As you probably know if you’ve been trying out Office 2007 beta 2 yourself, there’s an updated engine of Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search engine available for use with the beta, which enables better search functionality in Outlook and OneNote.

This engine has been working fine for me in Outlook (well, after the initialization in the beginning, and if I skip the facts that the data files take up more than 1GB of space on my laptop and apparently need to be maintained regularly at the cost of a lot of HD traffic), but it never worked at all in OneNote. In the beginning I asked about this in the OneNote forum and I was told that the initialization had probably not finished (which was true, I guess), but several days have passed now and things still don’t work. I can search within single pages, but I can’t search across page borders – and the nice demo in the “getting started” section, where text in an image is supposed to be found, doesn’t work either. For completeness’ sake: when searching across page borders (i.e. searching for something that can’t be found in the current page), the first time I hit Enter after entering the search word(s), nothing happens at all. The second time I hit Enter, this dialog pops up (for good measure, it pops up twice):

Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to write about. Two days ago I found that searching had stopped working in Outlook as well. Every time I tried it, I got a message (right inside the list panel in Outlook) saying “Outlook cannot perform your search.” Now I found what the problem was: apparently the Windows Search service had somehow hung itself up. It was running alright, I had checked that before – but after I restarted it (no, I had never rebooted my system since installing the beta) manually today, the search suddenly went back to normal. In Outlook, that is, OneNote still misbehaves in precisely the same way.

Here’s great news – I had just wondered about it earlier today, and now there’s actually a quick way to get some feedback to Microsoft about the Office 2007 beta. This blog post explains it nicely, and here’s the download in case the MSDN blogs are inaccessible (which they sometimes seem to be).

Can’t say if this is really specific to PowerPoint, but I just noticed that PowerPoint 2007 regularly uses the clipboard internally.

I’ve been using ClipMate for a few years now, which is a really fantastic clipboard monitor/archiver tool with a lot of functionality around clipboard use. ClipMate also has a setting to produce a sound when the content of the clipboard changes, and that’s what made me notice that clipboard content was regularly changed while I was creating and editing slides in PowerPoint. Specifically, when the new live preview functions kicked in while I was hovering the mouse cursor over the Ribbon, this happened all the time.

Looking at ClipMate’s Explorer window, I can only see that PowerPoint is apparently pushing empty image data to the clipboard. It does this several times with a block of same size, then the size changes at some point, to be repeated several times again. No idea why this happens, but I don’t like it…

Why is this a bad idea? Well, simply put, the clipboard is not a tool to be used for application-internal purposes. The clipboard content should be defined by the user of a Windows computer, not by the applications running on that computer. Any user who’s not using a clipboard monitor will lose clipboard content when an application just writes its own stuff over the existing content, and this in turn will give the impression of the computer behaving irrationally, as the user is not aware that a change to the clipboard content has occurred at all. So far, I had only found a few applications doing this, usually of the kind where I might expect the programmer not to know better – finding this kind of bad behaviour in a Microsoft Office application is a completely different thing, and I certainly hope they’ll fix this.

Which brings me to a different and really unrelated topic: Where’s the “send feedback” menu entry? They have all this fancy automatic crash reporting stuff, but I have to find an online forum somewhere myself before I can send such reports in? (Actually I have no idea whether that’s what they want me to do. Will have to go look for it when (if) I have the time.)

I posted before about a few inconsistencies in the Office 2007 UI, and now I found that there’s not even a common UI document model underneath the various applications. I did some tests with PowerPoint, Word and Excel – what I want is really simple: I want to be able to open more than one document at once, and I want each document to appear in its own window. Of course each of those windows should have its own button in the task bar (it wouldn’t cross my mind to mention this specifically, but as I found out, this is apparently not a normal thing to expect). I have three screens attached to my computer, so I want to be able to view several documents of the same type next to each other, and I want to use Alt-Tab to switch between main windows, because my task bar is seldom where I need it and always so full that I can’t easily find the right button anyway.

So here’s how the three applications behaved in my test.

Word

There’s an option called “Show all windows in the Taskbar” (Advanced/Display) in the options dialog. This effectively switches between an old-style MDI interface and a new-style interface that behaves exactly like I would expect (see above). Good! The drawback about MDI is that there’s no Windows menu anywhere to be seen, so the handling of a number of MDI windows is probably more difficult then it used to be.

Excel

Excel has a similar option (same name, but this time it in the Personalize/Top options for working with Excel section) as Word, but the result is different. After analyzing it for a while, I would say that Excel simply always works as an MDI container. When the option to show all windows in the task bar is switched on, there are two differences:

1. The task bar shows one button for each open Excel workbook, although there’s always just one Excel main window.
2. The close button for maximized MDI child windows vanishes. I can still close them if they are not maximized, though… I guess the reason for the disappearance of the close button is that I’m supposed to use the main window close button. In this mode, the main windows doesn’t close the main window, but instead the active child window. Ridiculous.

    

In my quest to make Excel behave the way I want it to, I tried to run multiple instances of the application, and I was surprised to see that this actually works! No matter what the button option is set to, it’s possible to run Excel more than once to get multiple main windows on screen.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint has, once again, a similar option, and this time it can be found in the same place as in Word. But the behaviour of the application itself is closer to what Excel does: it works as an MDI container always, and the option switches the number of buttons in the task bar. In contrast to Excel though, when the option is On, there are no MDI child window buttons at all. So the only way to switch between one child window and another is to use the Windows task bar.

