Microsoft Office 2007 Review

Was looking forward for a serious upgrade for my desktop, its operating system which is windows XP and the Microsoft office 2003. But after the reviews I read and the Beta RC2 test for windows vista I preferred to keep on using XP with service pack 2. On the other hand I gambled and bought the office 2007 and right now I am using it and happy cause I did go for this choice, and let me admit it for the first time I like a Microsoft product and not being obliged to use it.

The office 2007 was rebuild with a different interfaces and new file formats, but still you can save the files to be accessed by the older versions of office in the save as option. The new Office doesn’t look like its predecessors; it’s likely to spark intense love-hate responses from users. I found that this upgrade isn’t for everyone: If you’re patient, eager to try the latest tools, and willing to relearn most of what you already know about Office, then you may relish the challenge of Office 2007.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 can produce a lot more polished documents and presentations, even Outlook’s new interface make it more familiar and reliable for use.

Those professionals who like to impress their clients, managers, co-workers with attractive reports , charts, and slide shows will find this new office a worthy upgrade.

If you use office applications with their basic or minimum functions, maybe you will try the office 2007 for free for 2 months than you will put it on the shelf, and get back to the 2003 version as you don’t need for more and It is easier for you.

Those who used to master old versions of Microsoft Office, will be on the right track to master this new version like I am doing, but it will take a bit of time, but once you will get familiar with it you wont be able to use older versions, and those using older versions will find difficulties in accessing your files and they need special patches to do so, which will be a problem in the future. To not forget, also Office 2007 offer complex functions that you cant find elsewhere right now.
I would like to state some of the Interface and features from what I found on a cnet article about office:

Interface

Once you open each Office 2007 application, you’ll see a radically different, blue interface that’s brighter than in the past. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint arrange features within a tabbed Ribbon toolbar that largely replaces the gray drop-down menus and dialog boxes from a quarter-century of Office software.

The Office logo menu, docked in the upper left corner, bundles many commands from the old File and Edit menus. Outlook lacks the logo button and adopts the Ribbon only within its message composition and scheduling windows.

There’s a core set of always-on tabs, as well as contextual tabs that hide until the software detects that you need them. For instance, the Picture Tools Format tab only shows up when you click on an image. We were stumped at first about how to format images, tables, and charts until we got used to clicking on them first.

The Office 2007 programs, which share a new graphics engine, strongly emphasize ways to decorate documents. Pull-down Style Galleries let you preview how new fonts, color themes, chart styles, images and such appear before you apply the change.

This is great for selecting from menus of fonts or page templates. At the same time, however, the “intelligent” shape-shifting may bewilder those who don’t realize that they must click a style to apply a formatting change. In most cases, the preformatted styles only present colors within the same range already used by your document.

And sometimes the pull-down galleries jut into the document and obscure the charts or images you’re trying to change, and you can’t turn them off.

Nor do the dynamic previews apply to all style elements. For example, from the Page Layout tab of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, you can preview Themes of colors and templates by mousing over them. But the Page Borders option takes you to an unhelpful, old-school pop-up box without dynamic previews.

On the one hand, newbies to Office software, particularly young, visual learners, may find the 2007 interface easier to master than Office 2003. Icons label most of the commands, and many expand into pull-down menus. There are inconsistencies, though, such as buttons that open older dialog boxes. And many items have moved to places that we don’t find intuitive.

For instance, the dictionary and thesaurus in Word are under the Review tab, not References near the footnote and bibliography buttons. And the Insert Rows command in Excel 2007 is located beneath the Home tab, not the Insert tab. Likewise, PowerPoint’s New Slide button is under Home instead of Insert. Notice a pattern? Although the Home tab houses many frequently used features, it’s not the first place we look for them.

After more than a year of alternating between Office 2003 and test versions of Office 2007, we still found it hard to break old habits. Microsoft advertises the Ribbon’s ability to help you “browse, pick, and click.” If you’re upgrading, though, you could get stuck in the “browse” stage longer than you’d like, slowing your work.

Rather than piling on more features — Word 2003 alone had some 1,500 commands — Microsoft attempted to better show off functions that already existed. To some extent, the Ribbon meets this goal, as it’s easier to find Conditional Formatting in Excel, among other sophisticated tools. And the View tab in Word and Excel better provides options for viewing two or three open documents at once.

You can customize Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to some extent, such as by adding buttons to the small, Quick Access Toolbar, but not as much as with their predecessors.

Luckily, keyboard shortcuts remain the same; just press ALT at any time to see tiny “badges” that label the quick keys for the Ribbon’s commands. We like that you can hide the Ribbon by double-clicking on any tab. Plus, Microsoft has killed Clippy, the annoying animated pop-up assistant that would interrupt your work in Office 2003. A subtle new quick formatting toolbar in Word 2007 fades in and out near your cursor.

