Microsoft Office Wish List

This is something I sketched together at my dining room table earlier this week, and hoped other people would enjoy - the Microsoft Office Wish List. Every Office geek has one, so here's mine.

PowerPoint
This is one that I went after hard, because I was talking to my buddy Sorb, a fellow Office trainer, about how PPT hasn't really come that far in the last 2-3 versions, and needs some updates/upgrades.

1. The fact that we live in the 21st century and we can't save a PowerPoint as any kind of movie file (on the PC, that is, Mac users can smirk at this one)..I know the format in question would be WMV, and that's fine. (By the way, to those of you who want to respond, "There's third-party add-ins that do this," I agree. But add-ins should be designed to address the needs of a narrow set of users instead of patching a gaping hole in a fairly commonly used application.)
2. A more robust Find and Replace, straight out of Word. I want to find Arial 16 point bold, and replace it with Verdana 16 point Italic. Word can do it, why can't PowerPoint?
3. I want a Consistency and Professionalism Wizard, or some name like it. This would be along the lines of Word's Word Count/Readability Statistics; show me some of the following:
1. Color Schemes
2. Fonts
3. Backgrounds
4. Animation
4. More installed templates out of the box. I don't mind going online to get them, but I shouldn't have to. I don't always have internet access, believe it or not.
5. A Navigation Menu Wizard, kind of like a DVD menu. I want to have a Wizard where I can add 3-5 action buttons that point to a particular point in my show, with some built-in button styles.
6. Speaking of action buttons, the ones we have look very 1980s...can we get some more modern looking ones, please??! Again, I know good and damn well how to draw my own, but why should I have to?
7. A better slide sorter. This is one microcosm of the utter lack of support for multiple monitors in MS Office. I want to go to the Slide Sorter, and be able to right-click on a slide, and choose "Preview In New Window," or in the other monitor, in this case. So my slides are sorted on my left screen, and I'm previewing the one slide on my right monitor. Whole-parts. Not rocket science.
8. More stock photos, less clip art in the Gallery, both online and installed. Clip art plain SUCKS.
9. The Mac has a color picker tool, why doesn't the PC? I don't think it's too much to ask to be able to grab the RGB value of a color from an external source, so I can make the fill color of my shapes that same RGB. But, of course, that would mean that we'd have to have a more robust color management tool in MS Office. Wow, bummer.
10. Last, but certainly least, would anyone else like to see a better, more robust, fully developed VBA object model? The amount of actions that I can record in PowerPoint is shamefully lacking, and it's frustrating.

Microsoft Access
In the interest of fairness, I have to say that I was pretty pleased with the small changes introduced in Access 2007; some of the import/export functionality is FANTASTIC. But there's still a few missing pieces:

1. I'd love to see an improved Data Access page come back. Maybe it's time for the Office Developer Edition to come back, so it's easier for me to create ASP pages right from Access; my recordset is already declared, and I can maybe create a quick-and-dirty update form, and a simple report? Anyone?
2. Parameter queries are one of my favorite features in Access. I'm thinking some kind of a Parameter Query Wizard that helps me build an unbound form, which lets me plug in the necessary parameters to run the query? And for extra credit, have that query drive a report? Yes please.
3. More wizards - Macro wizards this time. There are some basic functions that I shouldn't have to think about anymore:
1. The No Records macro for the report; just let me plug in a message and the Wizard does the rest.
2. A Duplicate Record Check Wizard - not on existent recordsets, but a Wizard to help me check for duplicate records before the Update event of the record.
3. The Audit Trail Wizard - when I create a form with a Delete Record button, have that fire an event that writes information about the deleted record to an audit table, so I know the where and when of the deletion.
4. Searching
1. Regular expressions in my searches would be SUPERB, especially in queries
   
2. More wildcards, including SOUNDEX
5. Better and more updated form/report templates, and a greater flexibility to customize those templates

Microsoft Word Wish List
I mentioned this in my last post briefly, but Word needs to be slimmed down in many ways; move more of the functionality over to Publisher, out of Word.

