Chris PratleyChris PratleyLead Program ManagerLead Program Manager

Microsoft OfficeMicrosoft Office

Overview

Office Unicode strategy Implementation Benefits of Unicode to Office users Demo of Word2000

Office Unicode Strategy

Office97 driving factors– Customers operate world-wide (US only 40%)– Need to handle multiple code pages in Europe

Office97 goals– Enable loss-less file exchange world-wide– Solve code page problems in Europe– Development efficiency for Asian and Euro versions

• Unified source code base – but still different executables• Unified development process• Delta between language versions shrinks from 18 to 2 months

– Lay foundation for future

Office2000 Unicode Strategy

Office2000 goals– Reduce Total Cost of Ownership for large corporations

• Single version to deploy and administer globally• Configurable interface to handle local needs

– Language of User Interface can be changed– Additional language features can be enabled as needed– Emulate any localized version

• “Français”, “ 日本語”, “ 한글” , “ عربي”,“עברית ”, etc.

– Streamline development process further• Core “US” team ships global product • Integrate bi-directional version team (Arabic, Hebrew)

– Focus on needs of bilingual and multilingual users

The Word Family Tree

Unicode

US/Euro JPN KOR CHT CHS Bi-Di Thai

DBCS DBCS DBCS DBCSSBCS SBCS SBCS2.0/5.0

Version

Wide Wide Wide WideSBCS SBCS SBCS6.0/95

Unicode Unicode Unicode97

UnicodeFuture

Unicode Unicode2000

Today

Implementation

Core applications are Unicode internally– Word, Excel, PowerPoint (Office97)– Access (new in Office2000)

• Databases are now Unicode

Remaining apps and applets– Inter-operate with Unicode apps– Will move to Unicode in next release

Implementation

Difficulties encountered with Unicode– Character code unification

• Many punctuation were unified that are very different (especially full-width / half-width)

– Interoperation with code-page based systems

• If the code page is not known, converting data to Unicode is hard - lots of bugs here

• Things that had worked “by accident” were broken

– Educating test team about Unicode vs. MBCS

Implementation

Multi-font support groups characters– “ASCII” (0-127 range in ISO-8859-1)– “Asian” (all full-width “double byte”, plus half-width katakana)– “Complex Script” (composing scripts such as Bi-di, Thai, Indic)– “Other” (all other “single byte” characters)

Do not apply fonts to characters not supported by the font– Otherwise applying ＭＳ Ｐゴシック to “Montréal” would beco

me “Montr al⁞ ”– Likewise applying Arial to “ 日本語” would become “ ���”

Unified characters are hinted where necessary– Asian full-width “•••” never becomes European proportional “…”– Full-width Cyrillic and Greek never become proportional

Office Users Benefit

Single binary world-wide Shared world-wide file formats Multilingual word/data processing Unicode HTML Unicode e-mail (HTML, RTF, plain)

Single Binary

Easier to deploy, administer– One set-up image to install world-wide– One set of service packs for all machines

All features available in all “versions”– Still have local version packages– Multilingual users can use “foreign” features

User Interface language is configurable– Your language follows you when you travel

Major cost savings for customers– Less testing of corporate solutions– Lower internal tech support costs

Single File Format

Multinational corporations use Office– Need to exchange documents company-wide

Office unified file formats via Unicode– Word95 had 7 different file formats– Word97 had 1 file format but no editing, layout

for languages covered by other versions– Word2000 adds editing, layout, and full-

roundtrip

Multilingual Word/Data Processing

English Office2000: input/display/edit/layout of– European languages

• any similar left-right scripts if fonts/NLS available– Asian languages

• Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)• Japanese• Korean

– Bi-directional languages (requires enabled system)• Arabic (incl. Farsi, Urdu)• Hebrew

Thai/Vietnamese/Indic require local version

Multilingual Word Processing

Most documents are monolingual– Most users are bilingual

• Local language

• English

– Optimize UI for using one, two or three languages• Over 100 supported – rare usage

– Detect over 20 languages as they are typed• Automatically install and use the correct proofing tools

Multilingual Word Processing

Proofing tool interfaces are Unicode– Spelling, Grammar, Hyphenation, Thesaurus

Tools for over 30 languages available– Most European languages– Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew

Additional tools– Traditional/Simplified Chinese conversion– Hangul/Hanja conversion– Japanese character usage consistency checker– Dictionaries & integration with Microsoft BookShelf

Multilingual Data Processing

Access databases are Unicode– Hook up to SQL7.0 Unicode databases

Excel workbooks are Unicode– Hook up to Unicode databases using OLE-DB– Create Pivot lists and manipulate Unicode data

PowerPoint creates multilingual multimedia– Use VBA to generate learning tools,

multilingual kiosk demos

Unicode HTML

HTML is a companion file format– Roundtrip all formatting– Save to web servers– Roundtrip Unicode data in any encoding

• UTF-8 and UTF-16 are supported too

– HTML is tagged with encoding URLs are UTF-8 Plain text I/O in any encoding (Word)

Unicode e-mail

Office2000 provides fully multilingual email– HTML mail uses internet standards

– All Unicode content preserved Plugs into Outlook, Outlook Express, Exchange

– Use Word to compose replies and new messages

– Send in plain text, RTF, or HTML All applications can mail documents as HTML

Future Directions

Work with Windows2000 towards a worldwide platform– Unicode 3.0 languages too

Fold in Thai, Vietnamese, Indic language support Extend Unicode support to more applications

– Outlook– FrontPage– PhotoDraw– Visual Basic Editor and Forms– Publisher– Works

Work with tools group (Visual Studio) to make globalization technology available to developers

Microsoft Word2000 Microsoft Word2000 onon

Windows2000Windows2000

Demo

QuestionsQuestions

Answers