In contrast to Excel, it turned out to be impossible to run multiple instances of PowerPoint. Every time a new instance is run, a new document is created in the existing instance instead.

Summary

So we have at least three different UI document models in these three applications. All three of the applications can be used as MDI applications, but in absence of proper in-application window handling (no Windows menu!), this is not very useful. Switching off the MDI mode has three different results – multiple main windows in Word, no real effect at all in Excel and MDI without child window buttons in PowerPoint. The workaround of running multiple app instances is available in Excel, in PowerPoint the only way to see multiple presentations on screen at the same time is to use the broken MDI mode. Way to go, Microsoft!

Now we’ve been told about the fantastic Ribbon for so long… somehow I expected to find it everywhere (and I actually like it, but that’s a different topic). Outlook doesn’t have it though – are there not enough menu entries and toolbar buttons in Outlook to warrant the Ribbon? Then again, one look at the Outlook Options dialog tells me that the UI improvement team skipped this application… it’s as ugly and confusing as ever.

Outlook at least recognizes the theming setting I made in another Office application and comes up in sexy Vista grey, even though I’m on Windows XP. OneNote, on the other hand, doesn’t have a Ribbon either – although it’s got a menu bar, 9 toolbars with around 130 buttons in total – and it doesn’t even do theming. So we have at least (I’m sure I’m missing something) three different looks throughout Office 2007.

If you ask me, this has always been one big problem for Office: the fact that the various components were so horribly different, in many ways. They looked different, they felt different… it’s always been like that, unless you stayed with Word and Excel. I think it would be a really good move for MS to work over the UIs of all the Office applications. I would assume that somewhere in a four year development cycle there should be room for this.

Update: Hehe… I hadn’t even noticed yet, but actually most of the windows in Outlook do have Ribbons – just the main window doesn’t. Now if that’s not intuitive

So here’s Microsoft being themselves again… hundreds of people are complaining about the fact that Office 2007 can’t be activated right now, at least since this morning apparently. It’s nice that I can run “the software” 50 times without activation, but as “the software” includes all the single applications in the Office Professional package, this isn’t very much. After having a look at each app just once and getting Outlook to the point where it now synchronizes with my Exchange server, I’m down to about 30 starts left.

I’m not saying Microsoft shouldn’t have problems… I’m saying they could try communicating with their users, especially those who are trying to take time out of their own busy days to help MS test their software. So far there must be tens of threads about the activation problem in the forum linked above, and I have yet to find a single reply from somebody at MS, or any other information about the problem or its solution.

Go here to get it. Mind you, I don’t know if there are any restrictions – I had registered on a similar page a while ago, in the hope of being on the beta at some point. You have to login with your passport and enter a bit of additional information, but once you’ve done that, the download starts immediately. Have fun!

I just had to pass this on… if, like me, you have spent countless hours with the original Incredible Machine games, you must watch this video. Via MakeYouGoHmm.com, here’s the video.

I’m currently at the SDC in the Netherlands and I’m having a pretty good time demonstrating our tools and components to everybody. CodeRush and Refactor! are of course always popular, but I’ve also talked to people about (and actually demonstrated!) XPO, the eXpressApp Framework and any number of isolated problems with our various products. Mainly there’s a lot of praise, and somebody actually shook my hand in passing, saying “thank you for bringing Developer Express here”.

There are many people here who have some experience with Delphi (maybe it’s because David I is here, he might have brought them along ), but our .NET stuff is also interesting to most. Apparently there are many Delphi who have at least tried using Delphi for .NET, and many of those are pondering using C# as well, at least for a specific project.

Mark Miller should be helping me here at the booth, but since he’s very badly prepared for the sessions he’s supposed to be doing, he’s off to the speakers’ room most of the time, preparing… or so he says.

Oh and Guy, what was that score again?

Today I attended an event here in London, organized by Microsoft and Computer Arts, titled “Designing Next Generation User Experiences”. It was a mixed experience, probably due to the fact that the attendees were very diverse in their backgrounds. In the end it provided good insight into the new Microsoft Expression tools and their role in next generation WPF applications.

Most of these tools I had known already because their CTPs have been available for a while, but this was the first time I saw the Expression Web Designer in action, and the CTP version of that (which they gave to all of us) was apparently the first released to any public group.

One of the main features of the Web Designer seems to be its ability to work with CSS styles a lot more intelligently than FrontPage ever managed, hence the title of this post. But other features that were shown also seemed like great ideas – for example, the designer can create and customize an XSLT stylesheet automatically based on a visual design created for a block of  XML data. I was rather impressed, I must say – even though, or perhaps because, I don’t normally do that much web design or ASP.NET development myself.

Anyway, if this is interesting to you, be sure to look out for the CTP in the usual places. They mentioned no timescale, but I seem to remember that the CTP should be generally available in the future.

Go here to see what the agenda of DDD day 3 looks like, and then register here. Finally, here’s the page for the Geek Dinner that’s being organized for the evening after the event. See you there!