Features I would like to see in the next version of Microsoft Office
I was thinking about this topic during a plane flight last week. I have no knowledge of what the Office team at Microsoft is planning for the next revision of Office so this is purely my own "wish list" as a regular user of the suite.
So without further ado:
1. Option to not send attachments to cc’d recipients (on a per message basis).
Sometimes I want to send a fairly large attachment to one person and let other people know that I have sent it. For example, if I want to send a response to a person who wants a big document from anyone on a DL. I don’t want to send the document to the entire DL but I want to let the DL know that I sent it (so the recipient doesn’t get the same attachment lots of times from other people).
2. Ability to directly edit the Outlook name cache (the type ahead feature in addressees).
Prior to Office 2010, this was stored in a file called profilename.nk2, in Office 2010 the same information is held in a hidden message on the Exchange server. For some reason I have a few names that never seem to make it into my type ahead file (bug?) I have to type them into the address line every time I need them. It would be nice to pull up the list of all the names in my cache and edit or delete ones or even add new ones.
3. Ability to customizable the audible bing based on rules.
For example, if it’s just to me or from a particular set of people use one tone, if not use a different one. I get enough “semi-spam” (stuff that is not true spam, but of little relevance to me) that I don’t want to read immediately that causes the “bing”. I would like to have Outlook not sound the tone for most messages, but alert me if I get something directed to me or from a certain group of people that I define.
4. Easily share Quickparts between users and between the Office applications.
Quickparts is a very cool feature first introduced in Office 2007. I just wish there was an easy way to import and export Quickparts so that they can easily be shared between users. Also, Quickparts are implemented slightly differently between the applications in the Office suite. It would be nice to have the interface the same between the different applications.
5. Multiple select in the addressee type ahead.
For example, perhaps I want to send an email to my co-worker and friend “Jerry” at both his home and work addresses. If I type “Jerry” both addresses are shown in the drop down but I can only pick one of the two. If I want to add both, I have to type “Jerry” twice. Ctrl+Click would be nice to allow me to pick both.
6. Ability to work with the contents of the addressees on a message.
I get some messages that literally have hundreds of recipients. On an inbound message, the order they show up in the to: list is the order they were entered by the sender. When I am trying to figure out if a particular person received the message, I have to scan the entire list looking for the person’s name. Outlook gives me a scrollbar but I typically can only see 4 lines at a time. How about an “expand to display all” feature and a re-sort alphabetically feature for the to: and cc: boxes. I know I can cut and paste the contents of these boxes into a document or spreadsheet, but that is a PITA.
7. In Microsoft Word, ability to better control how the comment boxes work during a review session
I review a lot of documents and I often find the comment box feature unwieldy. For example, I would like to be able to place a comment box on a page and not point it to anything but Word only lets me add a comment box connected to a bit of highlighted text. Another thing I would like to do is be able to change the color of a comment box. That way I could call it out during a review session ("what do you think about my comment in the taupe colored comment box?").
8. In Microsoft Word, the ability to control the font menu.
The font menu got a whole lot better in Office 2007, but I can think of a few nice ideas to make it even better. For example, there are lots of fonts on my computer that I would probably never use (Gigi for example). It would be nice to have an option to right click to hide a font. I would also like to be able to tear-off the font menu and keep it as a floating menu off to the side of my document so I can see the entire document while still seeing my font dropdown list. This would be nice for PowerPoint too.
I would be interested in hearing about features you would like to see in Office 201x.
-bruce