Mac Mojo: The Office for Mac Team Blog

Great looking presentations made easy with PowerPoint 2008

Radhika S — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:07:43 GMT

Want to design a professional-looking presentation? The new PowerPoint 2008 puts the control in your hands to create compelling visuals and layout with only few clicks of your mouse. Watch this demo for a quick overview of the different features you can use to create a great-looking presentation, and to see for yourself that you won't have to learn PowerPoint all over again.

PowerPoint Great Features (16MB; 6:15)

Note: This video requires QuickTime.

This video shows how to:

• Quickly give all text, charts, backgrounds, and tables a consistent look.

• Create attractive information graphics and diagrams from text.

• Accurately align everything on your slide.

• Organize and import slides directly from other PowerPoint presentations.

• Save presentations in the best format for your audience.

• Use presenter tools while your audience sees only what you want them to see.

Solver For Excel 2008: Available By Mid-September

Gavin Shearer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:07:30 GMT

Last month, I posted to Mac Mojo about Solver and Excel 2008, where I explained that the Excel team was working hard to bring Solver functionality back for Office 2008 customers.

Today, I am delighted to announce that Solver is definitely coming back to Excel 2008. This is very, very, very good news for anyone that uses Excel for linear programming or nonlinear optimization problems (Mac-using MBA students, I'm looking at you...).

Here are the three things you should know:

Solver for Excel 2008 will be free.

Solver for Excel 2008 will be available as a download from the Web site of Frontline Systems (www.solver.com/mac).

Solver for Excel 2008 will be available by mid-September (just in time for back to school!).

So how was this accomplished, and how does it work?

Technical Approach

Developing a Solver for Excel 2008 presented some interesting technical challenges. In Excel 2004, Solver relies on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to function. Since VBA is not a part of Office 2008, we had to find a way of identifying those areas that needed VBA and replacing them with something equivalent.

Many people don't realize this, but Solver is not actually a Microsoft product. Rather, the Solver code is owned and developed by a Nevada firm called Frontline Systems. Frontline creates and sells a line of industrial-strength Solver products that are used in commercial and government settings. Their basic, free version of Solver has shipped with Excel for many, many years.

Frontline are the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to Solver, and, once MacBU began hearing from customers about Solver's absence, we began working with Frontline to figure out how to solve the problem (pardon the pun).

The final solution was to package up Solver's functionality into its own Mac OS X application, Solver.app, and then use AppleScript to communicate between Solver and Excel. This approach is simple, elegant, uses proven Apple technologies, and results in an experience that is very, very similar to that of using Solver in Excel 2004.

(It's also worth pointing out that this approach required us to 'eat our own dogfood' - Solver was developed using the same AppleScript techniques we recommend for other developers who want to build on top of Office 2008.)

How It Works

We have attempted to make the process of obtaining and using Solver as simple as possible.

Obtaining Solver

The process of downloading Solver is (eerily!) similar to the process for getting any other Mac software off the Internet:

Download Solver for Excel 2008 from the Frontline Web site.

Unpack Solver by double-clicking it.

Move the unpacked Solver.app to your /Applications folder (or to any other folder you like).

If you plan to use Solver a lot, drag the icon to your Dock.

That's it! You're all installed.

Using Solver

Once Solver is on your machine, it's ready to start working with Excel. To use Solver:

Launch Excel 2008.

Build (or load) the workbook with your Solver model.

Click the Solver icon in your Dock (or double-click the Solver icon in your /Applications folder). Solver will open (see Figure 1).

At this point, you use Solver much as always - by selecting cells and ranges in Excel to serve as constraints or targets, setting your options for the model, and then clicking 'Solve'. Solver will attempt to solve the model and will let you know if it finds a solution.

Figure 1 - Solver.app Running On Mac OS X

Next Steps

As mentioned, above, Solver will be available as a free download from Frontline's Web site by mid-September.

We will put up a notice right here on Mac Mojo when the bits are available for download; if you read Mac Mojo through RSS, you'll be notified very quickly (and if you don't get Mojo through RSS, why not? Try Safari or NetNewsWire for a great RSS experience). Frontline will also have an announcement on their Web site.

I'd like to close on a personal note. One of the first things I learned first-hand at Microsoft is that software is a team sport: nothing happens in this business unless a lot of good people, each with their own unique talents, work very hard to make it happen. This project (especially coming together as quickly as it did) was no exception. In addition to the thanks owed to my colleagues in Excel, all of us here at MacBU owe a huge "THANK YOU" to our friends at Frontline Systems, who were above-and-beyond professional, responsive, and just plain wonderful to work with.

So: Solver. Free download. Mid-September. Watch this space for details.

Brave New Fonts

Derek Snook — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:08:30 GMT

Office 2008 for Mac introduces new and updated fonts for Office users, including new default fonts throughout the suite.

The new default fonts are part of seven families of modern and beautiful typefaces in the Microsoft ClearType font collection. These cross-platform fonts look great on the Mac and in print, though each font also includes ClearType hinting for Windows screen display.

Calibri, designed by Dutch type designer Luc(as) de Groot, is a default font for Word, PowerPoint text, and for Entourage HTML messages. A modern sans-serif font with subtle rounded terminals and corners, Calibri’s proportions retain strong readability in tight lines of small or large text.

