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1/29/2010

Community Clips was a concept test – or experiment – to explore whether it was possible to create a community around how-to videos about Office. When we started this project, we knew that videos could be a great instructional tool, and we believed that Microsoft customers would prefer watching videos to reading help articles. We had a feeling that letting other Office users create the videos themselves... (read more)

Posted at 1:37 PM by Jen (Office Labs) | Category: Community Clips | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (3)

1/19/2010

Play Ribbon Hero and hone your Microsoft Office skills

Hi! I’m Jennifer Michelstein, a Program Manager and casual games enthusiast in Office Labs. My current project is Ribbon Hero, which works on Vista and Windows 7, and in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word 2007 and 2010.
I think that Office has a lot of powerful features that can save users a lot of time and help them do some really cool things. When I meet Office users, I often hear them say things like, “I... (read more)

Posted at 9:54 AM by Jen (Office Labs) | Category: Office Labs; Ribbon Hero | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (35)

11/12/2009

Working with Microsoft Research

Here in Office Labs we love to partner with whomever we can in order to do our work. One of our favorite organizations to partner with is Microsoft Research.

In case you’ve never worked with an organization like Microsoft Research, it’s like having a whole building full of world class experts who are happy to meet with you and advise you on your projects. No matter what topic you’re working on, you... (read more)

Posted at 3:01 PM by JJ (Office Labs) | Category: Email Prioritizer; Productivity Future Vision; Office Labs | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

11/6/2009

The Office Labs Giving Campaign Auction

Every year during the month of October Microsoft runs its annual Giving Campaign, where employees worldwide donate to their favourite non-profits. Different teams around the company come up with all sorts of entertaining ways to encourage donations, and I had the pleasure of participating in two of those activities this year:

the Photographers@Microsoft book, where I was on the selection committee and... (read more)

Posted at 10:31 AM by Neil (Office Labs) | Category: Happenings; Office Labs | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/19/2009

Exciting Times

It’s exciting times here in Office Labs. We’ve been operating for a little over two years now. We’ve worked on almost 30 projects during that time. Many projects don’t get past the design or prototype phase – we do a lot of concept testing and tuning of ideas to find the ones that work. When they get halfway interesting we put some of them on this web site to get your thoughts as well as data about... (read more)

Posted at 9:46 AM by Chris Pratley (MS) | Category: Office Labs | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/2/2009

Chris Pratley on Channel 9

We have gotten a lot of feedback that you would like to hear more about what is happening behind the scenes of Office Labs.

Over the past months we have been busy at work on additional projects, some of which we hope to share with you in the next several months. In the mean time, we thought you might enjoy this Channel 9 interview with the head of Office Labs, Chris Pratley. Channel 9 is a site that... (read more)

Posted at 3:18 PM by Natasha (Office Labs) | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

9/3/2009

Embedding Office Labs Videos

We have moved all our videos to Microsoft Showcase.

If you are interested in embedding our videos, you can get the embed link from Showcase. Just search for Office Labs to find our videos and then copy and paste the embed link as highlighted in the image below.

Here is what the new player looks like.

Enjoy!
(read more)

Posted at 10:35 AM by Natasha (Office Labs) | Category: Office Labs | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/26/2009

Introducing Forgotten Attachment Detector (FAD)

Hello!I’m Bhavesh Chauhan and hopefully you’ve already downloaded my Forgotten Attachment Detector (FAD) add-in for Outlook. FAD is a little add-in that checks your email before you send it to see if you’ve forgotten to “attach an attachment”. It uses a small set of customizable keywords to do its detection. If it detects that you may have forgotten to “attach an attachment” it pops up a dialog that... (read more)

Posted at 12:24 PM by Bhavesh | Category: Grassroots; Forgotten Attachment Detector | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (18)

4/28/2009

Touch version of pptPlex

When we wanted to try out the new multi-touch capabilities of Windows 7, pptPlex seemed like a good application in which to do some experimentation. We liked the touch interaction and thought we would share this updated version of pptPlex with anybody out there who has a multi-touch enabled device running Windows 7. Take a look at this video and keep reading if you are interested in getting access... (read more)

Posted at 10:59 AM by Jonas (Office Labs) | Category: pptPlex | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (6)

3/29/2009

A Walk Through the Productivity Future Vision Video

There has been a lot of buzz around the Microsoft Productivity Future Vision video since it was unveiled by Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division. Many people have been asking for more information about the scenarios shown in the video, the underlying technologies, and how the video relates to Microsoft’s overall vision and ongoing product development roadmap.
In response to many of... (read more)

Posted at 10:48 AM by Paul (Office Labs) | Category: Envisioning; Office Labs; Productivity Future Vision | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (6)

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