Office 2007

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The long-awaited Microsoft Office 2007 is now available in a pre-release beta. Microsoft Office 2007, offers the next version of Microsoft's suite and presents improved versions of Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and more. It appears though every new feature has its advantages and disadvantages to experienced users.

The first thing that you'll notice when you open an Office 2007 product is the completely revamped interface. The traditional drop-down menu's at the top have been replaced by what is called a ribbon.

The Ribbon

An interface device that presents commands (buttons, icons and options) under a set of tabs.  For example, the Home tab contains all of your formatting options, such as font settings, page layouts, and colours. Other tabs include Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View.

Excel, on the other hand, provides tabs for creating worksheets, inserting charts, applying formulas, and more. In theory, only relevant tabs appear when they can support the immediate task at hand. Thus, as an example, Excel's chart commands only appear when you're working with graphs.

The tabbed toolbar browsing will make navigating through tasks and documents easier and eliminate the guesswork. The ribbon also expands to your needs depending upon what you are doing in Word at the time. For example, if you are dealing with pictures or clip art, a new picture formatting tab appears with options specifically for editing and manipulating graphics. You can now also edit an image right in Word 2007 without having to open an external image editor.  The idea is to reduce the number of dialog boxes you have to open to perform everyday tasks.

Live Preview is a new feature that will be a bonus for both new and experienced users - it immediately shows the results of applying editing or formatting style changes by simply highlighting text and moving the cursor over an option.

Main Menu

The main menu of all the Office 2007 programs is now accessible by pressing the Office logo  in the upper-left corner.

The most used application of the Office suite, Word has had the most revamping, though the ribbon is incorporate across the applications.

Some New Features

In Word

• A new feature detects and removes unwanted comments, hidden text, or personal information to ensure that sensitive information doesn't escape when documents are published.

• In Word able to convert its documents into Portable Document Format file (PDF-Acrobat) format files.

• Also a new XMS file format that is Microsoft's response to Adobe's PDF.

• Word allows you to open and edit older Word files, but saves them in a new file format by default. The new format is not backwards compatible. This is an important consideration if you need to exchange files with others who may not have made the upgrade.

• A feature for our internet age, you can now publish blogs directly from Word to a blog site.

In PowerPoint

• New slide templates, image-editing tools, and slide animations.

• Microsoft is including a ton of pre-programmed style galleries to spice up images and text.

• New SmartArt capabilities allow you to transform boring bulleted text into a chart or other useful informational graphic.

In Excel

• Supports spreadsheets up to 1 million rows by 16,000 columns in size and builds charts with fewer clicks.

• Keeps its headings in view as you scroll. (Finally!!!)

In Outlook

• You can share a calendar with anyone within or outside of your organization by publishing Internet calendars.

• You can flag an e-mail that you want to deal with later, and the program will add it to your list of tasks.

In Access

• Automatic data detection allows the program to recognize whether data is currency, a date, or other common data types.
• There are new field types such as attachments and multi-value fields that allow you to attach any document, image, or spreadsheet to any record.
• With a multi-value field, you can select more than one value (for example, assign a task to more than one person) in each cell.
• The new WYSIWYG interface displays how a report will look without having to actually run it. New features also allow you to better track records and see who created, edited, and deleted records, as well as roll back data edits.

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