Category: Office

  • What's up with Office 2013's context menu and tooltip shadows?

    Update (2015-04-22): Somewhat surprisingly, a recent Office 2013 patch appears to have fixed this issue. Update (2015-03-04): Office 2016 fixes this. Update (2014-10-03): Office 2013 running on the Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9841) exhibits the same issue 🙁 At some point in the not-too-distant past, Office 2013 started rendering strange shadow artefacts in the…

  • Office 2013: Further Evidence of the Demise of ClearType?

    Poking around the Office 2013 Customer Preview, one thing that caught my eye immediately was the lack of ClearType font smoothing. Nearly all user interface elements use ‘greyscale’ font smoothing (as opposed to ClearType’s sub-pixel smoothing). I’ve highlighted the parts of Word 2013 that still use ClearType: The text in cells in Excel 2013 still…

  • Office 15: per application border colours?

    Winreview.ru’s latest Office 15 screenshots reveal application-specific border colours and drop-shadows. Word gets a dark blue border and shadow, Excel gets a green border and shadow, etc.: Microsoft in fact applied for a patent for per-window glass colourisation in late 2005 (‘Glass appearance window frame colorization’; discovered by Long Zheng in 2007). While there isn’t…