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To search or to find

Simon Jones Read more October 7, 2009

I’m currently designing the user interface for a new line-of-business application, and when I arrived at the part of the app that lets users look for data that matches certain criteria, I was suddenly faced with a linguistic dilemma: should such a feature be called Find or Search, and what icon should it display on the menus and toolbars?

Both these terms seem to have been used interchangeably in the past, with no real pattern of distinction discernable, and the icon associated with them both is typically either the magnifying glass or a pair of binoculars, though I can see no evidence of one of these icons definitely being associated with one of the words. There’s also another problem in that the magnifying glass icon is also often used for a “zoom” command.

Word 2007 uses the term Find and the Binoculars icon, while the Magnifying glass icon is reserved for the zoom function, although it also appears as part of the icon for Print Preview. Internet Explorer 7 uses the Magnifying glass icon to zoom but also for Search, which has a sub-command called “Find on this page”. Visio employs Find along with the binoculars, but the magnifying glass icon turns up a number of times, notably for the Pan and Zoom Window and also on the Shapes Window command to indicate that you can use it to search for shapes. Outlook uses the Magnifying glass icon for Search, but it also appears on the Advanced Find and Find Public Folders dialogs, as well as in the icons for Print Preview and Auto Preview – binoculars don’t seem to feature in Outlook at all. Microsoft Visual Studio uses binoculars overlaid on other items with the term Find, but then it uses the Magnifying glass icon for Search Help and in icons for various Explorer functions. Windows itself employs the Magnifying glass icon for Search, but it then labels its command buttons either Search or Find Now, a confusion that’s carried over into Outlook, where the Advanced Find dialog has buttons called Find Now and New Search.

This terminological confusion isn’t just confined to Microsoft’s software either. Adobe Reader uses binoculars for Search and the magnifying glass for Zoom, but it also has a Find command with no icon, so what’s the difference between Search and Find there? Ameol, the offline reader for CIX conferencing, has commands for both Search and Find, and both of them have magnifying glasses in their icons, but both commands bring up different dialogs labelled Find. RSS Bandit has a Search command, and its icon is either a magnifying glass or a magnifying glass over a newspaper, depending on where you look in the user interface.

Microsoft supplies a set of icons for people to use in applications they’re designing using Visual Studio 2005, which include a helpful list of suggested uses for them. If you look through these images, however, you’ll encounter exactly the same level of confusion as in the applications: the main Binoculars icon is called FindHS, but its action says that it should Launch Search UI. The difference between the magnifying glass called zoomhs.png and the one called search.bmp seems to be merely that one faces left and the other right. Microsoft’s accompanying advice is that “As part of a visual language, the following images (or any part of the images) should be used consistent[ly] with, although not necessarily identical[ly] to, the usage described below:”

To my mind there’s a real distinction between these terms, with Search implying that you might not know whether the item you’re looking for exists at all, whereas Find implies that you do know it’s there somewhere but need to know exactly where. Search also implies you’re looking within a large area, whereas Find implies looking more close by. Bearing these interpretations in mind, I’d prefer to link the Binoculars icon with the word Search and the Magnifying glass icon with the word Find, but Zoom is now so powerfully linked with the magnifying glass symbol that I think it should take precedence. The trouble is that the Magnifying glass icon is so simple to draw compared to binoculars: it overlays onto other images far more easily, but could you tell from the icon alone whether a magnifying glass superimposed over a sheet of paper means “search this document”, “find a document”, or “print preview”? It’s used to mean all those things in different applications.
The line-of-business application I’m designing won’t contain a zoom function of its own, but it will inherit one from SQL Server Reporting Services, which it will employ to generate its reports. The Report Viewer control doesn’t have an icon for the zoom function. I’m not planning to include a print preview function at the moment, but one might become necessary later and, if it does, it would get the standard magnifying glass on a piece of paper icon simply because that’s now well recognised from all the Office applications. As for the “look for something that matches these criteria” command, I think I’ll be calling it “Search” and using the binoculars as its icon, while for the “Explorer” function I think I’ll be using a sailor’s navigational compass as its icon.

