Greetings from MacBU and Happy New Year! As you probably know by now, Office 2008 RTM’ed last month and we’re thrilled to start off 2008 with our product launch at Macworld Expo San Francisco. In just two weeks, we’ll be awaiting everyone at our Macworld booth with demo stations, theatre presentations, and insider tips-and-tricks on Office 2008.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to provide in-depth postings on how we developed Office 2008. Thus far, we’ve provided details on new suite-wide innovations and application-specific features in Office 2008. However, developing new features is only part of our efforts --- we also invest in improving existing features based on customer feedback. One example is Notebook Layout View, first introduced in Word 2004 and now further enhanced in Word 2008. In this post, I will begin with a brief history of this feature and take you behind the scenes on how it was designed, developed, and further improved upon over the course of two releases of Word for Mac.

So first, what is Notebook Layout View? Simply put, Notebook Layout View is a specialized workspace that resembles a spiral paper-based notebook, in which you can take notes, flag items, and record audio. Below is a screenshot of the latest reincarnation of this feature in Word 2008.