Speaking to an audience of CEOs at the company’s Redmond campus yesterday, and in the latest of his periodic Executive Emails, Gates talked about introducing better ways to manage information and work more efficiently.

Microsoft wants to help information workers focus, prioritize and apply their expertise, visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment, Gates wrote.

Gates’ Office vision thing amounts to this: workers are dealing with more information than ever, are adopting inefficient means of dealing with it using current software, and need tools that can help them work smarter.

Workers have to prioritize and react to even more email than ever before, Gates said: There’s a real temptation that the thing that comes latest is the one that you shift your attention to, even though that may be the least important thing that’s in there.

He roughly outlined how future versions of Office will be able to help users prioritize through pattern recognition and adaptive filtering.

As software learns your working preferences, it can flexibly manage your interruptions, Gates wrote. If you’re working on a high-priority memo under a tight deadline, for example, software should be able to understand this and only allow phone calls or e-mails from, say, your manager or a family member.

It’s important for Microsoft to provide real value in new versions of Office. While this part of its business is second only to Windows in terms of revenue, growth is challenging as many companies believe their existing Office installations are adequate.

But details on features to be introduced with Office 12, a working title, are still pretty thin on the ground, but Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the Information Worker Product Management Group at Microsoft, did talk in some general terms.

The design focuses on five general areas that customers have identified as important needs: individual impact, collaboration, knowledge discovery and insight, enterprise content lifecycle, and information solution IT fundamentals, he said in a statement.

Caposella added that PowerPoint will have a feature that can automatically apply professional-quality formatting and layout to slides so people can focus their attention on the content.

SharePoint Portal Server will have peer-to-peer collaboration functions from Groove Networks, which Microsoft acquired, added. Excel will have features for pushing scorecards directly to SharePoint portals.

Caposella also said that Office 12 will support more XML standards, to enable developers of back-end applications to better integrate with the software. An ERP application could feed data directly into Office.

Integrating familiar Microsoft Office tools with enterprise resource management systems will become easier, and developers also can create rich applications for specialized industry needs, Caposella said.

Despite the focus on Office in Microsoft’s marketing yesterday, Gates spent much of his CEO keynote talking up the recently launched Windows Desktop Search software, which is currently being positioned under the Windows, not Office, family.

It’s certainly the most interesting feature we’ve ever added in between major releases, because it really can change the way that you navigate and find information, Gates said, calling the software a free add-on to Windows.

Microsoft is competing with the likes of Google when it comes to search, both on the desktop and off, but the language Gates used suggests the well-known ‘leverage Windows’ strategy Microsoft has used down the years.

Search really is just at the very beginning, whether it’s the web-type search, or the desktop-type search, Gates said. Those will improve a lot, they’ll come together, and you’ll just come to think of those as a standard element of the system.