Office 2007 delayed

Late on 29 June, Microsoft announced a slight delay in the availability of Office 2007. Citing problems of “product performance”, and following internal testing and feedback from more than 2.5 million users of Beta 2, Microsoft has decided to change its estimated delivery schedule. Office 2007 was going to be released to manufacture (RTM) in October 2006, with volume licence customers able to install it soon after, probably in November. Retail and OEM customers were to be made to wait until January 2007 before they could get their hands on the new suite, in order to bring the availability of Office 2007 into line with that of Windows Vista, the retail launch of which had already been delayed until after Christmas so as not to disadvantage any PC manufacturers. It was felt that if Vista was RTM’d that close to the holiday season, some manufacturers might be hard-pressed to get new computers loaded with Vista into the shops in time for people to buy.

This latest delay now means that Office 2007 will RTM “by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007”. Microsoft’s communiqué also states that: “Feedback on quality and performance will ultimately determine the exact dates”. Any large software development programme is likely to be subject to unexpected delays, and Office is nowadays such a huge suite that some delay is hardly a big surprise. Nevertheless, if you were planning to roll out Office 2007 this year, you’ll now need to factor this delay into your schedules. If you have a Software Assurance contract for Office that’s due to expire between October 2006 and January 2007, you’ll now have to renew it before you can upgrade to Office 2007, which is a bit of a nuisance, but I’m sure we’d all rather have bugs and performance issues fixed now rather than left in the released product for people to trip over.

VSTO Cypress

On the good news front, however, work is progressing on an update for Visual Studio Tools for Office, codenamed Cypress, which will add Office 2007 support to Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007. Cypress will enable you to build add-ins for Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio, including safe loading, unloading and management, manipulating the Ribbon, custom task panes and Outlook form regions. This isn’t a full new release of VSTO – that won’t happen until a full new version of VSTO is released alongside Visual Studio Orcas, which will probably be late in 2007 or early in 2008, by which time you can expect it to contain visual designers for the Ribbon and custom task panes.

VSTO Cypress will be backwards compatible with Office 2003, allowing you to develop for both versions with the single tool under certain provisos. For example, while Office 2007 supports multiple, application-level task panes, these aren’t available in Office 2003, which supports only a single document-level task pane, and so VSTO Cypress has to work within that limitation. Document-level task panes require the end user to have a particular document or template open to see a custom task pane, and that there can be only one custom task pane per document or template. Under Office 2007, you can design multiple custom task panes for each Add-In you create, and many of them can be displayed at the same time. There’s a CTP (Community Technology Preview) programme for VSTO Cypress so that prospective developers can try it out with Office 2003 and Office 2007 Beta 2, which you can find at msdn.microsoft.com
Office 2007 ODF Converter

When Microsoft announced last year that Office 2007 would use new XML and ZIP-based file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, many people asked why it didn’t just adopt the OASIS Open Document Formats (ODF), which was being developed for OpenOffice 2 and Sun’s StarOffice. Microsoft, quite rightly, pointed out that its new format had to be 100% backwards compatible with all the documents created in earlier versions of Office by its more than 400 million users worldwide. Microsoft’s new Office Open XML format (OOX) will also support the inclusion of custom XML schemas and data, which creates far greater scope for automating business processes, while ODF couldn’t deliver either of these features. However, a few high-profile customers and government departments started making noises about ditching Microsoft Office, or else requiring documents be stored in ODF files, ensuring this issue won’t go away anytime soon.

Accordingly, Microsoft submitted its Office Open XML file formats to ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer’s Association) for ratification as a standard, and that answered some of the critics who wanted open, standard formats rather than closed, proprietary ones. It also scrapped the existing licensing conditions in favour of a simple “covenant not to sue”, which means that anyone can use the OOX formats in any application they write, even if it’s one that competes directly with Microsoft Office.

