One of the Pillars of the Word 2010 vision outlined in Scott's post on Framing the Release was "Polished User Experiences". This pillar represents a desire to dramatically improve a set of scenarios that define Word's core user experiences in terms of polish, ease of use, and responsiveness – basically, setting and holding a high bar for user experience excellence. Work that we did in support of this part of the vision isn't necessarily all new features, but is rather about looking at the experience of performing some common types of activities in Word, and evaluating not just whether you can be successful, but is the experience a good one – does is feel polished and seamless.

One such core scenario is working with long or structured documents, and the simple tasks of reading and moving around in the document, searching for content, or manipulating the outline and headings. Word 2007 and other previous versions of the product had a variety of relevant features or tools available, some of which date back many releases – in particular document map, find, and browse objects. The new Navigation Pane is an attempt to bring these features together in a fresh, cohesive and polished experience.

The Microsoft Word 2010 Navigation Pane

One of the new pieces of functionality you'll find in Word 2010 is something we call the "Navigation Pane". This pane hosts a set of related features for getting around in your document, searching for content, and manipulating the structure and organization of headings. Essentially, this task pane replaces and improves upon the old "Document Map" and "Thumbnails" panes, as well as integrating Find and even some aspects of the little known Object Browser.

By default, the pane is docked on the left (as shown above), but can be moved to the right, or even floated independent of the document window. You can show or hide the pane on the View tab of the ribbon.

The primary bits of the navigation pane are called out in the following figure, and then described in more detail in turn.

Browse Headings

The headings view of the navigation pane, shown below, is the updated replacement for the document map. It is basically a series of nested "tabs", each of which corresponds to a heading in the document.

There is a wealth of functionality available here…

Viewing and getting around

• As you would expect and can probably deduce from the image, the heading tabs are organized as a hierarchy, and can be expanded and collapsed as desired by clicking the little expand/collapse triangle on the left end of the tab. With the right-click context menu, you can collapse all, expand all, or collapse to a specific level (e.g. show all heading 2 or higher, but collapse everything else).
• The tab corresponding to the heading whose content you are currently editing (e.g. where your insertion point is) is highlighted.
• Clicking on a tab will scroll the document to that location, and put your insertion point at the start of that heading.
• If you edit a heading, or type a new one, it shows up in the navigation pane in real time. The navigation pane tabs themselves aren't directly editable, but they stay in sync with the content as you edit in your document.
• The top-most item shown above is only present if there is content between the top of the document and the first heading, and represents the beginning of the document.
• If you are working on a document with multiple authors, the navigation pane can give you some sense of where those folks are and what they're up to.
  • First, a small pawn icon (or multi-pawn, as appropriate) will appear on the right-hand edge of any tab corresponding to a heading under which another user is editing.
  • Second, when another user saves and I sync to merged that new content into the document, the tab corresponding to the location of the new content will highlight, again helping me quickly get a feel for where changes are occurring (and I might want to go there and take a look).
• And finally, when you use the new Find feature by typing a search term into the box at the top of the pane, any heading whose content contains that term you searched for will be highlighted yellow. This is handy if you know you're looking for a particular term in a particular region of the document.

Rearranging and moving content

• Drag and drop a tab in the list to move the heading plus all of its content to a new location in the document. If that heading has subheadings, the structure remains intact, and simply moves the whole branch. This makes rearranging your document incredibly quick and easy. Bonus: Ctrl+drag to duplicate the content.
• While you cannot directly drop arbitrary content onto a heading tab, you can hover over a tab while dragging to navigate to that heading. You can then drop the content in the document where you want it.

Manipulating the outline

• Right-click on a heading tab to promoting or demoting the heading up or down a level. Changing the level of a heading that has subheadings under it also changes those headings to the appropriate new level.
• Also on the context menu, you can add a new heading of the same depth above or below a given item, or add a new subheading under it. This essentially inserts a new blank paragraph with the appropriate Heading Style applied. Then as you type the heading text, it appears in the navigation pane heading tab.

Additional functionality

• Right-click on a heading and choose Select to select the heading and all of its content
• Choose Delete to delete the heading and its content
• And finally right-clicking and choosing Print is equivalent of selecting everything from the start of that heading down to just before the next heading, clicking the File tab, clicking Print in the Backstage view, and then changing the "Print What" option to "Selection". Not an everyday task, but handy when you need to print just a particular region of the document.

Browse Pages

Clicking on the "Browse the pages in your document" tab gives you a view of all the pages in the doc. This is very similar to the thumbnails pane in previous versions of Word.

Clicking a page's thumbnail takes you to that page in the document, as always.

There are really only two big improvements in this part of the pane, when compared with the existing one:

• First, it now works in all the layout views – web layout, and even draft and outline.
• And second, when you have searched for something via the new Find feature, the list of pages shown dynamically filters to show only the pages that contain the term you searched for. This is another super useful way to find what you're looking for. I find it especially handy when the thing I'm searching for isn't text, such as a particular table, chart, or image.

Browse Search Results

Finally, the navigation pane hosts a search results list, as shown below.

This list contains and item for each of the matches in your document. In the example above, you can see I searched for "navigation", and it found 3 instances of the term, each of which is represented by a clickable item in the list, with a brief snippet of the surrounding text to give a bit of context. Clearly I took that screenshot early in the authoring process for this post, because there are now over a dozen hits, and I'm still writing… J

Clicking an item takes you to that location in the document.

In my next post, I'll discuss the new find experience in more detail.

Conclusion

Well I think that's about it for the basics of the new navigation pane. Based on early feedback, I'm pretty confident it is going to be useful for a great number of customers, in a variety of scenarios. There's a lot of room for additions in the future, but I think this is a super solid start that enables a lot of functionality.

There are a number of design decisions we made along the way, and I'd be interested in whether any of them will pose any problems for you. For example, as you can see in the images of the navigation pane, each heading takes up more vertical pixels than the old document map entries did. They're way more useful, but it's undeniable that you see fewer headings at a time without having to scroll the list. Similarly, you could configure the look of the old document map items by tweaking the doc map style, but now each heading is essentially a UI control, and so uses the default UI font. This also means that you don't see things like tracked changes or other formatting within the text of a heading as displayed on the heading tab. We also don't guess about things you might have intended to be headings, such as lines of text in bold or all caps – we strictly pay attention only to content with an explicitly applied outline level (unlike the old doc map, which would use autoformatting logic to add those levels). I do think we've found the sweet spot on all of these issues, but would be interested in feedback if you feel strongly to the contrary.

Thanks for reading, any comments or questions are welcome!

--Scott Walker, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Word