Gates debuts Vista, Office features at developers conference

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Architect Bill Gates introduced new features of the next versions of Microsoft Office and Windows in his keynote at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles Tuesday.

Gates' speech to kick off Microsoft's developer meeting included the first public demo of the forthcoming Microsoft Office, code-named Office 12. The demo, which showed off a newly designed user interface (UI), was delivered by Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker (IW) Product Management Group.

Capossela also demonstrated new UI features of the latest build of Windows Vista, the next version of the Windows client operating system (OS). Both Vista and Office are expected to be available in the second half of 2006. Microsoft also distributed the latest version of Vista to developers at the PDC Tuesday.

In his talk, Gates said that Microsoft has delivered on the promise it laid out at the PDC in 2000 to provide a Web-services based platform, .NET, that would allow business users to share files and data in a standard way through XML. "That was quite a proposition to put forth when Win32 was dominant," he said, of the shift to an entirely new development platform.

Now that the .NET foundation has been laid and the platform is being widely adopted, the next step for Microsoft is to more closely integrate the features of the applications within Windows and Office to allow the sharing of files and information across an enterprise as seamlessly as possible, Gates said.

This experience will come in part by giving users a more visual presentation of the data and tasks they need to accomplish, he said.

"We need to make it easy for people to visualize information that comes from any location," Gates said.

Microsoft is adding new features to both Windows and Office to bring information stored in the applications, as well as those applications' tools, as close to the surface as possible, he said.

To demonstrate this, Capossela highlighted UI features of Office that make it easier for users to tap into features they may not know existed because they were not easily accessible in previous versions.

"When we asked people what would you like us to do in the next version of Office, nine times out of 10 people have named something that is already in the product," Capossela said. "In Office 12, we are making a much more innovative UI to help you get better results faster."

To bring those features to the forefront, Microsoft is providing a visual toolbar across the top of the various Office applications that allow users to easily point and click on features that were hidden in drop-down menus in previous versions of Office, Capossela said.

For instance, in Microsoft PowerPoint, users can simply click on an icon in the tool window to change text on a slide into graphics, and choose from various styles for those graphics. In Microsoft Word, users can preview how an entire document will look in a font by simply scrolling over one of the choices in the font menu. Word users also can easily add text boxes by clicking on an icon, and choose from a gallery of different styles of boxes that will easily change the appearance of the document, he demonstrated.