I have a golden rule which is that all slides in a PowerPoint presentation MUST have titles, which I mentioned in an earlier post about using large images in PowerPoint. Before I get hundreds of comments saying this is nonsense, and “less is more”, I just want to be very clear: every slide must have a title, they just don’t necessarily have to be visible to the audience.

The minimalist, image-led approach often recommended by followers of Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points (and others) can be very powerful and really help to get your message heard and understood, but people often take it too far and actually delete the title placeholder from their slide, or use the “blank” layout. Even if you don’t want to put words on your slides to show the audience, you should still keep the title, and I’ll explain why and how to achieve this, and discuss a couple of things which might catch you out.

Why put titles on if no-one can see them?

Titles on the slide are not just words on the page, they are also used internally to identify the slides. The titles are used in various places and are really quite an important part of each slide. I’ll cover the most important reasons why I think you should always have a title on every slide and then look at best approaches to do this.

1. It helps you when you are navigating your slideshow during a presentation

From time to time you will need to navigate around in your presentation while presenting it – maybe you are running short of time and need to skip ahead, or a question at the end makes you want to go back and show a particular slide again to explain the answer. Either way, the simplest way to do this if from the right click menu > Go To Slide > then choose where you need to go. Doing this by slide number alone is a nightmare, so make sure all of your slides have titles that make sense to you in this list.

(Aside: if you are using presenter view and only have a handful of slides, then hovering over the slide “filmstrip” at the bottom and using the scroll wheel of your mouse to go left and right is OK, but if you have scores of slides then this gets quite hard work)

2. You can make sense of your slides when creating custom shows

Now, I know not everyone uses the feature to create custom shows, so a quick explanation may be needed. When you present normally, you will see every slide in the presentation (except for hidden ones). You might have to maintain several versions of a presentation – perhaps for occasions where you are given more or less time to cover the subject, so you can’t always get into the depth and detail you want to. Or perhaps you have some general slides about your offering, but then a selection of case studies which you would select from according to your audience so you know you are talking about something interesting to them specifically.

This is what custom shows are for – you can select a subset of your slides, and/or change the order they are shown in, and save that as a ‘version’ of your presentation – within a single PowerPoint file (pptx or ppt – this feature was available in 2003 as well). So you might have a 10 minute version and a full half hour (especially if you are following the Beyond Bullet Points methodology), or one version for investors and one for potential customers, or several for customers in different industries. All in one file. That way, if you update slide 17 with the latest financial results, or alter the picture on slide 23 with a better photograph of your headquarters, you don’t have to go and edit lots of different slide decks, you just edit it once and every one of your custom shows will use the new version (if it is included in that show of course).

So what does this have to do with titles? Well, just like when you are using that right-click to jump to a different part of your presentation, when you are building a new show or editing an existing one you get a list of slides by number, with their titles next to them. Seeing “37. Slide 37” is really not very helpful, and it is even worse with custom shows, because the slide numbers in the show itself are different from in the ‘master’ file – they are in the order they appear in that show. So slide 37 might be slide 15 in one show and slide 18 in another, so now it is even harder to keep track of which one is which unless you have used proper titles on every slide. In the screenshot below you can see that I have chose some of the slides from the left, but in a different order, and it would be quickly confusing as to which slide had what picture on (or whatever content it contains).

3. Title are shown in Outline view

When you use Outline view to help you plan and reorganise your presentation, this shows titles of slides, even if (you guessed it) they are not visible. If you don’t have a title at all and there are no other words on the slide (as in the sort of case we are talking about with large pictures), you see nothing here at all, just a blank line next to the slide number.

4. Titles are used when you publish to another format, particularly to a webpage

If you have a need to publish your presentation out to a web page, the titles of your slides will be used for the outline pane presented to the viewer for navigation, even if they would not be visible on the slides. In the short section of a recent training course presentation I have published and then viewed in Internet Explorer here, you can see the third slide has a title which makes sense for navigation (“Keep things simple”) rather than describing what is on the page (“Albert Einstein” would be a rather odd entry in the menu here). Omitting the title would have left a blank entry, which is not helping the audience at all.

(Aside: for the eagle eyed, you will notice that Protected mode is showing as “Off”, because I saved the webpage locally and the default setting for local and intranet zone is Off for Internet Explorer protected mode on IE8 as shipped with Windows 7)

5. Titles are shown as tooltips in the filmstrip of presenter view

This is a bit more obscure, but I find it useful when presenting lots of slides with images and little text. Imagine you are presenting to an audience, and in the “filmstrip” at the bottom of presenter view you see the next slide coming up and you get a mental block what the main point for that slide is. Total brainfreeze! You know the notes will remind you, but you don’t want to have to wait for the slide to appear then have to read before you can start talking. Also, you might want to segue smoothly from one topic to the next so you need to know where you are headed. The same applies if you are trying to look ahead for a particular point that you can jump to so you can skip a few slides. Right click> go to slide is OK, but even easier is just to hover over the thumbnail view of the slide. The title will popup in a little tooltip and you can be reminded of what your main point was, and the picture that goes with it (whereas the right click has the title only).

How to hide titles so they are not seen by the audience

The simplest way by far is to move the title placeholder so it is not within the area of the slide. In fact, when I design corporate slide templates and themes for clients I always include a layout which has a bare slide (great for pictures) with a title placeholder already just off the top of the slide, called something like “Blank slide with hidden title”.

Alternatively, if you using the layout for “title only” from one of the built-in templates or your own company theme you could add a picture to cover the whole slide which you show while you are talking about that particular topic. This might be a simple photograph of a box shot of your new product, an image of your new widget being used by some hip individuals in a trendy studio apartment (what I call lifestyle’ shots), a screenshot of your software in action, or a portrait of someone or something relevant to the subject, or even something more abstract.

In PowerPoint 2007 if you insert a picture on a blank slide it will fill the whole slide as best it can, and you can adjust the size as discussed in my earlier post and on Jan Shultink’s Slides That Stick blog. By default in 2007 the picture will be in the foreground, with the title hidden behind it, which might be sufficient as long as you are not intending to have the picture appear in some way other than all at once when the slide is shown (so not fading in for example). While it is nice and invisible behind the picture, it is not very helpful when it comes to editing it, so it is probably best to move it anyway.

