In last week's post on Word's new UI, we touched on Ribbon and it was mentioned in comments to that post that the Ribbon is only one of many UI elements that make up what we are calling the new Microsoft® Office Fluent™ user interface. In today's post I'd like to talk about two other aspects of Word's new Fluent UI: Galleries and Live Preview.

Galleries

In Word 2007, you will notice a new piece of UI that shows the results of one or more commands versus the command(s) themselves. These are called Galleries.

Galleries are like legacy Word's font picker control on steroids. Specifically, with the font picker in legacy Word the look of the font was reflected in the font picker itself. The command in the font picker used to apply Times New Roman looked like Times New Roman, the command for Courier New looked like Courier New, etc.

This was a simple application of the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) concept to Word's user interface, but made picking the right font much easier than a uniform list of font names. It is much easier to pick the right font for your document from this list:

• Times New Roman
• Arial
• Courier New
• Verdana

Versus this list:

• Times New Roman
• Arial
• Courier New
• Verdana

In Word 2007, we have extended this WYSIWYG user interface goodness via Galleries to benefit features beyond fonts, such as (not an exhaustive list):

Styles

Tables

Cover Pages

Headers & Footers

Just like the WYSIWYG font picker made using fonts easier, Galleries make using: Headers, Footers, Cover Pages, Tables, Numbering Schemes, Water Marks, Page Layouts, Equations, Styles, Themes, Colors, Effects, Pictures, etc. easier.

Live Preview

While Galleries in and of themselves offer a more effective and efficient way to format a document, when you combine Galleries with another feature of the Fluent UI called "Live Preview", you get what I think is a revolutionary formatting experience in Word.

Specifically, Live Preview allows you to preview what a given Gallery command will do to your document, right in your document, without actually changing it.

Using Galleries and Live Preview, you can, for example, position an image in the upper left hand corner of your document without knowing anything about floating pictures, inline pictures, text wrapping, alignment, or anchoring, and you also don't have to click Undo over and over during the trial and error 'drag the picture around on the page' phase. The 'doing without knowing' part is enabled by the Picture Tools' Position Gallery, and the 'not having to click undo a bunch of times' is enabled by Live Preview.

Combining the two give you goodness such as…say you insert a picture into a Word document.

Now you want the picture in the upper right hand corner of the document, but instead of needing to know about floating pictures, inline pictures, text wrapping, alignment, or anchoring, you just click on the Picture Tools "Contextual Tab" (Contextual Tabs are Ribbon tabs that only surface when the object they affect is selected), and then put your mouse over the Gallery image of a document with a picture in the upper right hand corner.

As soon as your mouse is positioned over this Gallery image, you get a live preview (hence the feature name) of what the command would do to your document without actually doing anything to the document itself.

You could then also easily preview what your document would look like if you positioned the image in the other three corners without doing anything to the document simply by hovering over those Gallery images.

In Sum

Galleries provide a more effective way to format documents by showing the results of a command, and Live Preview augments the goodness of Galleries by allowing you see what a command will do to your document without actually doing anything to you document.

We hope that Galleries and Live Preview will unlock quite a bit of Word functionality that was previously out of reach for the average Word user. Put differently, it was not by any means impossible to create the document below in previous versions of Word, but it is a heck of a lot easier to create it in Word 2007 due in large part to Galleries and Live Preview.

To see the creation of this document check out the video & steps in this previous post. (PS I've reused this image from that post…so the same typos are still there :)).

• Jonathan