Microsoft Office

In Outlook 2007, with WordMail, we have made it easier to differentiate between different email responses. We added what we call thread shading to emails. Every time we see a new email response (or thread) we shade the entire “extra” content part. Now reading an email allows you to more easily see where one response or thread starts and ends. Check out this screenshot from Outlook 2007:

Thread Navigation and Shading
Reading emails has remained pretty much the same since it first came out; you read an email as one long piece of text. You have to keep scrolling down a message until you have read all responses, where each of the responses are usually separated by the presence of some “extra” content like lines or message headers, which contain information like who sent the email, to whom, when it was sent, etc.

In previous versions of Outlook, reading an email usually meant a lot of scrolling or use of the keyboard to move up and down an entire email message. You needed to notice the “extra” content to figure out when an email response started or ended.

We didn’t stop there. Sometimes you want to be able to skip over whole responses or threads at a time, or even skip to the first or last response within an email. In Outlook 2007 we have made this scenario easy. Moving your mouse over any of the shaded regions will reveal our thread navigation controls.

With these thread navigation controls you can easily navigate to the next, previous, first, or last thread within an email. Emails are becoming more and more popular, with some of us getting hundreds a day. Hopefully this feature will make reading emails a bit easier.

Panning on Tablet PCs
If you are using a Tablet PC, we have added another way for you to easily read and navigate your email through the Panning Hand feature. The Panning Hand command can be found at the top of the vertical scroll bar.

When the Panning Hand is turned on, you can use the Tablet PC pen to scroll up and down an email.

Smart Scaling of Images in the Reading Pane
I don’t know about you guys, but I love being able to quickly read my emails with the Outlook Reading Pane. Unfortunately, the Reading Pane only has a small portion of the total width of my screen’s real estate. Usually, that’s not a bad thing, but if I receive an email with a very large image, my Reading Pane becomes harder to use for reading. The reason is because now I not only have to worry about vertical scrolling, but also horizontal scrolling.

In Outlook 2007 we have made reading such emails easier. Outlook detects if an image is too large based on the Reading Pane real estate size, and it appropriately scales down the image to fit it on screen without the need of a horizontal scroll bar. Check out the same email within Outlook 2007. You can now see the entire chart all within the Reading Pane.

We hope this feature makes it easier for you to read your emails more efficiently (no need to double-click an email message to view it outside the Reading Pane).

Hit Highlighting for Instant Search Results
The last thing I want to show you guys in this post is how we improved the user experience of search with WordMail. In Outlook 2007 you can search for specific emails by using the Search control. Doing so will not only find email messages that contain that string, but WordMail will also highlight and show you where in the email the text can be found.