To get at the title to edit or move it may seem a little tricky but there are various ways to do this, easiest first:

• With the picture selected, hit TAB which will go to the next object on the slide. If you have things in the footer, keep going until it has selected the title placeholder. Grab the bottom edge and drag it until it is just off the slide. Press F2 to edit the text if you need to (if you did not already put text in before the picture), ESC when you’re done (or click elsewhere with the mouse)
• Using the mouse, drag a selection rectangle over the area of the slide where the title is. To make sure you don’t accidentally select and drag the picture, start the rectangle outside the slide itself, in the blank area of screen around it.
• Turn on the selection pane. The button for this is in a couple of places. Home ribbon > Drawing group > Arrange > Selection pane or if you have the picture selected Picture Tools|Format > Arrange group > Selection pane. Every object on the slide will have a little “eye” icon next to it. If you deselect the one next to the picture object, it will become invisible and impossible to select, so now you can get at the title box and edit it. Again, I would still say you are best to move it so you don’t have to do this every time you want to see what it says. Don’t forget to click on the eye to make your picture visible again (more on that later).
• Use Outline view. Here you can directly edit the title, but you can’t move it off the slide so this for me is the least useful method

Things that can catch you out

There are a couple of other things to bear in mind when doing this.

Animation of the title

The slide master you are using may have the title set up so that it builds as part of the slide, for example fading in or having the text appear from one side, then waiting for you to click the mouse before going on to the next item. I’m not going to get into a discussion here as to whether that is a good or bad thing, just to note that if you have a title that is not visible and it is then waiting for you, the audience sees a blank slide until you realise what is going on and catch up with them.

To avoid this, make sure you check the custom animation for the slide and ensure that there is no animation event for the title (in the custom animation pane you will see the effects applied in the slide master slightly greyed out. Right click and “copy effects to slide” then you can remove the ones you don’t need.

All of this is a good reason to have a specific slide master in your template which includes the title off the slide, and has no animation for the title, even if your other slide layouts do.

Alternative method to hide the title, and why not to do this

One of the other methods you will sometimes see people using or proposing to hide their slide titles is to simply hide the title while leaving it in it’s original place. If you look back at the method for getting at a title behind a picture, you will remember the option of using the selection pane to hide an object so that you can see behind it. Well, you could also use that to simply hide something forever -  like a title, say. This would mean it does not show up when you run the show (except in the tooltip if you hover on the thumbnail in presenter view) and you don’t have to worry about animation either. Quick and easy, so why should you not do this?

Firstly, backwards compatibility. If you are sharing the presentation with someone using PowerPoint 2003, they cannot use selection pane to get the title back. They can however see it in outline view, but you might be amazed how many people I do advanced PowerPoint training for who have never used outline to organise and plan their presentation, or do not even know of its existence. These people would not know how to change the title, which may not seem too bad until they duplicate that slide (perhaps to add different captions or some other content) and now they have multiple slides with the same title and can’t edit them.

So the first problem is your colleague may not know how to see it, the second problem is that your customer might, and if you had a slide called “How we get more money out of our customers” then it might not be good to leave that title in. So along comes the document inspector. Using this feature in Office 2007 helps you to identify and clean up this kind of invisible content. Go to Office button > Prepare > Inspect document > pick some options (or all of them for good measure), find ‘dangerous’ stuff and get rid of it. Oops. That title of yours is toast, as it gets classed as “invisible content” and removed (if you tell it to remove the things it finds, obviously you can be a bit more careful and choose not to). So hiding it is OK, but you or someone else could remove it by accident, thinking you are doing something helpful. To avoid this, simply don’t hide the title, move it off the slide as a recommended earlier.

Hang on a minute though, one of the options in the document inspector is to find and remove “off-slide content”. Surely this is no better? Well, even if you choose the option to find (then later remove) off-slide content, the title placeholder is specifically ignored and left alone. The same is not true of any other text box you add, nor the original content placeholders if you moved them off the page. See, I told you titles were special.

One technique for effective presentations is to use large images, especially photographs, with minimal or no text and use these to evoke the ideas you are talking about, or create a connection or emotional response for the audience. On his Slides that Stick blog, Jan Shultink discusses a simple technique to make sure your images have the right proportion and fill the slide which is well worth a read.

Keeping things in proportion

I shudder when I see images that have been pulled and stretched out of proportion, particularly if it is the presenter’s company logo (or worse still that of the audience’s firm, hastily borrowed from their website).
Jan’s tip about dragging by a corner is great for pictures and photos because PowerPoint will assume you want to preserver the aspect ratio, but this is not true for drawings or some vector graphics – a simple hold of the shift key while dragging the corner has the same effect for these files. Note that in both cases, this technique preserves the current aspect ratio, so to get things right in the first place you need to use the reset as pointed out by Jan.

If you are using PowerPoint 2007 or later and you insert a picture from file on a content slide, it will fit it into the content placeholder, so you would then have to expand it up to fit. A quicker way to get it full screen is to make sure to change the slide layout to blank or to title only. Then when you insert the picture it will make it as large as possible while still fitting the whole of the picture on the slide. If your picture is the same orientation (portrait or landscape) and proportion as your slide it will fill it. If it is not then it will still need to be stretched a little to fill the whole slide (this is often the case if you are designing slides for widescreen 16:9 layout and using digital camera pictures which are usually closer to a 4:3 ratio).

Note that in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier, inserting a high resolution picture on a blank slide will usually end up with the image bigger than the slide, as it will be scaled according to how many pixels it has relative to the size of the slide and the output resolution. The best bet is to use a slide layout with a content placeholder for the image, stretch that to the corners of the slide and then insert the picture in that (in many of the built-in templates there are multi-content containers which have an icon in them to go straight to the insert picture dialogue box).

