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In the course of writing this blog, between comments and direct emails, I would estimate that I have fielded over 1,000 questions. Of those, only one had anything to do with Tools|Options, which I found to be a surprisingly low number, given how often I hear people comment about it when I am talking to customers on the road. Like most of the UI in Office2007, Tools|Options has had a significant makeover (it is gone, really, replaced by a new design). Today I want to give an overview of those changes.
To start, let’s see where the functionality that was Tools|Options is located in the world of the ribbon. When you look at the contents of the File menu, you will see that there is an “Excel Options” button right next to “Exit Excel”.
(Click to enlarge)
When you press the button, you will see the new and improved experience for setting options in Excel (the examples I will walk through are all Excel, but the same thing has been done in Word, PowerPoint, Access, etc.).
One of the key things we are trying to do with the dialog is expose of the more important settings in the dialog clearly so they are easy to find and easy to set. Over the years, we have added many settings – some more useful than others – and as a result, it has become difficult for all but the most stalwart users to locate the interesting settings from the pile. This new design puts the most commonly changed settings up front, clears out settings that are infrequently changed to the “Advanced” tab, and allows us to categorize the rest into recognizable sections.
Another thing that you may notice are small “i”s besides some of the items. Hovering the mouse pointer over these icons will display a super tooltip providing a reasonable amount of information on what, specifically, the setting does.
Tomorrow, I will go through all the different tabs on the options, but before I signed off for the day, I wanted to point you at a post in Jensen Harris’ UI blog. The design I describe above is actually the second redesign of Tools|Options as part of the Office 2007 release. As those of you that used our first beta may remember, the first redesign of Tools|Options contained something called “expert mode”, which was our first attempt to simplify the whole experience. It didn’t quite work out the way we had envisioned, though, and after significant feedback from beta participants, the UI team came up with this second design. You can read all about the process it in this post.
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'Choose the most popular options in Excel.'
Most of the options you show are new to XL12. Most popular among beta users? Most popular among the Excel developer team?
As for most commonly changed, speaking only for myself the only options shown under Personalize that I've ever changed are 'Show all windows in the Taskbar' - always UNset, and 'Include this many sheets'. Neither are options most users would change more than once, and the same could be said for most of the others, as opposed to Calculation mode.
Settings that would be changed infrequently could be made less visible without unduly harming the new user experience.
One thing that looks very bad is 'Use this font' showing BODY FONT rather than a typeface. So y'all have decided to complicate Excel with section formatting as in Word? So not only does Excel need SmartArt to make it more like PP, it also needs section formatting to make it more like Word.
Will there still be a Registry key
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\\Excel\Options
with Options, Options3, Options5, Options6, Options95 values? [BTW, WTH is Options6 from?] Specifically, the first thing I change on new Excel installs is adding 4000H to Options3 in order to eliminate gridlines.
"adding 4000H to Options3 in order to eliminate gridlines"
To Harlan, thankyou for sharing that information. It's a beauty !
To Microsoft, please consider making the gridlines option a persistent setting.
Regards,
Vic Eldridge
Harlan, In response to your question 'Options6' starting from 0 through 15 in increments of 1 runs through the various combinations and toggles the default settings for 'Enable automatic percent entry' on the 'Edit' tab, 'Zoom on roll with IntelliMouse' on the 'General' tab and finally both 'Show names' and 'Show values' on the 'Chart' tab. I believe these were added for Excel97.
Nigel
Nigel, thanks. The others could be tied to specific Excel versions (other than Options), but there was no XL6 AFAIK.
Why replace the tabbed dialogs? Tabs are intuitive. That is why MS uses them for worksheets as well as for the help system and, now, the ribbon. Though simplification is good, replacing the tabs with two sets of seemingly unrelated information (i.e., two separate panes) is a step backwards.
If you want to move the headings of each page of options to the left of the dialog, you can still keep the tabs. Imagine an address book, with letter tabs on the edge. You'd have a tabbed dialog with the tabs on the side (instead of along the top.)
By the way, the (i) tooltips on "SOME OF THE ITEMS" are also no great leap forwards.
Why not restore context-sensitive help?
Every control should have that!
If users cannot figure out to right-click or click the ? icon at the upper-right and then click the control in question, why not do it like an automatic correction in Word/Excel (or a text book in Tablet PC Edition):
- when the mouse hovers over the control long enough, a small question mark icon should float up alongside the pointer. The user could then click that to get help. There could even be a drop-down pointer to get extended description (open help system) or do a search on that item in the help system.
"Always user ClearType"
Ask the IE7 guys how well-received that option was.
Harlan - yes, those settings still exist, 4000H still works. I am actually not sure where Excel6 comes from - I will ask around.
Francis, I will pass on the feedback to the team that built the options dialog. Ditto the help comment.
OK Harlan, we broke out the Excel archeologists, and here is our best guess. The numbering scheme was intact for Options3 (v 3) and Options5 (v5). Options95 is Excel95, of course. Options6 is almost certainly from Excel96, which was the "working name" for Excel97, except for some reason only the "6" in "96" was used.
So, uh, where's the full preview of the new options dialog? When you wrote this on Monday you stated, "Tomorrow, I will go through all the different tabs on the options."
Been busy with the public beta release?
First off, I read the linked article from Jensen Harris's blog on Expert Mode. Putting the button that accesses options next to the Exit button in the File dialog apparently under the Home tab in the ribbon will make it easy to find both for new and existing users?
Have y'all ever looked at any non-Microsoft software? Some other programs have various combinations of Preferences, Properties, Options and Settings. The point being that other software makes the distinction between, er, aspects that are specific to a given user and those that vary by document or session. For example, number of worksheets in new workbooks is something that would vary by user and likely be set once, while calculation mode would vary by session and/or workbook.
I think y'all missed the boat with respect to 'Expert Mode'. You should have left the preferences dialog as is with the simpler or more frequently changed settings. Then you should have added a separate applet for configuring the advanced settings, maybe making it a Control Panel applet. Would such a beast have been all that different than TweakUI from Windows PowerToys? Finally, put buttons in both the preferences dialog AND online help topics relating to the 'advanced' settings that would launch, er, TweakOffice.
IMO, workbook-specific settings should be in a separate dialog from application settings, so 2 dialogs, one for the active workbook's properties and another for the current session, and both should have a simple means of making the current settings the default settings for subsequent workbooks or sessions, ideally a button next to the OK button *outside* any of the tabs so easier to click at any time. That's *IF* y'all really do want to improve the user experience.
Thanks for the feedback. I will pass it along to the UI team.
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