Nevertheless, some people are still championing the rival OASIS formats, which they say are “simpler” than OOX files. That’s certainly true, but the flipside of it is that they’re also therefore less powerful. Others say they’re supported by “many” different office suites, which is true as a small number of alternative suites do use ODF files, but each of these suites has a tiny number of users compared to Microsoft Office. In any case, to answer these questions about interoperability, Microsoft has announced an open-source project with several partners, to create bidirectional translation tools that allow Microsoft Office to open and save ODF files.

The first prototype for Word 2007 has been posted on SourceForge at sourceforge.net under a BSD licence. Anyone can download it, use it, submit bug reports, give feedback or contribute to the project. The initial specification is quite modest, with only basic formatting being converted, but it should expand later to include more sophisticated features such as tables, numbering and others – the eventual aim will be to convert every feature the two formats have in common. The converter for Word has limited functionality at the moment, but should be ready by the end of the year when Office 2007 will now ship. Converters for Excel and PowerPoint should follow in 2007. These converters will be accessed via a command-line interface for batch processing of files, or else through add-ins for Office 2007. Older versions of Office will be able to use ODF files via the compatibility pack designed to let Office 2000, XP and 2003 save and load OOX files. To convert any existing binary format DOC file to ODF, it will first be converted into the new DOCX format and then into the OASIS ODT format.

Microsoft intends to put menu items in the finished version of Office 2007 that will lead people to download not only the ODF converter, but also the XPS and PDF exporters, which it recently pulled from the suite to appease Adobe. So, for most people with a broadband internet connection, these features are virtually in the box, since it should take only a couple of clicks and a minute or two to download and install them.
Date filtering

I use Outlook to help keep track of the tasks I need to do. Articles I have to write, household chores, you name it and it’s probably in there. In previous versions of Outlook, I customised views in the Tasks folder to colour code the tasks according to their categories for quick identification. I also used the Automatic Formatting option to add rulesto colour tasks due today in blue and those not due for at least a week in silver. Along with the built-in formatting for overdue items that gave me red, blue, black and silver colouring for overdue, due today, due within 7 days and not due yet respectively.

Outlook 2003 introduced the concept of Arrange By | Date and Arrange By | Show in Groups, which made the colour coding unnecessary. This gives group headers for common date ranges such as Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, Next Month and so on, so it’s much easier to see when tasks are due but, as I have a large number of tasks in the folder, the display is cluttered by tasks that I really don’t need to worry about now. Taxing and insuring the car come round only once a year and I won’t have to renew my passport for another ten years, so I don’t need to see these tasks every day until their start or due dates are much closer. This is especially true in Outlook 2007, where the To Do bar shows tasks alongside your email and calendar, for example.

The best way to deal with this situation is to create a new view, or alter the To Do bar view in Outlook 2007, to filter out the tasks that are more than two months away. In Outlook 2003, choose View | Arrange By | Current View | Define Views…, Select and click the Copy… button. Name the view Upcoming Tasks and click the OK button. Now click the Filter… button and switch to the Advanced tab. Click the Field button and pick the Start Date field from the Frequently Used Fields, Date/Time Fields or All Task Fields – it doesn’t matter which, as they all point to the same Start Date.

In the Condition drop-down list, pick “on or before” and in the Value box type “2 months”, without the quotes. Click the Add to List button and then OK. Click OK again and then Apply View. If your tasks have Due Dates but no Start Dates, you should use Due Date rather than Start Date in the filter. If you have tasks that have no start/due date, which you want to be shown in the view, you’d add the condition “Start Date does not exist” or “Due Date does not exist” to the filter.

In Outlook 2007 Beta 2, to fettle the To Do bar, right-click in the To Do task list and choose Customize Current View… and then click the Filter… button. Add the conditions “Start Date on or before 2 months” and “Start Date does not exist” conditions through the Advanced tab and click OK twice.