If your image is not the right proportion to fit on your slide and you don’t want to crop it, consider changing the background colour of the slide to black so it at least appears in isolation. Some projectors don’t do black very well and you will get a muddy grey, so experiment with white as an alternative, especially if large parts of the picture have a light colour (typically outdoor shots might have lots of pale sky, for example).

Should you put a caption in front of the picture?

This all depends on the context, in some cases you might put a caption underneath to explain what the picture is, but often this will be unnecessary. “Iwo Jima, February 1945” would be suitable for the picture in Jan’s tutorial if you were talking about the events of the second world war as a matter of history. “Joseph John Rosenthal (1911 – 2006)” might be more appropriate if you actually wanted to talk about the photographer himself or perhaps the role of photo-journalism in modern conflicts. If the picture is just being used as a hook for a more abstract concept such as “success” or “teamwork” then either of these as a caption would be redundant (and a little cheesy).

Should you put a title on the slide?

Absolutely, yes, every single time. You just might not always want to make it visible to the audience. But that topic needs a follow-up post.

I don’t often write posts that simply say “hey, did you see this post over here?”. These echoes in the blogosphere don’t really add much value, and are sometimes symptomatic of people being measured by how many blog posts they write to meet some arbitrary marketing activity metric, rather than adding quality.

(Aside: the same applies to a series of posts about 6 related features of some software or comparing 5 alternative products which would have made much more sense written as a single cohesive article, but failed to tick the box for 10 blog posts per month. You get what you measure, or WYMIWYG)

But today, I though this was important enough to just say – have you seen this post on the Excel Team blog about improvements to functions in Excel 2010? Now that one’s a week or so old now, but today there was an even more important post with a link to a draft whitepaper with more information.

I have linked to the post , not the pdf file directly as it is only a draft, and hopefully the post will get an edit or at least a comment when a newer or final version is available. This document is for those who like to understand the details, and for any sceptics who might say “well, they said it was accurate last time, how do we know it’s any better now?” – it does sound a bit like washing powder ads who always tell us that this time round it will get things even whiter and brighter and cleaner than ever (just like they said before).

There are a couple of typos in the draft (the floor.precise function for example has an obvious chunk of copy and paste from the ceiling.precise function for example), and there are some things not made very clear (for example in most cases it only describes the new behaviour, not the old for comparison or for explanation of the difference and why the new way is more accurate).

It lists the MOD function in the section on functions whose accuracy has been improved. Did you know that MOD gave inaccurate results on older versions of Excel? I didn’t. In fact, it doesn’t – it gives a completely accurate result or fails with a #NUM error if the divisor goes into the number more than 2^27 times as described here. I think this is distinct from being inaccurate in the way the statistical functions have often been criticised.

Similarly the RAND function is listed but its problems not described in any detail – I can only assume that the function is flawed in that it does not give a perfectly even distribution of results and is therefore “weighted” to some extent. Since I only ever use it to produce dummy data for examples used in my Excel training courses, it does not really matter to me if it not truly statistically pure, but I am sure to others it is vitally important what algorithm is used to generate the results (it’s now the Mersenne Twister, for those who care, but this fact is not from the whitepaper, it’s in a comment to the original post made by Jessica Liu).

Anyway, the bugs and inaccuracies that are discussed in the whitepaper are all now fixed (but it does not say this in the whitepaper, merely leaves it implied), and already works in the Technical Preview. Some of the other changes came too late for TP but should be in the public Beta when that gets released.

I expect the changes to naming conventions will also help people who use the statistical functions a lot (I’m not one of those) or have to make sense of others’ work. The convention of .precise added to a function name seems to mean “according to a precise definition” rather than “inherently more accurate”. I would have though .strict might be less ambiguous and similar to the use of the term in other fields (eg web design using XHTML versus XHTML strict).

Has anybody had real issues with these inaccuracies in the past? (and had you even noticed?)

Are you using other software tools to avoid the problem in Excel, and will these changes allow or encourage you to switch back?

It’s been a while since Office 2007 service pack 2 came out, but now you can get the files you need to successfully administer this, using Group Policy to apply settings from the ADM or ADMX files, or using the Office Customisation Tool (OCT)..

This Technet page has more information including some important details about making sure to reset some of your policies before replacing the ADM files, as you won’t be able to edit them afterwards:

If you have previously configured any of the Group Policy settings affected by this update, you must set those policy settings to their Not Configured state before you remove the previous 2007 Office system ADM files and load the updated version 3 ADM files. This removes the registry key information for the policy setting from the registry. This is because if an .adm file is removed, the settings that correspond to the .adm file do not appear in Group Policy Object Editor; however, the policy settings that are configured from the .adm file remain in the Registry.pol file and continue to apply to the appropriate target client or user. This also applies to any policy settings that you had previously configured that are listed in “Removed settings” later in this article.

You can download the Administrative Templates and OCT in a self-extracting exe file. Included are ADM, ADMX and ADML files in various languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and a couple of flavours of Chinese).

Also has the OPA files and a settings reference, but this other page claims that this is the definitive version of the Office 2007 GP and settings file. I can’t tell the difference – they are the same size and have the same number of rows on the list pages, and have identical MD5 checksums, so they are the same file.

I suspect this was a newer version than the old version in the old download before the newer version superseded the old version so it is now the current version. Clear as mud?

Anyway, most of the focus of these is on fixing a few broken things and targeting settings relating to Open Document format files (making it the default for saving, or blocking it being used at all, that sort of thing.)

Happy policy making!

Microsoft have updated their usual Group Policy settings lists following recent releases of new Windows versions. On one page you can now get 4 downloads to include pretty much all current versions of desktop and server OS, and v-1 (so Windows 7 and Vista, server 2008 and 2003 sp2).

Group policy settings for Windows Vista sp1, Windows 7, 2003 sp2 2008, 2008 R2

Group policy settings for Internet Explorer 8 are also available (on a different page).

Note that the latest files are all in Excel 2007 format so if you are not yet using Office 2007 or 2010TP you would need to install the Office compatibility pack to allow you to view these on a previous version of Office, or the Excel 2007 viewer (+ service pack 2 as well) to view them (but not be able to edit or save changes). Both of these downloads are free.

