Hi, my name is Scott Stiles and I run the Program Management team for Word. The goal of this post is to provide some context regarding how we framed this release. As I've been largely behind the scenes in the context of this blog, I thought a quick introduction was in order. I've been with Microsoft for a total of just under 19 years on many .. more »

A common question that comes up is about the difference between multilevel lists and list styles. Stuart discussed these two list types in his post . What I hope to do in this blog post is an in-depth look at the similarities and differences between these two concepts. An easy way to look at this would be to think of list styles as an improved .. more »

It's super easy to put generic text into a Word document for all of your filler text needs (especially useful during demos and presentations). Just start a new paragraph and: On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, .. more »

(This post comes courtesy of our friends at the Office Web Apps blog.) We are excited to announce that today Office Web Apps are available on Windows Live. The initial release is available to Windows Live customers in the USA, Canada, Great Britain and Ireland with support for English, Spanish (USA) and French (Canada). More languages and locales .. more »

A big part of Word 2010 is enabling what we call In this post, I'll focus on cutting-edge In the Beginning Was the Digital Word… …and the digital word wasn't especially collaborative. Back when the first version Word was released in 1983, authoring digital documents was typically a solo activity. Generally, an author typed their document, prin.. more »

PDF) faster than the desktop application on similar hardware when performing the actions supported by the service (document conversion). Our focus on a few core scenarios enabled us to optimize our engine for those tasks. If you've ever tried to use the desktop version of Word to do server-side automation, I'm sure you've run into an example of the .. more »

In Word 2007, I was the program manager responsible for driving both the changes in the styles user experience and the investment made in lists. There a number of decisions that were made by those of us involved in those efforts that folks are still talking about (including in recent comments on this and other blogs). This post gives you some of my .. more »

In my first two posts in the series on Word Automation Services, I talked about – in this post, I wanted to drill in on how the service works from an architectural standpoint, and what that means for solutions built on top of it. Word Power on the Server The most important component of Word Automation Services is getting a core engine with 100% fi.. more »

about Word Automation Services, I wanted to continue by talking about the functionality offered (and not offered) by the service, how it's exposed, and the types of solutions you will be able to build on top of it. Functionally, the service is very simple – this is intentional, as we wanted to address the pain points that we've heard loud and cl.. more »

A few weeks back we talked about co-authoring in pretty good depth (Word: Co-authoring – Where we are Coming From & Word: Co-authoring (i.e. Simultaneous Editing) in Word 2010). If you want something a bit more high-level that covers co-authoring in not only Word, but also in PowerPoint and OneNote 2010 here's a three minute overview video. .. more »

We are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Word 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for you to download We've talked in a bit of detail about the goodness of Word 2010 in , and our friends in marketing put together a handy top 10 list . In addition .. more »

Over the last couple of months, we've posted about many of the exciting new features of Word 2010 . This week, at SharePoint Conference 2009, we announced one more (and one that I'm especially excited about): framing the Word 2010 release , one of the pillars described is "Word Power in New Contexts". Word Automation Services is a big part of that .. more »

Today is a great day for the Office 2010 team!.  As Nick Simons posts on the Office Web Apps blog: We are making available Excel, Word and PowerPoint Web Apps for a select group of Windows Live users as part of the Office Web Apps Technical Preview. While the initial functionality is modest it will expand over time. As we get closer to the r.. more »

When we first started blogging about Word 2007, we talked a lot about 21st Century Documents. Our vision was that Word 2007 would allow authors to easily create much richer documents (Quick Styles, Themes, SmartArt, Picture Styles, Building Blocks, etc.). In Word 2010, our cutting-edge authoring pillar builds on the 21st Century Documents vision in .. more »

Word Automation Services: What It Does post, I provided a very high-level outline of the server-side API provided by the service, showing you the basic outline for working with the service: Provide it the settings for the conversion(s) to perform In this post, I wanted to look at a specific example solution and what's involved in creating it, to .. more »

A big part of Word 2010 is enabling what we call cutting-edge authoring. Cutting-edge authoring is all about making deep enhancements in the core document creation experience in Word, given the types of documents people are creating today (i.e., a lot more than just plain text) and the way people are creating documents today (i.e., authoring with .. more »

A lot of great stuff from the shared Office teams involving Word over the past few weeks, and I hope you like the new look of the blog. Protected view in Word 2010 – overview of a new security feature in Word 2010/Office 2010 Viewing Word.. more »

Continuing on from my last post on the Navigation Pane, another example of some of the work done for Word 2010 is the new default Find experience. This is again a feature built in support of the "Polished User Experiences" vision pillar described in Scott's Framing the Release post. Find is not a new feature, and has been in Word for a long, long .. more »

One of the Pillars of the Word 2010 vision outlined in Scott's post on Framing the Release was "Polished User Experiences". This pillar represents a desire to dramatically improve a set of scenarios that define Word's core user experiences in terms of polish, ease of use, and responsiveness – basically, setting and holding a high bar for user .. more »

With my introductory post and Scott's framing post, we hope that you have a good sense for many of the advancements coming in Word 2010. And while we will be posting some Word specific details later this week, in the meantime, I would like to introduce you to the blogs of four shared teams in Office. These blogs are great resources for features and .. more »