Overall, our favorite interface tweak is the slider bar in the lower right corner that lets you zoom in and out with ease.

Features

Many of the changes to Office 2007 feel skin deep. By that, we mean that there’s a strong emphasis on making documents, spreadsheets, and presentations easier on the eyes.

You can adjust the brightness of images, for instance, and add 3D effects such as drop shadows and glows to pictures and charts. And many of the features that might appear new are simply easier to stumble upon in the new interface. The useful Document Inspector provides old and new ways to clean up hidden metadata in files. But don’t expect too many new features.

Word 2007 offers some basic tools that you’d otherwise look to in desktop publishing programs such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign. A host of new templates as well as preformatted styles and SmartArt diagrams let you dress up reports, flyers, and so on with images and charts.

However, you can’t precisely control the placement of design elements on the page as you can with professional publishing software. And for wordsmiths who just work with plain old text, there’s little need to upgrade. There’s a new method of comparing document drafts side by side, but you still can’t post a password-protected file to the Web without having Groove or server tools.

At the same time, academic researchers should appreciate the Review tab’s handy pull-down menus of footnotes, citations, and tables of content. And Word’s new blogging abilities might be handy, but even its cleaned-up HTML is far more cluttered than we’d like.

We find that the Ribbon layout in Excel improves its usefulness for working with complex spreadsheets. For instance, scientists and other researchers can access all the formulas in handy pull-down menus. You can make deeper data sorts and work with as many as a million rows.

It’s easier to find the Conditional Formatting for drawing heat maps or adding icons in order to display data patterns. Plus, along with the other glossier graphics throughout Office, Excel charts get a facelift.

You’ll probably want to upgrade to PowerPoint 2007 if you frequently depend upon professional-looking slide shows to help close a deal. The new template themes are more attractive and less flat-looking than those of the past, although there’s little new in the way of managing multimedia content.

Among the four applications in Office Standard, Outlook 2007 provides the most practical improvements. To start, it lets you drag tasks and e-mail messages to the calendar, a long-awaited feature that makes scheduling more simple. The new To-Do Bar’s task and calendar overview and the ability to flag an e-mail for follow up at a specific time are terrific for time management.

Outlook’s built-in RSS reader is useful if you manage lots of news feeds, but we were disappointed that it matches up only with RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7 and not other browsers. We also wish there were a simpler way of organizing e-mail messages than in nested folders and Search Folders. Tagging messages by subject might be nice, as Gmail allows.

The new Instant Search — which lets you troll through e-mail messages, calendar entries, to-do items, and contacts — improves upon Outlook 2003’s clutzy lookups. Plus, Outlook’s new protection against junk mail and phishing scams disables suspicious links.

But Outlook 2007 uses Word 2007’s HTML standards rather than those of Internet Explorer 7, which could make some of your newsletters look lopsided when compared with their appearance in Outlook 2003.

When sending e-mail attachments from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Outlook composition window opens with all of its formatting options. Integration has improved throughout the applications, but it’s not fully there yet.

For instance, we like that you can tinker with a chart’s appearance within Word and PowerPoint while managing the connected data in Excel at the same time. You can click through a preview of a PowerPoint slide show attached to an Outlook e-mail message. But why can’t you get a quick, split-pane view of two applications at once at any other time?

We’re disappointed at the current lack of integration with Web-based services. If you don’t want to buy Groove to collaborate with other Groove users, and you’re not using Office on a shared office server, then you’ll have to turn to a third-party service, such as Zoho Writer, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and ThinkFree to upload and collaborate on documents without having to e-mail them around.

We had hoped to see such capabilities added, perhaps in the form of tie-ins to Microsoft’s Windows Live or Office Live.

Every application saves work in the new, Office Open XML formats (see our guide and video). Look for an X in the new document extension: DOCX replaces DOC, XLSX replaces XLS, and so forth. The 2007 documents, presentations, and spreadsheets squeeze more data into fewer kilobytes than their predecessors did. If a file becomes corrupted, you should be able to recover its contents better than in the past because the files store text, images, macros, and other elements separately.

Note that when you open older Office files with the 2007 applications, you’ll work in the Compatibility Mode with fewer features until you convert files to the new format. And as with the release of Office 1997, you can’t open a file with the new extension right away when using earlier versions of the programs.

What if you have the new software but need to share work with people who have not upgraded? The 2007 applications let you save backward-compatible files, but not by default. Those who are running Word 2003 or 2000 and need to open a Word 2007 DOCX file have to download a one-time Compatibility Pack.