Favorite New Acronym (and Office 2007 Feature)

This article was originally posted on October 11, 2006.

Office 2007 has brought us…drum roll please…: WYSBYGI (pronounced “wizbiggy”). Not only is it even more fun to say than WYSIWYG (I know you’re trying it right now), but it represents one of the coolest things about Office 2007. It means “ What You See Before You Get It” and is officially called “Live Preview.” In the “old days” of WYSIWYG, when you wanted to change, for example, the format of a particular paragraph in a Word Document, you would select the text you wanted to change, go to the menu or toolbar, and select Format → Font, pick the font you wanted, and the change would appear in your document. If you changed your mind, you could Edit → Undo or go back to Format →Font and select another, and so on.

In the same scenario as above, if I wish to change the font of a paragraph in Word 2007, I select the text , then on the ribbon, hover ov

er the style(s) I wanted to try. As I roll over other styles, fonts, colors, sizes, etc., Live Preview aka WYSBYGI shows me what my selected text would look like if I chose these options, but I haven’t selected them yet. If I do not click on any of them, my text reverts back to its original format, so I can “window-shop” (pun intended) fonts, styles, etc. very efficiently. It’s a bit hard to show you how it works with still images, but I have a attached a couple — the fonts/styles shown are due to my hovering the cursor over the styles seen on the screen.

I have used this feature in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and it makes selecting Fonts and Styles remarkably easier, and almost (dare I say it?)…fun!

I’ll be preparing for a series of Office 2007 Sneak Peek events over the next few weeks, so expect to hear more about new capabilities, features, functions, and the occasional gripe over that time. If there’s anything specific you’d like to hear more about, please send me a comment or drop me an e-mail.

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.