Word 2007 – Filling Up Demo Documents

Often when I’m demonstrating things like SharePoint document libraries, I find I need to create a new Word document and quickly fill it with some placeholder text, ideally real text rather than the usual “asdadsadasdasda” that you end up typing otherwise.

For a long time I’ve used a little feature in Microsoft Word, whereby you can type =rand() and hit enter to generate some placeholder paragraphs, or =rand(paragraphs,sentences) to specify a number paragraphs and sentences.  Even though this feature has been around in Word for several versions now, most people still don’t know it exists.  One thing that has changed in Word 2007 is that the generated paragraphs are a little bit of Word 2007 help, like this sample -

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document …

In previous versions of Word, using =rand() generated multiple paragraphs of The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog which is a pangram containing all letters of the alphabet.  Well, thanks to this post on the Microsoft Word Team blog I’ve discovered you can still use the “quick brown fox” version – you just have to use =rand.old() instead. 

The Word Team’s post also mentions another function (new to me) which can be used in Word to generate Lorem Ipsum text, using = lorem() – again, quite useful for generating placeholder text in documents, web pages and SharePoint web parts.

Technorati tags: Word 2007, lorem ipsum, placeholder

Tools for SharePoint UI Layout

A while ago I wrote about Balsamiq Mockups and since then I’ve been trying it out on a couple of specification jobs.   On the Balsamiq Mockups to Go site I found this very handy set of pre-built SharePoint elements – so many thanks to Gordon MacLeod of Navantis for that.   Following a quick download of these elements It was possible to create mock-ups like this (click image for a larger view):

 

So definitely worth considering if you need some quick SharePoint mock-ups for a presentation or proposal.  By the way you can now link Mockups together, also useful when presenting to an audience.

I also just heard about Visio Shapes for SharePoint, basically three different collections of stencils and shapes covering SharePoint UI prototyping, architectural design and conceptual views of your SharePoint implementation.   I haven’t tried this one myself yet but looking at the screenshots on the site you get a very comprehensive set of design elements.  I plan to take a look soon – if anyone reading this has worked with this product please leave a comment and let me know – I’m keen to hear what it’s like.

Technorati tags: User Interface, UI, SharePoint, Mockups, Visio

SharePoint Designer 2007 – Now a Free Download

 

So the rumours about SharePoint Designer 2007 being free to download from April have turned into reality, and you can now download a free copy here.  At the bottom of the download page are three videos covering SPD and future directions.  Haven’t watched these yet but could be worth a look.

But don’t forget Peter Parker’s famous quote, which is also true for SPD – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility!

Technorati tags: SharePoint Designer, download

Clever UI Mock-Ups with Balsamiq Mockups

Often I get called upon to produce some kind of user interface mock-ups as part of the initial design phase of a project.  I definitely believe that a showing your customer a mocked-up version of what the finished user interface will look like as early as possible is a good thing.  No matter how much detail you go into with words and flowcharts, a picture of what the user is going to see on screen helps a lot.

Now I certainly don’t claim to be a graphic artist.  In the past I’ve prepared this sort of thing for users in a variety of ways.  Visio has some UI template components “out of the box”, and there are add-ons out there which extend it’s capabilities.  I’ve even roughed things out using lines and boxes in MS Word and PowerPoint before now. 

I’d heard good reports about Balsamiq Mockups, a tool developed using Adobe Air and available as a desktop or web-based product.  Balsamiq deliberately use hand drawn user interface components – the idea being that when you present your design you can focus on the functionality, and not, as they say “that pretty colour gradient”.  As they also say, you aren’t giving the impression of a polished UI with code behind that’s already to use.

For my first attempt, I thought I would put together a mocked-up page for an online books/CDs/DVDs/whatever store (you may have already seen some of this functionality elsewhere ) -

I was pretty impressed with how little time this took me to put together – in total, including downloading and  installing the trial, less than half an hour.  I really liked the way you can do stuff like add images to the mock-up, then quickly get Balsamiq to turn these into sketches.  Again, this gives the user a good representation of what’s going on without too much distraction.  The UI components they make available are pretty comprehensive, and extensible as well I believe.  Also I notice they’ve already added iPhone UI components, as you can see below:

So far I have to say I like Balsamiq Mockups a lot.  It’s very refreshing to work with a tool that lets you be very productive very quickly.  And at $79 per desktop licence it seems to be a bargain.  I’m planning to spend more time with it over the coming months and will report back on how it works out.

Update 5 April – I changed the example mockup image -  for some reason the original wasn’t always rendering in my WordPress theme.

Technorati tags: UI, User Interface, Mockups, Balsamiq

Got Those CSS Curly-Bracket Blues

A little Friday afternoon light relief for anyone struggling with a SharePoint re-branding exercise:

 

Got those H1 curly bracket property colon value semi-colon curly bracket blues…

Technorati tags: css, branding, sharepoint