Hat tip to Jeremy Mosokowitz at GPAnswers.com

At the moment I’m revisiting pretty much all my course materials for my Microsoft Office training courses, partly to restructure them into different chunks, and partly to start work editing where necessary to include coverage of Office 2010 so that I will be ahead of the game when that gets released next year.

Along the way I’ve been finding out loads of cool things about major new features such as sparklines and slicers (more on that in a future post, as promised), and the ability to customise the Ribbon easily without writing code. There are also lots of tiny changes as well, which are easy to miss and may get drowned out in the sea of other news about the next version, so I thought I would mention a couple of them here – the status bar summaries and filters in Tables.

Subtotals ignore previous subtotals – so does the status bar in 2010

As you might already know, if you use a SUBTOTAL function to calculate a cell, and then use another SUBTOTAL to calculate cells including the first one, the original subtotal is excluded from the second one, which makes sense to avoid double counting / summing.

If cells A1,2,3 contain 1,2, and 3, and A4 is =SUBTOTAL(9,A1:A3) then A4 will have the sum: 6 (‘9’ is the sum sub-feature of the SUBTOTAL function). If cells A5,6,7 contain 5,6, and 7, and A* contains =SUBTOTAL(9,A1:A7) then this will have the sum of A1,2,3, 5,6,7 and skip the value in A4 as it realises this would give a wrong result. This works even if you use different functions for the totals, for example you might use counts (function 2) for most subtotals, then use an average (1) and a sum (9) right at the bottom or top of the column.

Now, you can select the same 7 cells and take a look at the status bar – this should show you the sum, count, average or whatever functions you have chosen. In 2003 and earlier you can select one at a time, in 2007 and later you can choose to see multiple summary results at the same time – in all cases, right click where it has a summary at the moment (eg “Sum: 123”) and choose the functions you want to see.

If you have 2007 or earlier, the status bar shows the ‘wrong’ result of 30 – the sum of all 7 cells including the subtotal. While this is a correct sum, it is unhelpful, particularly if you select a large number of cells or a whole column, and may not realise there are one or more subtotals in there. Selecting cells A1:A8 is even worse, you now have two subtotals included for a whopping error of 54.

In Excel 2010 this behaviour has changed and these functions in the status bar ignore SUBTOTAL formulas in cells just like the function itself does, so the count shows 6 and the total 24. You can see the difference in the status bar of the two screenshots below, for Excel 2007 (left) and Excel 2010 (right) (click for larger images). The other features like Average and so on do the same, but I could not show too many at once on the same screenshot.

Now, on the one hand this is a great idea because in general I think this is the result most people would actually want and even expect. But on the other hand, there are thousands of existing users who already know and understand how this works, and might find the change undesirable, if for no reason other than the fact that it is not obvious. It does save time because you don’t have to select all those cells separately using CTRL-clicks or a GoTo > Special (if the numbers are really numbers and the only formulae are the subtotals).

Maybe a better way to offer this functionality would be to add “Subtotal” to the list of status bar features you can display, with the expectation set that this does the same as the function of the same name (unlike count, which is more like COUNTA; you have to use “Numerical Count” to get the same as COUNT. Don’t get me started on that one!).

Tables in Excel 2010 show filters when the headings row goes off the screen

If you have used Tables in 2007 at all, you may have been pleased at how the column labels A, B, C… get replaced with the headings from your table if you scroll down so the headings are no longer visible while you still have a cell in the table selected. Frustratingly though, the autofilters which are very helpfully added to Tables automatically are not available. you have to scroll all the way to the top to put a filter on, then scroll to take a look at your data and perhaps the totals, then up, down, until your scrolling finger aches.

Well, ache no more – in Excel 2010 the filters are also shown in the column headings so you can filter wherever you are in your table, as shown in the screenshot below. A very simple, but very useful additional feature this one, I am sure you will agree.

In the context of these two features, I should also point out for anyone not already aware, the Total row in a Table uses the Subtotal function rather than a sum, count, average etc, so this means it will show the total for the visible rows if you filter it (which makes sense), and will get ignored in the status bar in Excel 2010 but not previous versions. In the example above I have selected the whole of column C (sales) to include the total row, but the status bar shows the more useful result of 71,261, rather than double this as would be seen in Excel 2007.

Anyone else found any little nuggets that have changed? What are you favourite improvements to Excel 2010 (or the other Office apps, come to that)? Anything missing that you wish had made the cut this time round?

Recently, like many others, I have been through the process of installing various releases of Windows 7, from the Beta, through RC1 and finally the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version. I decided to take the plunge and install 64 bit on my Dell D620 and everything went really well, no driver issues or any other hiccups. Had to do a manual download of a driver for my old(ish) Epson scanner, but it still installed straight off first time. RC1 needed a bit of manual intervention to get the NVidia drivers working for some reason (Beta and RTM both just worked, strangely), and it was a bit temperamental with docking and undocking while running, but RTM seems to have cleared this up, and is now way more stable than Vista ever was at doing this (I used to get a full system lock about 1 time in 10).

I did as advised by Microsoft and did this as a clean install every time, rather than doing a hack to allow me to run an in-place upgrade. Thanks to James O’Neill’s blog article I did this from a bootable USB drive, and this was lightning fast since I also recently upgraded my hard drive to a 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD.

