The New Office Experience: Embracing the New Workflow (Premium)

It is perhaps not coincidental that the coming Windows 10X user experience mimics that provided by Office on multiple platforms and entry-points. Microsoft is clearly trying to move its users to a more consistent user experience for accessing the applications and documents that they need to get work done each day. And as I noted in my earlier peeks at workflow in both Chromebook and Windows 10X, some of us will need to make adjustments.

Granted, Microsoft has been working on abstracting the file system and moving towards a simpler user experience for years. For example, Windows 95 featured a short-lived document-centric user interface paradigm whereby users could create new documents—a new compound documents, another short-lived experiment—without first finding and launching an application. Windows Vista introduced virtual folders, so we could think of broad terms like documents, music, and pictures instead of manually navigating to specific folder locations. And Windows Phone furthered both concepts by trying to hide the file system and applications and providing sweeping “people-centric” (really, user-centric) hubs of functionality.

Those are just a few examples, but you get the idea: While power users like us spend time tweaking File Explorer, Microsoft Word, or whatever other tools to work just the way we want, mainstream users just want to get in and out. They want to get work done as simply and efficiently as possible and then move on. And they want to do so on whatever device or using whichever interface they prefer. Windows or Mac, perhaps. Mobile platforms like Android and iOS. The web. Whatever.

As noted, Microsoft has tried to evolve its user experiences. But its user base has been surprisingly resistant to change. Over time, its users did move from the MS-DOS days, when many saved every single file in the root of the C:/ drive and using a command-line experience to Windows, where many still save files to their desktop or other folders via a more graphical interface. But more modern platforms have already moved well past this well-worn and perhaps obsolete UI. And Microsoft is trying to adapt. Again.

Windows 10X and what Microsoft calls the new Office experience both embody, I think, Microsoft’s latest thinking in this area. If you’re confused by the new Office experience, it can be found in multiple end-points, from the Office app for Windows 10 to the new Office mobile app for Android and iOS to Office.com and the Office 365 Launcher (for both consumers and commercial customers) to the Office extension for Chrome and other browsers (including the new Edge) and probably elsewhere. The idea, in all cases, is to put everything you need to get work done in one place.

I’ve written in the past about how I—an admittedly old-school user—still use my PC desktop as a scratch space. Each day, I temporarily the store documents and images I need for articles I’m working on there, and as I complete those articles, I move those files to other locations for long-term storage. In my case, that means OneDrive, which I access via File Explorer in Windows 10. I’ve created quite the folder structure there, something I’ve honed over time to be efficient, for me.

Though there’s more to it, that process represents a good chunk of my daily workflow. And when I think about doing things differently, my brain starts to freeze up.

Consider a simple example: Microsoft emails me on a Tuesday to tell me about a product announcement they’re going to make on a Thursday, so I save that announcement document to my desktop. I begin writing my article about that document sometime between then and the announcement time. I also prepare a graphic, which was hopefully provided by Microsoft; regardless, I have to edit it in some way. And then I copy it into our CMS on the web ahead of that time. (I don’t schedule it because I don’t trust that.) And then I post it.

When that’s all done, I move all of the files—the Microsoft announcement document, my article, and whatever graphic files to OneDrive. If I were doing that right now, that would mean copying it to Documents\Work\2020-02 in OneDrive directly, but really C:\Users\paul\OneDrive\Documents\Work\2020-02 since I’m using File Explorer in Windows 10. But I don’t have to navigate there. I have a 2020-02 folder shortcut in File Explorer’s Quick Access area in the navigation bar. It’s quick.

Your reaction to this process says as much about you as it does about me. Some might think, “wow, that’s pretty cool, I should try and emulate this clearly superior and efficient method of working.” But many more will likely think, “yikes, this guy is nuts,” and will happily go about doing what it is they do.

Either reaction is fine, of course. But however you or I do things today, it’s going to change. Assuming, of course, that we begin getting work done on newer mobile platforms that don’t have a desktop or an easy way to manipulate files in a file system. Or if Microsoft is somehow able to move us to the new experience it’s creating in both Windows 10X and Office.

There are many other ways to do what I/we do. Maybe too many. But let’s consider Office.com, which provides access to the Office (web) apps plus recent, pinned, and shared documents, all from a single location. (Here, I’m using a secondary account, and I recently opened two ancient documents in the process of seeing what I had stored in that account’s OneDrive.)

I could upload the Microsoft announcement to OneDrive (or, more likely, save it to OneDrive from Outlook.com), which would put it at the top of the Recent list. I could also “pin” it if I were worried about it getting buried under other documents I was working on. I could also then start a new Word document from this interface to work on my own article. That, too, would appear at the top of the Recent list.

For the graphics, I would have to rely on whatever facilities the OS offered. So I’d probably still access File Explorer in Windows 10 (or 10X) and use whatever apps I use for graphics (Paint and Photoshop Elements in my case).

On an iPad or Chrome OS, or whatever, there are similar tools, and similar methods. But from a completion perspective, Office.com provides a way to move files to new locations—if I wanted to continue working the old way. Or—and this is kind of interesting—I suppose I could just simply work from OneDrive and create new files in the location they will ultimately be stored. They’d still appear in that Recent list normally and I wouldn’t have to manually do any cleanup later.

Again, I can feel my brain freezing up. But that’s probably because I overthink this. I’ve spent years building up a file structure and I can navigate through it to find things from the past. Someone less hung up on all this stuff would likely just use search and find what they needed no matter where it is. Maybe I just need to let go. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too late for me.

Regardless of my own comfort level, I do like the new Office user experience, and I like that I can pretty much get it anywhere. And starting with Windows 10X, I will be able to pretty much get it as the default user experience: The Windows 10X desktop is for show only, and Start very closely resembles Office.com and the other new Office experiences.

One semi-goofy way to experiment with this right now, beyond the obvious, is to put your PC in Tablet mode and try to operate from the Office app for Windows 10.

In this simplified user experience, the desktop is effectively hidden from you because all apps are run full-screen. It’s not a perfect copy of Windows 10X—where some apps can be run in a windowed mode—but it’s an interesting exercise in purposefully limiting yourself to see if you can hack it. I find it a bit troubling, like using a Chromebook, frankly. But it’s more palatable on a laptop than it is on a big desktop display.

Can you do it?