Reading in the new Office

re: Reading in the new Office

Nikos — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 03:26:10 GMT

Great work!

Especially the "Reference Tools" with abilities to retrieve definitions and translate words within the app was much needed. In combination with the bookmarks solution and the page synchronization between Windows devices with the help of your Microsoft account the whole package provides a great reading experience!

From my test I see that reading works great with Word documents. However it does not work as good with PDF files especially those that contain rich graphics or use a magazine style theme. Is the reading mode exclusively focusing on displaying Word documents and will be limited with other files such as PDFs or full support for PDFs and other file types will come in a later time closer with the release date of Office 2013?

Finally I have a suggestion for the final product that I like to see and that is a Library section which organize in one place and includes all the files I want or have available for reading with the ability to add files manually on it or set my “library folder” and automatically display the documents included in that directory. The Cover Pages of all documents are nicely displayed in that Library to make it easy to spot or identify the document without reading the file name.

Second suggestion is regarding bookmarks. It’s great that Word remembers and can synchronize automatically the last page viewed across devices as a bookmark, but many times we need to have many bookmarks with comments or other information for the same file. So please allow to manually create multiple bookmarks for the same file in addition a good bookmark manager/viewer is also needed.

re: Reading in the new Office

tbee — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:47:07 GMT

Seem like a great improvement, but I would like to suggest another user experience improvement.

When editing in print layout (because of its WYSIWYG display) the cursor navigation via the keyboard can be frustrating. On a resolution large enough (1920x1080), when the zoom level is set to a value that is pleasant for reading, Word automatically switches to displaying two pages side by side. Now, when you are "massaging" text that happens to fall on a page break between the "left" and "right" page, each time you press "up" on the right page you do not end up on the bottom of the previous (left) page, but on the page visually above it. You then need to use the mouse to get the cursor where you want to.

I see this navigation as a result of supporting easy reading. So if this read mode that is described here is added, then can the edit mode please be modified to optimize editing?

re: Reading in the new Office

latinoscorp — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 21:23:38 GMT

The reference tools are great for teaching writing in a foreign language, as students can access dictionaries, and other sources, righ there as they write.

re: Reading in the new Office

Brandon — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:16:22 GMT

Is there a reason why you're not including the whole article in the RSS feed? It makes offline reading really difficult the way it is now.

re: Reading in the new Office

tracjim — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:16:19 GMT

Hi, Great to read the progress and advancements of word. Will it ever be possible to split screen with windows explorer and word at the same, rather than resizing each time. Maybe i have missed a trick here but something i coudl really use as i often have to copy data from explorer into word. All i can see to do currently is alt tab.

Would really appreciate feedback.

Jim

re: Reading in the new Office

Nikos — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 22:56:09 GMT

Great work!