Applications, applications, applications

A bit of a pain re-installing applications again each time round, but it does mean I have a nice shortlist of the apps and utilities that I actually need and use regularly enough to merit an install. Without being an exhaustive list, the apps that made the grade every time, in approximately the order they got installed are:

• Office 2007 + sp2 and Office 2003 (for feature comparison when writing training courses), and 2010 Technical Preview on the last time round too. Because I am installing multiple Office versions I can only use 32 bit across the board for these, so no experience with 64 bit version of Office 2010 yet. All of these 32 bit apps run just fine (a common misconception seems to be that if your favourite apps only come in 32 bit flavours you can’t choose 64 bit Windows, but a feature called Windows on Windows takes care of this quite happily, just as it did for previous editions of Windows since 2000)
• Firefox (3.5.2 this time round)
• Foxit PDF Reader, as I have mentioned before, I much prefer the responsiveness of this over Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. I do wish it would stop nagging me about paid-for upgrades under the disguise of it’s auto-update feature. Oh well, musn’t grumble too much about free software I guess. FoxitPDF Preview handler from Tim Heuer makes PDF previews available directly in Outlook without opening the attachment.
• FastStone Image Viewer – FREE image viewing, editing, organising, browsing, screen capturing software. Brilliant piece of software which I use all the time for my digital photo library, really quick and easy to use for browsing thumbnails, organising, and editing tasks such as cropping and resizing, including doing this in batches. Highly configurable, easily replaced Office Photo Editor and Paint Shop Pro browser which I used to use for these sorts of jobs. (I still use Jasc PSP for actual image creation and editing, eg creating banners and icons)
• Visio 2007 and 2010 TP
• Notepad++ FREE text editing software. Simple to use tabbed interface, supports loads of different coding languages (eg colouring keywords, matching braces and tags, creating expand/collapse sections). I find it a great way to edit javascript for CRM customisations, HTML and CSS for my website, and XML for hacking around in Office documents, templates and themes.
• Zoomit utility to zoom in on portions of the screen while presenting, demoing or projecting for any reason. Version 4 now allows you to actually use the machine at the same time on Windows Vista and 7 (previous versions worked like a kind of screen capture you could move around, but you could not click anything, which meant it was really hard to show things like menus, or URL’s as you typed them). Using “live” mode means you can’t also draw on the screen – the mouse is either the real live mouse or it is used for drawing, you can’t mix and match.
• Windows Live Writer – essential for writing the blog, so much more efficient than the web interface (no offence to WordPress, the interface is OK but WLW blows it to bits, especially for someone like me who uses loadsof keyboard shortcuts to get things done). Only annoying thing is there is no separate offline install for this, you have to download the launcher for the Live Essentials collection, then do a custom install and choose the bits you want (just Writer, in my case, no toolbars, no photo editing software – why would I want SQL to be running on my laptop just to organise my photo library?)
• Microsoft Expression Web. Although I hand code most of the things for my website, it’s convenient to have tools like global search and replace, and a built-in FTP tool to upload changes (although I’ve been using FireFTP a lot recently while I did not have Expression Web re-installed)

Things I still need to get round to installing and trying include Camtasia Studio so I can start to record and edit training videos (and maybe upload some shorter ones as tips), Dynamics CRM client for Outlook (might need to wait for the updated release expected later this year for this to work with 2010, but I’m going to try the current client first), and Paint Shop Pro (didn’t get round to it on RTM yet; it was fine on RC1).

Offline folders and the CSC cache

The biggest pain for me was actually rebuilding my offline files every time, although of course this is true of any bare-metal install, nothing to do with Windows 7 or 64 bit. I use this extensively so I hardly ever have to think whether I have a file with me from my server or not, pretty much everything I need is there all the time, and kept in synch silently and invisibly – offline files and folders were massively improved from XP to Vista, and Windows 7 continues to perform well on this feature. When I am offline it shows the available space of my network drives which have synched files as the same as the space on my local drive, which makes sense, as this is the most stuff I could put in any one of them. No change there, but something I had never noticed in Vista and believe to be new to Windows 7 is that the file system for these drives is shown as “CSC-Cache” to indicate this is where those items are actually going to get saved, and it has no information about the file system of the offline fileserver at the moment.

A word of warning incidentally – if you do install a later release of Windows from bootable media without formatting your drive, it will prompt you to point out that it has detected a previous version (eg RC rather than RTM) and this will not work after you install. Great, go ahead, yes please. But, although that old version won’t be bootable it is still on your hard disk, shoved into a directory called windows.old. Well, actually, that’s not just your old windows directory, it’s the whole of the contents of the hard drive.

In a way this is good – it means you have access to things like your old documents (including draft blog posts!), program settings (especially useful for things like Firefox where you can just copy your old profile straight across). However, it also means you have a whole bloated load of stuff like all those installed applications in programs and programs(x86), which in my case is about 3.2 GB of stuff just in those two directories (on a machine I only ran as RC1 for a few months – 3 concurrent versions of MS Office are responsible for nearly half of that). The other thing to watch out for is that inside the windows.old\windows folder is the old CSC cache (unless you moved the CSC folder to another drive or location). So, if you are like me and use offline files a lot, this could be pretty big and you will want to nuke it sooner rather than later. You may need to take ownership of this in order to delete it since it is a system folder, so I’m pretty sure even your local admin account does not have the rights out of the box.

One thing I did notice about the CSC cache folder in Windows 7 though, is that the contents have proper filenames and are now arranged in a way that reflects the source folder structure, rather than the horrible flat, anonymous renamed mess that previous versions had. If you are doing recovery of a failed machine, this might come in handy to find files which have been edited offline and have at least some hope of getting them back into the main file store.

What about running 64 bit Windows on an older machine?

Also got RTM installed on my old Sony Vaio after XP died for no good reason (and a rebuild was overdue after about four years). This was not 64 bit capable, so I went 32 bit and everything fine but the drivers for the old video card have not been detected so it’s running at 1024 x 768 on a 1280 x 768 widescreen at the moment. Annoying, and the laptop predates Vista release, so there’s nothing on Sony’s site. I need to try to figure out exactly what the chipset is and get an OEM driver for it, assuming there is a Vista driver out there somewhere, otherwise I may get very stuck.

Next one I want to try is a really old Toshiba I have kicking around. ‘Hackerman’ reports getting Windows 7 to run on a Pentium II 266 with only 96MB RAM so maybe there is some hope. I don’t expect much out of it, but maybe it will be one for my pre-school kids to play around on.

Can I run 64 bit on my PC?

SecurAble from GRC is a very nice simple utility you can use to find out if your PC or laptop is capable of running 64 bit editions, as well as checking for hardware DEP and virtualisation. It simply runs with no install (so you can do this from a USB drive, for example). Needs admin rights, but behaves properly with UAC on Vista and Windows 7 so you can just give it credentials when it ask for them. Run it and see the very simply presented results – three boxes with yes or no in them).