(These screenshots are from my MacBook Pro, but you'll need to see these fonts rendered in Office on your screen for true fidelity.)

Cambria, designed by another Dutch designer, Monotype Imaging’s Jelle Bosma, is also a default font for Word. This serif font has even spacing and proportions with strong diagonal hairlines, vertical serifs and restrained form, lending itself well to business documents, email, and web design.

With Cambria and Calibri, we bring forward the legacy of elegant and readable serif and sans serif fonts for Word’s text.

Consolas is a monospaced font, also designed by Luc, used as the default for plain text messages in Entourage. The font is designed with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts, allowing for more comfortable reading of extended text onscreen, for plain text email, or for reading and programming code.

Three other fonts complete the ClearType font collection for Latin text in Office 2008. Corbel is a sans serif, crisp font with elegant curves, designed to give an uncluttered and clean appearance.Candara brings additional flair to sans serif choices with high curves, wide apertures, and a lively attitude. Constantia is a wedge-serif and features small x-height and long extenders. Each of these families retains readability onscreen and on the printed page, and include italics, bold, and bold italic styles.

Meiryo is the Japanese typeface member of the ClearType font collection in Office 2008. Meiryo is a sans serif type with open, well-proportioned forms, retaining clarity at small sizes and in tight spacing. Meiryo includes both Japanese glyphs designed by Eiichi Kono and the C&G type foundry and Latin glyphs designed by Matthew Carter. Also, MS Mincho and MS Gothic, both fixed-width and proportional, have been updated with additional Japanese range support in Office 2008.

The ClearType font collection has been designed to work together well, and extra attention was made to design the non-Latin scripts in parallel with the Latin sets. You’ll see this in Meiryo with the Japanese and Latin text sharing harmonizing alignments and weight. Each font includes Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic script support.

You will find these new fonts frequently used in Office Themes. Themes bring a unified look and feel to documents by providing a set of fonts, colors, graphics effects, and slide layouts (for PowerPoint) to Office documents. Other fonts new to Office 2008 were also included to add variety to the look and feel of Office Themes, including: Franklin Gothic Book and Medium, Gill Sans MT, Lucida Sans Unicode, Perpetua, and Twentieth Century MT.

If you own Office 2004 for Mac, the six Latin fonts are installed with the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0 to provide additional layout fidelity when opening files that were authored in Office 2007 for Windows or Office 2008 for Mac. You must have Office 2004 for Mac installed on your boot volume for these fonts to be installed.

If you’re working with Office 2008, you’ve been using some of the new fonts already, but I encourage you to take a tour and get to know the unique look and feel of all of them, you’ll like what you see while adding attractive choices to your work and designs.

So what's it like to work in MacBU?

Nadyne Mielke — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:08:01 GMT

One of the questions that I get asked a lot -- whether it's from people at user groups or coming to visit our booth at Macworld Expo, or via my blog -- is, "what's it like to work in MacBU?"

Let me first start off by saying that I'm a user experience researcher, and that I'm only one person of the more than 200 people in MacBU. As they say on the intertubes, YMMV — and I'm quite sure that the mileage definitely varies. Don't take my answer here as canonical. It's only my answer to that question, and it's quite possible that I'd give you a completely different answer in six months.

When Craig posted his ten reasons to join MacBU, I smiled and agreed with all of them, but I didn't think that the list captured what it's really like to work here. It's more than just a Letterman-esque top-ten list. Okay, the margarita machine really is quite cool, but it's not what makes me want to come into work in the mornings.

I have to admit that I'm a Mac geek. The Mac geek in me loves that I get to work on software that millions of Mac users use daily. It's my job to have a deep understanding of Mac users and what they're trying to accomplish with my software, whether it's managing their day or making a birthday gift. Being able to marry a personal interest in Macs to a professional job working on them is definitely one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning. Plus I've got awesome co-workers who share my Mac geek-ness, so our hallway and lunch conversations often include a shared geekery at the latest Mac geekery.

The thing that I like the most about working for MacBU is that, as an individual contributor on the team, my management chain leaves a lot up to my discretion. I have the opportunity — nay, the expectation — that I'm going to chart my own course. My manager relies on my experience and expertise to do what's needed for what I work on. This isn't to say that my manager doesn't help: I rely on my manager to act as a sounding board to ensure that I'm not going off-course, or when I'm unsure of how to proceed. I also rely on my manager to help me identify areas where I can grow in my skills and my career, as well as help to find the opportunities that I need to accomplish that growth. But on a day-to-day basis, the work that I do is largely self-directed. It's my job to identify what needs my attention, to prioritise everything, and to deliver what's needed to my teams. It's a huge responsibility, but it's also very freeing to have that kind of self-determination in what I do.

There are literally dozens of features that I can point to across all of our apps that came about because someone had a vision. They identified a need, and they made it happen. That's just awesome — it's not Craig and the senior managers handing things down from on high. We have that opportunity to make our products what we think they need to be. That's why I'm here. I don't feel like I'm just a cog in a big machine. I get to make a difference.

(After telling you why I'm here in MacBU, I'd be remiss if I didn't provide links to all of the jobs that we've currently got open, and I'll give special attention to two openings on my UX team: technical writer and user experience designer. Resumes for all of our open jobs can go to macjobs@microsoft.com!)