. The code is now at "alpha" stage, which means that it's being tested internally. Many features are not yet implemented and crashes are not only likely, but expected. (During an hour-long demo, PowerPoint crashed only once.) By now the feature set has been established and programmers are coding and testing the new applications.

Both Ric and Rebecca hosted sessions that showed some of PowerPoint 's most devoted users what they should expect in the upcoming version.

The next major step will be beta testing, when the application is released to users outside Microsoft who will do their best to create crashes that they document and report to Microsoft.

The application will be released at the end of beta testing. When will that be? Microsoft won't say.

A new look

Users of Office applications are familiar with menus, toolbars, task panes, and dialog boxes. It's a complex system that's difficult for casual users to learn and the structure makes adding features difficult.

A new user interface (UI) is being designed to make advanced features easier to find and use. One of the goals is to reduce the on-screen clutter. If you've ever seen a professional PowerPoint developer at work, you've probably been shocked by all the "stuff" on the screen.

The new UI uses "command tabs" instead of the traditional menus and toolbars. The application is smart enough to know what the user is doing and then presents only the commands that are most relevant for that task. This is not like the system in Office 2003 that shows only a few menu items by default and makes the user wait for the rest of the menu (I turn that feature off.)

They organize commands so that the commands correspond directly to the tasks the user is performing. The user who is typing bullet points would have no need to see commands dealing with photo manipulation, but the instant that user selects a picture, the photo manipulation features should be available.

Galleries are at the heart of the redesigned applications. Galleries provide users with a set of clear results to choose from when working on their document, spreadsheet, presentation, or Access database. By presenting a simple set of potential results, rather than a complex dialog box with numerous options, the Galleries simplify the process of producing professional looking work. The traditional dialog box interfaces are still available for those wishing a greater degree of control over the result of the operation.

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