If 64 bit is an option for you, my advice would be “go for it”, forget the gripes people had for 64 bit XP. If you have really old peripherals you might want to check for drivers first  before going through the install twice, of course.

Anyone had any good or bad experience with Windows 7 you want to share? How about 64 bit (including previous versions)?

As discussed previously, we have some marketing information about what we will be seeing in the next release of the Office system, but not really a great deal of technical information. The Excel team are starting to blog a bit more now that the Technical Preview is underway; their 10,000 foot view is a good starting point to find out what’s coming, or you can read the press release. On the official Office 2010 site there is a video by Albert Chew, Product Manager for Office, which shows off some of the new features of Excel 2010 (sorry, no direct link to the video available, it’s linked in the menu on the left of that page). On the Microsoft PressPass videos page there is an Excel 2010 demo video which you can also download (16MB wmv file). This covers two new features – sparklines (from the start) and slicers (from about 1min 55 into the video)

As more information emerges, I’ll write in more detail about some of the new features. Today let’s have a look at probably the most eagerly awaited extension to Excel’s data visualisation capabilities – sparklines.

Sparklines in Excel 2010

Sparklines are very dense microcharts used to display simple information, usually showing historical values to give context to the current data. The term was coined by information visualisation guru Edward Tufte and discussed in a whole chapter in his book Beautiful Evidence, which describes sparklines as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”.

Examples might include past share values, commodity prices, exchange rates, or internal business key performance indicators. Lines may have key points highlighted (high value, low value, last value), show a trendline or normal band, but otherwise will be deliberately uncluttered to aid easy interpretation.

The example to the right shows the previous 12 months sales and target, with the highest and lowest sales figures highlighted. Some people might prefer to show the figures to the right of the sparkline as they relates to the final data point and therefore the right hand end of the plotted line, but this is a matter of personal preference. Although this example is show here in quite a large screenshot, the trend is very clear at much smaller sizes too.

While lines are by far the most common choice for sparklines, especially to show changes over time, other formats may be found – columns to show breakdown of a total by category for comparison, for example. Another popular use is to track success and failure, such as wins and losses for a sports team, a technique described well by this article on sparklines at Bissantz, the creators of SparkMaker, an add-in for Excel.

Now Excel 2010 does sparklines straight out of the box, no add-ins required, which is a testament to how popular these kind of dense data visualisations have become, especially in the BI and business dashboard community. Of course, you could already do this with add-ins or just a lot of patience to customise normal charts to suit the restricted size of a typical sparkline. The way these are shown in the videos is that they are much easier to apply to a range of cells rather than having to build then copy and paste for multiple rows, adjusting data ranges and so on. So you build one in a cell, choosing the data range that it relates to, and then you can use the usual “fill down” technique by dragging a cell handle to create more sparklines for subsequent rows of similar data. Various formatting tools can then be used to quickly change colours, show or hide markers and highlight highs or lows, first and last point and so on. Whether these sparklines can be made to be dynamic to accommodate new columns or rows of data (using dynamic named ranges for the source, for example) is not clear at this stage, but hopefully this is covered. Currently the three formats which are built-in are lines, columns and win/loss blocks. Thankfully no-one tried to build a spark-pie-chart!

Sparklines are good news, if used well

These could be a really powerful addition to many pivot tables or other reports. Let’s just hope their convenience is matched by sensible controls so that first-time users do not end up with pretty but meaningless charts. The screenshot of sparklines shown on the Microsoft PressPass site is a fairly poor example – the lines and bars show the same data (acceptable from the point of view of a demo shot showing both formats are supported), and they actually chart all the visible data. Part of the point of a sparkline is to show additional data in a very dense way – for example you might display the current value of some measure, and a line to show the past twelve months so you can see what has happened to get to that position. Showing monthly figures as well defeats the point of the density possible here, and the principle of being able to visualise the information available rather than wading through figures to try and interpret the patterns.

Related news – data bars are being improved

I haven’t seen many details, but the data bars and some other conditional formats introduced in Excel 2007 are being improved in this release. A key feature being mentioned is the possibility to show negative values with data bars. For those of you unfamiliar with the strange implementation in 2007, the lowest value was displayed as the shortest bar, highest as longest. So if you had a mix of positive and negative numbers, a zero value would appear as a bar of an intermediate length, and there was no really useful meaning for the lengths of the bars. For a set of all negatives, the highest value (nearest to zero) had the longest bar, and the lengths do not have a proper relationship to one another, as seen below.

In this example I have highlighted some figures – two figures for the variation between actual sales and target in monetary terms (2,280 and –2,280) and two for the variation in percentage terms (9.0% and –9.0%). Notice that the lengths of the bars for these pairs of figures have absolutely no relationship to one another. A shortfall of sales by 2,280 should surely be shown using the same length of bar as an overachievement by the same amount? As for April – sales target was met exactly, this is a completely neutral achievement but the bar uses a substantial amount of “data ink”. This amount also varies depending on the magnitude of the highest and lowest values in the series!

Hopefully the new implementation for negatives in data bars in Excel 2010 will give us a zero-length bar for zero, and bars extending left for negative and right for positive (optionally with colour coding to highlight negatives even further). Additionally, cleaning up the bars to lose the graduated fade-out which makes the ends unclear, and allowing the shortest bar to have zero length rather than a small minimum size would be better (especially so that a zero value is encoded as a zero-bar).

Next time – data slicers

In my next post I’ll take a look at the new data slicers feature to try and work out what it does and if it really introduces new capability or is just a new way of presenting some existing tools like data filters.

Well, there’s some information finally coming out about Office 2010 and some of the features we will hopefully be seeing in the final release version next year. As the Technical Preview gets released to an invited audience only at this stage, there aren’t loads of sources of details, but a few places are showing off some interesting ideas and if you watch the videos carefully and look closely at the screenshots there are nuggets to be found.

