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While we are talking about the new user interface, I thought I would mention another feature the user interface team has added that I think will prove to be very helpful to a lot of users. The basic idea is to take tooltips, which are useful little devices, and add some additional capabilities. Let’s briefly walk through a few examples.
When you hover over a command in the ribbon in Excel 2007, you will see the name of the feature and they keyboard shortcut (if one exists) (note, we have not been completely thorough about this in the past, but we plan to fix that this version). In addition, you will see a short description of what the feature is for and, when it makes sense, when you might want to use it. Here are a few examples (sorry, printscreen does not capture my mouse pointer, so you will have to pretend it is there).
Text To Columns
Merge and Centre
The idea is to give the user an idea as to what the feature is without requiring them to look it up in help or on the web. Help on that feature is also readily available with the press of a button.
Another thing the user interface team has done is added image support to tooltips. This gives us the ability to use images to help communicate what a feature can be used for.
Trace Precedents
It also gives us the ability to show the user previews of dialogs they could launch as they mouse around the UI.
Format Cells
I can hear several of you asking “can I turn this off”? The answer is yes, you can turn this off and revert back to tooltips a la Office 2003.
One other thing I wanted to show today was the fact that you can collapse the ribbon simply by clicking twice on a tab (there is also a keyboard shortcut). This can be useful when you want to maximize your “grid area” either because you don’t need to interact with the application’s commands, or because you are accessing them through the keyboard.
Thin Ribbon
Comments: (12) Collapse
The "Merge and center" tooltip says "Joins the selected cells into one larger cell and centers the contents in the new cell. This is often used to create labels that span multiple columns".
This is misleading on a number of levels.
- "Merge and center" works in both directions, so any reference to "large" or "column" is inappropriate or needlessly limiting. If a user tries to find how to merge rows, how is (s)he supposed to click on that button based on the description?
- then it says "centers" : it's not true, the resulting merged cell is horizontally center aligned but not vertically center aligned. As a user, to me this is both misleading and... a bug.
- then it says "one new cell" : the grid never creates a new cell, this would imply the old cells are still there (only hidden in z-order). That's a metaphore I guess, but I'm not sure the metaphore plays well in a technical description.
- then it says "often used...multiple columns" : alright, since this sentence is only an example, I can't really complain. But again "column" is misleading.
- then, the worst of it all, is the fact that it does not say that this button can also be used to undo cells that have been merged into a logical one. It's ok that you perhaps want users to use the "undo" button or shortcut to go backwards after they've used this merge function and thought that they would rather not, but that would not meet all scenarios : for instance, I open the document (the undo stack is empty), and I want to remove the "merge" on a particular set of cells.
That's one example to explain my sentiment over this "tooltip one-size-fits-all" concept which is new to Office 2007 (since previous versions only had a single-tip tooltip).
Based on reading users problems on Excel related forums, I would certainly have expected a revamp of the whole wrap/merge/autofit tool set, which has always been a way for Excel to ask users to do the heavy lifting. It's nice to keep things backwards compatible, but I would have expected a more prominent theming concept, and only resort to "low-level" merge/wrap/autofit in the case where there is no other option left. That would have the nice effect of keeping the concept of free-flow conveyed by the grid, and yet provide more productive formatting tools. Note that the above can be fixed by simply 1) putting theming controls before the low-level tools in the UI 2) better yet, let the user scramble the ribbon to meet their needs (which if you are a regular user have clearly nothing to do with an occasional user) : and we are back to toolbars!
PS : I am also concerned by the sheer amount of additional bitmaps that get part of this UI, especially when they appear in a tooltip. I think there is a checkbox in the Excel options to disable super tool tips. I don't remember if that allows to get simple one-line tooltips instead.
"you can collapse the ribbon simply by clicking twice on a tab"
I think that it can happen without knowing, just like anytime you don't double-click fast enough on a file in Windows Explorer and end up editing its name. I am concerned by whoever would end up with the ribbon taken away, with no clue on how to take it back. Perhaps a caption message would help.
Mike-
While your observations might be technically correct, trying to make the tooltips ultra-precise would make them much more difficult to read.
Easy to read and understand is a higher priority in this case.
I think the wording is fine as-is. The only comment I have is that a comment indicating this is a toggle might be helpful.
Images are thousand of words. For new users, this is especially true since naming may be meaningless. So there could be 3 levels for tool tips that should be easily defined from the UI:
1- Maximum level: using pictures as much as possible, with text (new users)
2- Medium level: mostly text
3- No tool tips
Why here is no picture can be showed?
David
These super tips look like a good idea, and I'm pleased we have control over show/hiding them.
cheers
Simon
Mike. Thanks for the feedback; I will pass that along to the content authors. There is an "off" setting for super tooltips (they go back to Excel 2003 tooltips). Also, you don't need to double-click on a ribbon to hide or show a tab ... so even if a user does get in this state accidently, the next click on a tab will unhide it.
Brad, Jean, Simon, thanks for the feedback.
Kevin, I don't understand your question.
David, what Kevin probably says is that all pictures are gone from your blog. I don't see them either!
Yes, none of the images can be seen, what's going on?
Oh, good I thought it was just me having problems with the pictures ... even pictures that used to work seem to have vanished now.
Tony
Server problem. Working on it.
Super Tooltips are a great idea. Has the Office team dropped a suggestion to the Windows team to add this kind of functionality to Windows' tooltips, so that other applications can have their own super tooltips in a consistent, uniform way? :-)
Comments: (loading) Collapse