RSSOffice 12 to Feature 'Super Tooltips'
By Nate Mook | Published December 5, 2005, 5:05 PM
Tooltips, those little yellow popup boxes that provide information on a button or menu option, have become an indispensable part of the modern user interface. Now, Microsoft is looking to extend their usefulness by introducing what it calls "Super Tooltips" in the upcoming release of Office 12.
The next-generation Office suite from Microsoft is already slated to bring a major UI makeover. Standard toolbars have been replaced with task-oriented "Ribbons" that include features pertinent to the current job. But such a change will require a learning curve, which is where the new larger tooltips come in.
To start, each Office 12 tooltip will contain the feature name and keyboard shortcut if it exists. Beyond that, a short description of the option informs users about what it does.
"We've written these in the form of: "This is the right feature to use if you want to [tooltip text here]." The concept is to give you the idea of what a feature is for without needing to look it up in help or in a manual," says Jensen Harris, head of Microsoft's User Experience team.
But text can only go so far. Some Super Tooltips will include images to help explain what an option does in relation to the document. "Someone might not know what a "caption" is, but when they see the little picture with a line of text saying "Figure 7: blah blah blah" under it, they suddenly understand what it is," notes Harris.
Options leading to dialog boxes will include images in their tooltips as well. For example the Fonts tooltip shows a small image of the Font dialog box. "Early in our research for Office 12, we discovered that a lot of people identified dialog boxes by their look alone," said Harris.
Unlike current tooltips, Super Tooltips will not cover up the command. Instead, they will appear in a box directly below the Office 12 Ribbon.
Office 12 tooltips will also connect directly into the suite's help system. After the Super Tooltip pops up, a user can simply hit F1 to load up more information on the feature. This, says Harris, does away with unnecessary searching of help contents that only wastes time.
Even disabled features will take advantage of Super Tooltips. If an option is grayed out because it cannot be used, the tooltip will explain why. "The long-term is goal is for you never to be stuck and confused, wondering what magic trick is necessary to enable a command," promises Harris.
Those dismayed about having large boxes appearing throughout Office 12 worry not: Super Tooltips can be disabled and Office will revert back to "command name only" tooltips.
Listen carefully, and you can hear the OpenOffice shills screaming in gut-wrenching pain as their "project" suffers another 1,000 cuts.
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|Oh you mean those indispensable parts of the modern user interface that I always immediately dispense with?
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|That you dispense with and that many more will use and happily so.
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|Well, I think this feature will push the price tag to 1,000 EUR. Let's hope somebody will actually use it.
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|Somewhat reminds me of Balloon Help in the classic Mac OS. You had to turn on balloon help from the "Guide/Help/?" menu and then it showed a detail description...
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|Very nice addition to the help facilities. Maybe these will replace some of the annoying messages provided by the Office Assistants.
Frankly I am astonished that Microsoft is focussing on the user interface. Over the years Office UI has become littered with inconsistencies and issues that violate its own published UI design policies. Sorting out the UI will make the whole package easier for everyone to work with.
As Super Tooltips are a proprietary feature, and Microsoft does not sell its online help authoring tools, we can only hope that third party developers such as Macromedia will start offering similar tooltip support in their authoring packages.
As for the name, I would use the same old name TOOLTIPS. Everyone understands the concept, and here the concept remains much the same as before. If Marketing wants to make a big thing out of it then fair enough, but if the old tooltips are replaced by new tooltips then the word SUPER is superfluous.
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|And here I thought the article was only two sentences long. Why? Because I came in from the RSS feed, which doesn't include full text.
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|And that's exactly the point of the RSS feed. To give you the intro so you can decide whether to click and read the full story.
Why would an article only be two sentences, that doesn't really make sense.
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|I would love to use the BetaNews RSS feed however I prefer full feeds to partial feeds. An option for either full or partial would be nice as BetaNews is one of the only sites yet to make it into my RSS reader.
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|Surprised at all the raves. You all realize this will be a mandatory upgrade, since the file format compatibility will change and people will start making docs in the new version and forget to downgrade for compatibility sake? Does anyone not remember the mess that was Office 97 when it attempted this?
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|Microsoft will have Open XML format compatibility packs for both Office 2000 and 2003. Creating documents will require an upgrade, not opening them.
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|That's right! As of now, you save the doc in either .doc or .docx so you can work with the doc the under the format you want.
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|"Those dismayed about having large boxes appearing throughout Office 12 worry not: Super Tooltips can be disabled and Office will revert back to "command name only" tooltips."
IF I choose to give office 12 a try, I think I'll have to disable the tooltips. I hate tooltips. Their good for beginners, but not for people like me, who know that the little icon of a disk means save, or the printer means print.
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|I'm pleased with Office 2003 and thought it was a decent jump (especially visually) from Office XP, but Office 12 is such a major overhall, I think I'll be upgrading yet again!
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|Tooltips...
TO THE EXXTTTTREEEEEEEME
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|Tool tips rock the mic like a vandal, light up the screen and wax a button like a candle...CLICK..
Okay, so the stretch to Vanilla Ice is a bit long there, but it's late and I'm tired, and I thought it was funny :)
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|"The long-term is goal is for you never to be stuck and confused, wondering what magic trick is necessary to enable a command,"
as long is long as its optional cause those are friggen annoying when not needed anymore. (grammar joke included)
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|nice,
office 12, even though its bein made by ms, it seems to be developing nicely.
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|great addition ... i look forward to seeing it.
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|Just a note that "Super Tooltips" is only a code name for this feature.
That being said, this sounds like a great idea, and I'm glad that Microsoft is finally rethinking the interface in Office 12 (which, BTW, is also only a code name) to think about how they can *improve* it, not just change it for the sake of change. I'm actually midly excited about this release ... except my primary machine is a Mac, and I probably wouldn't buy the new Office anyway (I use OpenOffice.org and it works well enough for me, even on the Mac), but, still.
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|"Just a note that "Super Tooltips" is only a code name for this feature."
I certainly hope so :) It does look nice though.
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