If you want to be considered for the technical preview yourself, you can still sign up via the “Get a pass” link on the main “launch” site at Office 2010 – the movie. This site started out just hosting a teaser movie but now has a look and feel similar to the new “Backstage” interface which has been added to the Fluent UI to replace the current Office button menu to help you work with different aspects of your document in one place. There are a few videos posted on there right now, no doubt more to come soon.

Where can I find out more?

There are some useful overview documents on the Microsoft PressPass site, including an Office 2010 FAQ which covers a number of things, notably an outline of which products will be included in which versions of the suites available through retail or volume licensing. The oddest thing is that the various press releases available here are all Word .doc documents. Not a universal format like PDF. Not even Microsoft’s own portable format XPS. Not Word 2007 DOCX (probably a good idea not to assume people would already be on board with that, even with the compatibility pack for older versions). Other documents linked from that page give more detail for each of the products individually, but only at a brief marketing level, nothing too technical.

What are the biggest changes?

The most obvious change across the Office system as whole is that all the applications will now have the fluent UI and ribbon, which has also had slight facelift – they have removed many of the borders round buttons, reducing the visual clutter and “flattening” the overall effect (almost exactly what they did in the evolution of the toolbar from Office 97 to 2000). Selected or active options still appear to have borders to make them clearer. When you have additional context-sensitive tabs appearing in the Ribbon, the coloured highlight above them seems to be bolder because it extends from a solid colour at the top of the title bar fading out as it goes down into the Ribbon tabs area, rather than at the moment where this is only visible in the title bar area and fades quickly upwards. This may make the additional tools more obvious to new users when they need them, and help distinguish between similar items by getting used to the colours used.

The other big news items are the introduction of browser-based document viewing and editing (discussed below), and the availability of a 64-bit version of all the products (as well as 32 bit for legacy compatibility). This may provide some speed and productivity benefits to those who have appropriate hardware and OS to take advantage of this, use more memory and so on. Larger Access models might make more sense, but Excel spreadsheets of over 2GB? Hopefully not too often. I do know some people who could probably build PowerPoint shows that big though…

Browser based access? No installation?

Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President of the Office products, did a video for Channel 9 introducing Office 2010, and a lot of emphasis on this idea of Office everywhere for more flexible collaboration, which he described as

The best productivity software for the PC, the phone and the browser

The concept of being able to access your work equally from anywhere is a pretty powerful shift in emphasis (can I use the phrase “new paradigm” without irony?) So you could use the full application on a powerful Windows box, a browser on any machine (including non-windows devices if the support for Firefox and Safari works out), or even a phone (not clear if this needs to be a Windows mobile device, or any web-capable smartphone, although Chris talks about new version of Office Mobile, so it seems like the former).

From what we have seen there will of course be some limitations in the available functionality. This screenshot of editing a Word document in a browser is quite revealing, just in the sheer lack of tabs across the Ribbon gives some indication of the reduced functionality. As to whether this will really deliver value to customers remains to be seen. I am sure there are times when someone just needs to proof-read and edit the text without adding lots of other rich content, or check a spreadsheet to simply update their sales forecast figures. But there are many other times when adding that video to a PowerPoint slide deck for tomorrow’s pitch, or actually using Excel to do some real analysis are quite important too.

Of course, the fundamental layer to all this is not the desktop products (clearly, since the whole point is that you don’t need them), but rather the place you store your documents. This could be “in the cloud” using Office Live online services, or on one of your enterprise Sharepoint 2010 document libraries. This may be the compelling reason that finally encourages more corporates to move to Sharepoint. The ability to control access, do version control, manage document production workflows, check documents in and out to use offline copies safely, store metadata and index things for almost-instant search have not been enough for some IT managers to buy into the idea. Corporate governance legislation, e-discovery risks and other factors are already pushing better document management onto the agenda in many boardrooms. The added convenience of access from anywhere might be an additional factor which makes the decision easier.

There will still be a cost implication for both the Sharepoint installation (or some kind of SaS or SaaS subscription) and some kind of user licence for Office 2010. Pricing has not been released for any products in the suite at the moment, but partners are being reassured that the online model will not affect their revenue streams as companies will still have to buy licences, so the general principle seems clear, and may be more like the CALs associated with server products traditionally. However, some 400 Million existing users of Office Live and skydrive will have access to these Office web apps for free from the final date of release, so it’s not clear how this fits with the previous statement.

Added features in Office 2010 suite products

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at each of the products in the suite in turn and discussing some of the most important new features we will be looking forward to.

Other products in Office System 2010

The Office “system” includes desktop products like Visio and Project even though they are sold separately and not as part of any of the suites. These are getting the Ribbon just like the rest of the Office system, as is Sharepoint Workspace 2010 (the new name for Groove).

Another flavour of Visio is coming

There is a third product entering the Visio line up – “Visio Premium”. The old Visio Enterprise was discontinued some time ago taking the choice down to two (standard and professional), which meant the loss of some pretty useful features for connecting to and diagramming active directory domains and Exchange organisations. There’s more emphasis in Visio 2010 for connecting to live data sources (rather than just drawing pictures), and closer integration with Sharepoint, as with the rest of the Office system. According to the press release:

Visio Premium 2010, introduced this year, offers advanced diagramming capabilities for IT and Process management, including new templates for Business Process Management Notations (BPMN), The Microsoft Accelerator for Six Sigma and SharePoint Workflow; new process management tools such as subprocess to help with standardization and reuse; and rules and logic validation to ensure accuracy and consistency across the organization. In addition, SharePoint workflows developed in Visio 2010 Premium can be exported for execution and real-time monitoring on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Visio guy has started posting about some of the new features in Visio 2010 and Sharepoint, and I am sure he will have more to say about these features in due course.

What are the best features you have seen announced? What would you like to see in the new suite?

Another of Simon’s excellent posts about the Ribbon and other parts of the Fluent UI in Excel 2007 has prompted me to respond. Read the ribbon file blunderfest, where Simon says (I snipped a few bits out here for brevity, and the bold is mine):

I already mentioned the lack of file open icon, and previously I have talked about the ridiculous blob. And the initial flashing they had to incorporate to tell us its a button. But when you actually get closer it just gets sillier – I really wouldn’t have thought that was possible!

