Great features added to a small space

I’ve never thought much about the status bar in most of the software programs I use. Sure, there’s information there that I may notice every now and then, and sometimes I know that’s where I look for a specific piece of information I need. But I can’t say it’s something I couldn’t live without.

That may change with Office 12 though. It seems the development team has taken a specific look to that feature and asked the same question themselves, “do we need it at all?”. They agreed to decide on yes, and to make improvements. The new status bar will be loaded with more useful features for each program.

For example, the status bar in Word will now control all the different “View” switches always available instead of through the menus. In addition, the “Zoom” control will also be there with a slider control. Also available is a dynamic word counting feature. Always available, no need to open a separate window to find out. It will also count the words is a selected portion of text. If you want all the full details, just hover over the word count number, which highlights like a button and open the full view.

And for Excel, items like: average, total, minimum, maximum, and sum of any selected numbers will be available in the status bar.

If you think you’ll miss the items available in the old format you can still right-click on it in a blank space and get a “live” view of some of the specifics as well as toggle what items you want available in the status bar at all, like:

• Formatted Page #
• Section
• Page #
• Vertical Page Position
• Line #
• Column
• Word Count
• Spelling and Grammar Check
• Language
• Signatures
• Track Changes
• Caps Lock
• Overtype
• Selection Mode
• Macro Recording

Soucre: Status Bar Update on Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog