The “new document” issue first arrived with the release of Office Web Apps back in the day. Microsoft gave the user the cool ability to view and edit documents directly in the browser, but this obviously created some architectural challenges around how documents are saved, named etc.
At first it wasn’t really a problem as we mostly dealt with SharePoint on premise and so the Web Apps things didn’t feature as much. Users would click on “New Document” and by default MS Word would open and life would be good.
In the online world, which has taken over like, THE EVERYTHING, users would click on “New Document” and immediately start authoring the content in the browser. This is a cool experience, except it created a mess as the document names would increment as follows:
- Document1.docx
- Document2.docx
- etc.
A user had the ability to update the title after and yes, this is what search uses mostly, but still it just created a mess for administrators to manage and it looked poor when browsing a standard library via the interface.
And then it changed
Today I created a new document to test a template on our intranet and to my absolute amazement and excitement, a window popped up asking me to enter a NAME. I was so happy I immediately took a screenshot, tweeted it out and I knew it would ignite my love to blog again, as I just wanted to share this awesome update in the product.
I silently wonder how long this feature was available before I found it. 🙂
Thanks Microsoft!
I know you guys have been VERY busy rolling out new features and little apps all over the show, I’m just happy that you found the time to fix this little thing that really was a pain in my behind. 🙂
Tonight I can sleep easy.
Francois Pienaar 
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