1. How about a Regular Expression find and replace? The Find and Replace in Word is the best in the business, but this would just take it up to the next level.
2. Improved macro recording. Let me CLICK buttons, for the love of God! That's a grievous shortcoming in the Word macro procedure.
3. More robust version control. If I say at the get-go, "establish versions for this document," then prompt me for the document's version data EVERY TIME I hit Save.
4. Tracking changes in Word is pretty damn good. But I have 2-3 computers I use on a regular basis, and if I do some changes on my laptop, and some on my desktop, Word treats me as two different people, How about instead, when I open a document that has Track Changes turned on, I "sign in" to the document using my Passport or NT authentication, so I'm the same Geoff Lilley no matter what computer I use?
5. There's one feature of Mail Merge that I think is just ATROCIOUS. If I click Insert Merge Field, why is this window modal? Why can't I insert a field, then move my cursor somewhere else in the document, while keeping that Insert Merge field window open? That's just STUPID.

Outlook

1. The biggest one of all? Hotmail is a Microsoft product. Outlook is a Microsoft product. It's just inexcusable that I have to download any kind of plug-in to integrate the two. I should be able to integrate my Contacts, Calendar, and Mail without any extra work whatsoever.
2. I'd love to see Microsoft offer a Premium Live service of some kind that allows Rules and Folder Sharing.
3. Outlook forms shouldn't be as esoteric or difficult as they are. Having pre-fabricated forms available for download online would be superb.
4. I'm an old Mac guy, so I have to give a shout-out to my Apple using friends out there - Entourage should be more like Outlook, especially playing nicer with Exchange.
5. How about a Merge Duplicate Contacts Wizard? Sound like a plan?

Excel
The difficulty I had coming up with this list probably tells you that I'm a HUGE Excel fanboy. OK, fine, you caught me.

1. I wrote an add-in years ago that did this, and I found it very useful: I want to be able to click a Custom List Wizard, which has a drop-down list and three buttons. The drop-down list is my set of custom lists. One button creates a worksheet for each item on the custom list I choose. The second button populates a set of cells (either down or across) with the items in the custom list I choose. The third button creates an in-cell drop-down list which uses the values from the custom list I choose.
2. PivotTables are almost at a pinnacle of perfection. But there's one more thing I think they could use. When I have two or more Report Filter (AKA Page) fields, I want to be able to establish a dependency between them. So if my topmost page field is State, and I choose New Jersey, then have the City field show only cities in NJ.
3. Along the same lines of the Page/Report Filter field: I LOVE the Show Pages functionality dearly. But in many cases, I have five and six PivotTables on the same sheet, and/or charts to go with it. When I click Show Pages, what I really want to do is copy the whole worksheet, not just that one table.
4. There's a few text functions I'd like to see added or improved:
1. A function for counting instances of a string - how many times does "eo" appear in cell A1 (call it COUNTTEXT?) It might go =COUNTTEXT(A1,"eo")
2. A function to find the nth instance of a string - find the third "g," or the second "a." Call it FINDMODE? MODEFIND? =MODEFIND(A1,"g",3) to find the third "g" in A1.
3. The ORDINAL function might write 1st, 2nd, 3rd, that kind of thing? =ORDINAL(A1) would return "1st" if A1 contains 1.
4. The long-running winner of Worst Formula I Ever Wrote was to calculate business hours. This one would be akin to NETWORKDAYS; how about NETWORKHOURS? Same idea as NETWORKDAYS; I tell you the start DATE and TIME, and the start DATE and TIME. The third argument is the start time of the business day; the fourth argument is the end of the business day, and the fifth is a range of cells that contains holidays.
5. Worst Formula Ever would make a killer lookup function - VLOOKUP with an instance number argument; VLOOKUP the second or third instance of a value. Call it VLOOKUPS? VLOOKUPROW? It would look like VLOOKUP, with the last argument being the instance number you're looking for: =VLOOKUP(A1,List!$A1$B25,2,FALSE,2) would find the second instance of A1, in range A1:B25 of the sheet List, exact match.
   
5. Conditional Formatting in PivotTables just shouldn't be this damn hard! I should be able to refresh my PivotTable and maintain my Conditional Formatting. My inability to do this without a macro is just INEXCUSABLE.

OK, enough ranting already. Holler back with your ideas, and I'll see you next time. Until then, be well.