Day: October 5, 2005

Jerry Yasir

Features of Office Code name “Office 12” help


Features of Office Code name "Office 12" help

  • Microsoft is introducing a new help viewer which is resizable and running in a separate process (so you’re not prevented from going to help when you have a modal dialog up in the Office application).  The viewer can be "pinned" so it stays on top of the application window, but it will stay on top of only that application window, not other applications you’re running.  This is handy if you’re trying to follow in the application a step-by-step process described in the help topic.
  • The viewer clearly shows whether you’re getting content from the Internet or This Computer and the control allows easy switching with a click.  While it was possible in Office 2003 to set Office to "prefer offline content", it required finding the right settings dialog box – now it’s right in the lower right corner of the help window.
  • Microsoft is going to update the offline help files regularly and make the updates available on Microsoft Update.  The schedule hasn’t been yet been set, but it will be at least with every Office service pack release.  They still won’t make all the content available on the web site available offline (they have a lot of content on the web site) but they’ll make a reasonable and growing subset available, and that which is available offline will get updated as they learn to improve it from customer feedback.

Jerry