When you click and look, if you decide to cancel and move to the traditional cancel location (lower right) and click that button, does it close the file open dialog/ribbon? Or does it close Excel?

Everyone I have asked (and me) has accidentally closed Excel numerous times before eventually learning that this particular piece of the interface is not ‘normal’. In fact to cancel that thing you click anywhere else in Excel – and Excel ignores the click but closes the dialog! How ridiculous is that?

They have created a thing that is not as powerful or controllable as a dialog, but is too big and intrusive to be a menu or toolbar so they butchered an existing UI concept – the click away to cancel menu concept to work with this quasi dialog. But dialogs never worked like that before or in other applications. So now Office is the most friction-full application in the widows world (excluding perhaps Ulead products).

So, does the Office button bring up a (poor) dialog, or is it just a menu?

Sorry Simon but I have to disagree with you on this one (I seem to recall being told I was the voice of balance on smurfonspreadsheets by someone…).

Just because you think it’s a dialogue and call it a dialogue does not mean it is a dialog or should behave like one. Shredding a straw man / ribbon does not make a valid argument. To me it looks and behaves pretty much like I would expect a menu to behave:

• It appears from a button above it, and remains in that fixed position (unlike normal dialog which are windows which can be moved about).
• It has items which when hovered over reveal sub-menus of related items. The ones which do this are correctly indicated with a small arrow to the right.
• Since it is not a dialogue, it has no "X" close button in the window title bar because it does not have a title bar. (as an aside, I would wager this is just as popular a method of closing an unwanted dialogue as going for the Cancel button)

Why would I expect a Cancel button on a menu anyway?

Well, I wouldn’t. But even if I did, I would look for it specifically – the cancel button is not always in the bottom right of a dialog (nor always there at all). However, I do find that the Cancel button is usually the one labelled "Cancel" rather than the one labelled "Print" or "Exit Excel". This principle has stood me in good stead with most applications.

Anyone familiar with the old file menu and expecting things to be the same or similar in the new version would not be at all surprised to find that the option to exit the application was the last one in this list, I would have thought.

Fair enough, it’s not a regular, old style menu

A couple of ways this does not behave like a regular menu in the traditional standard interface design we have all come to love (or at least get very very used to):

• The “recent documents” list appears in the right hand half when the left hand menu does not require a submenu, rather than extending the menu to ridiculous lengths (especially if you crank up the setting to show the maximum of 50). Unusual? Non-(old)-standard? Sure, but you have to admit it’s useful, makes good sense and requires less mouse travel. And who does not love the ability to pin documents to the recent list by the way?
• yes, some of the menu items (such as Save As) have something like that weird dual-purpose behaviour where you can click the button and you get something very like it used to be, or you can hover and move to the right for the submenu. But these are better than the similar behaviour of split buttons on the ribbon in a big way – you only have to hover to immediately discover the submenu, unlike the buttons where you have to click one half or the other to see what is going on.
  The only menu item where this actually makes any difference is Save As. You click the left half and the SaveAs dialog is presented with the current saved workbook format selected (or .xlsx for a new unsaved workbook or some other default if you have a group policy in force to keep people in compatibility mode for some reason). A click in the right brings up the same box with the chosen format selected. Big deal. (The Print menu has print as an option on the right too, and no discernible difference to me which you choose to click on, so although it has the dual-control thing there is no downside to the user if they don’t understand it).

For me the only behaviour which is odd enough (in that it is unexpected for a normal menu) to warrant special mention on my Excel 2007 or Office 2007 update training courses is that the menu items can be added to the QAT with a right click, thus proving that they are buttons, this is therefore a dialog not a menu and Simon was right after all! Well, up to a point…

Should File actions be mixed with application Options?

As for “Excel Options” (or Word, PowerPoint etc. options) being out of place in here when everything else is “file” stuff, the same could be said for Options being on the Tools menu historically when everything else there was to do with content (of a spreadsheet or document or whatever) – like spelling checker, track changes or Goal Seek. It was never intuitive in the first place, we just got so used to it over time that anything seems weird (like non-Qwerty keyboards). Other application authors had options (or preferences) on the file menu years ago (Jasc Paint Shop Pro being one example I know of) or put it somewhere else such as the Edit menu. I don’t use Acrobat reader anymore, but I’m pretty sure Adobe put the preferences on the edit menu, which actually sounds right when you want to edit your preferences for the application, but never felt right because I was not editing anything in the usual sense.

I find that people quickly grasp the idea that anything to do with the whole document or whole application is on the Office button. It’s (sort of) a separation of content editing tools (on the Ribbon) and meta-tools (on the Office button).

What about other “whole document” options like Page Setup?

Arguably, Page Setup could have been left there for most people’s purposes (and Print Area in Excel), but they make good sense on the Page Layout ribbon, especially since they can differ from sheet to sheet in Excel or section to section in Word (thus failing my “whole document” test).

I actually prefer the visibility of the options on the Ribbon, especially Scale to Fit – how many times have you wasted a trip to the Page Setup dialog only to find the “fit to 1 page” option you wanted was already set. Now you see it before you go there. And having a true “Automatic” setting rather than a kludge of putting in more pages than you ever expected to need, (which worked until some twit turned on borders for a huge cell range or even the whole sheet). Now I just want the current margins to be obvious, and ideally adjustable from the Ribbon rather than another dialog – “Last custom setting” that I used is not the same as what is current for this document. Especially since Page Setup is one of the few dialogs which is still modal so I have to click OK, find out if everything now fits and wraps where I want it and try again.

To me it would also have made some sense to include other “whole file” operations such as Protect Workbook and Share Workbook on the Office button menu in Excel (maybe in the Prepare sub-menu) as well as on the Review tab of the Ribbon, in order to provide more discoverability? I think it makes as much sense as the Restrict Permission options being there, making it really easy for users to discover that they can’t use this feature without jumping through hoops or having a clued-up IT department to sort out certificate goodies for them.

What would you like to see on the Office button menu? Or on the Ribbon in general?