User Experience Thinking: Office and PDF

So it looks like the promised PDF capabilities are not going to make it into Office 2007.

• Brian Jones
• jkOnTheRun
• BetaNews
• Microsoft Watch
• Scoble
• Microsoft Monitor
• Others

In the face of it, it would seem that the only winners here are the lawyers, but perhaps there is more to it than that. Scoble doesn’t think there is, Microsoft Monitor has a different view.

In my experience it’s hard enough to get users to think about the files they create beyond the way it looks on the screen – and that, surely is the way it should be. I’m sure we have all received 20MB presentations which should really have been much much leaner than that. The split between different applications does at least require people to think differently about what they are creating.

When it comes to Office and PDF formats though, I’m sorry but I can’t imagine Microsoft doing the right thing here. We would all love the situation where we could send a file in a format which the person at the other end could work with in the way we want them to. It present we are expected to know what they can cope with. And this is where PDF comes in. Can you imagine a situation where Outlook said something like “I’ve notices that you always send John a file in a PDF format would you like to convert this one into that format”.

Without this kind of integration the availability of another format is of limited use. There is end user benefit, but it requires users to think about the format they use, something they rarely do. The main benefit, though, will be to the IT organisation who will be able to remove another piece of software from the software portfolio. There is also some benefit to application developers building solutions on-top of the office platform. But all of these benefits are limited.

Tags: Office,PDF,Microsoft,Adobe