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Average Overall Rating:  173 Ratings,196 Reviews |
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| This upgrade will ruin your productivity! Don't!! |
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2008-09-05 00:00:00 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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If Vista wasn't bad enough, this is even worse.
The huge problem with this upgrade is the dire interface. The ribbon takes up far too much space and can't be customised. Forget all your keyboard shortcuts, they won't work in Word 2007... (Read full review at Amazon)
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| "Jury Still Out" |
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By dpsdkep 2008-08-03 00:00:00 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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Used MS Office products for a million years, so the new interface was a shock to me. After using it for several weeks, I can find my way around fine, but I'm not sure this was a move up (I'm sure it was fund for the MS UI team to develop). I find i (Read full review at CNET)
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| Pros: Easy to install, seems faster than Office 2003 |
| Cons: The new GUI - The Ribbon (Maybe) |
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| "It's not the best" |
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By ramonb3 2008-07-21 00:00:00 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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Saves takes forever causes myself to either Ctrl-Alt-Del use task manager and start all over again after 5-10 minutes wait time. For counting of words in your document, that also takes forever. There's better alternatives, just search for it. (Read full review at CNET)
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| Pros: Graphically, it just looks good. |
| Cons: Don't bother doing a novel |
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| "The horror, the HORROR!" |
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By Teenygozer 2008-07-19 00:00:00 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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I went through the trouble of registering on this site just to spread the word of the horrors of having to work professionally with this utterly brain-dead piece of software. Who designed this, art students? Because it's very pretty, but it doesn't (Read full review at CNET)
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| Pros: There aren't any! |
| Cons: WHERE IS EVERYTHING?! |
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| "it takes some tuime to get used to" |
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By jrappy87 2008-07-17 00:00:00 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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In my opinion, office 2007 is okay, it just takes some time to get used to. There are more options than the previous version, but you have to get used to having designated tabs for each thing you want to do...i think microsoft wanted to mitigate havi (Read full review at CNET)
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| Pros: Cool interface |
| Cons: drastic change from office 2003 |
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| -- Activehome Expert, Activehome 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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| Word 2007 is one of the major components of Microsoft's Office 2007 suite. As with the majority of Office 2007 applications, it uses the new ribbon-style menu system. The Home ribbon gives character, paragraph and style formatting, plus clipboard and search tools. The dull default Arial-and-Times styles weâ??ve been used to have been replaced by elegant combinations of font, colour and formatting, arranged in a palette. Hover the mouse over a style and you get a preview of the selected text â?? a click confirms, while moving the mouse off the palette cancels. You can also change to a different style set, which affects the whole document - again, you get a preview. Complementing styles are Themes (accessible from the Page Layout Ribbon). These apply a complete set of fonts, colours and graphic effects to an entire document. The Insert ribbon covers everything that was previously in the Insert menu (dates, graphics, text boxes etc.), but also things that also belong there, such as headers, footers, and tables. Other ribbons cover References (footnotes etc), Mailings (mail merge, envelopes, etc), Reviewing (comments, proofing, and mark-up) and View. The View ribbon encompasses the former View and Window menus, as well as access to macros. If you have the optional Developer ribbon enabled, then you get more macro and VBA tools, document protection, XML schemas and form controls. The only menu left is the Office menu, lurking behind the top-left logo: this contains the old File menu, the options dialogue and up to 50 recently used files. A useful touch is that you can â??pinâ?? files to this list so they that stay put. The Status bar has also had a makeover and now includes a running word count and a zoom control. Another new suite-wide feature is the mini-toolbar . Select some text and a ghostly transparent toolbar appears beside it â?? mouse over this, or right-click, and it firms up to provide basic formatting. Note that the taskpane is still available for jobs such as accessing clip-art or the thesaurus. The contextual spelling check is another welcome new feature. This is designed to spot a correctly spelled word in the wrong place â?? "itâ??s" instead of "its", for instance. Although the ribbon takes getting used to, youâ??ll find many sections have a small arrow to the right of the label â?? this summons the traditional dialogue. Other aids include pop-ups for keyboard shortcuts; press the Alt key and letters will appear on the ribbons and tabs prompting further input. If youâ??re still stuck, as well as off-line text help thereâ??s an online Flash guide to finding Word 2003 commands in 2007. Surprisingly, given the extent of the makeover, Microsoft still hasnâ??t got window handling consistent. With multiple documents open in Excel, you're given one program window and taskbar buttons for each worksheet, which makes sense. However, with Word you are stuck with either multiple program windows â?? each with its own ribbon and taskbar button - or a single parent with a single taskbar button just showing the active document. Word 2007 brings with it plenty of improvements, but the lack of customisation options will frustrate some. This article is part of our complete Microsoft Office 2007 review Microsoft Office 2007 overview Microsoft Excel 2007 review Microsoft Outlook 2007 review See also Microsoft Windows Vista review Video review: Windows Vista Also consider Tesco Complete Office software suite An excellent budget alternative to Microsoft Office, providing all the basics required of an office suite Openoffice.org 2 Improved compatibility with Microsoft Office make this a genuine alternative for many home and business users Zoho Virtual Office productivity software Share contacts and organise calendars All Office Applications Tags: Word Processing , Office 2007 Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below: del.icio.us Digg this reddit! Permalink for this story ...
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| -- Vnunet Expert, Vnunet 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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| The new 2007 version of Microsoft Office has been available to corporate clients since November 2006, but retail customers have had to wait until the end of January 2007. As ever, it is available in a variety of configurations and prices, from the Student/Home edition at £90, comprising Word , Excel , PowerPoint and OneNote to the Ultimate edition at £487. The version supplied for review, Professional, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook with Business Contact Manager and Publisher. The best price we could find was £357 for the full version or £235 for an upgrade. To qualify for an upgrade you need any Office 2000 (or later) suite or program, or Works 6.0 or later. So, what??s new? The two big changes are in the file formats and the interface. The proprietary binary file formats ?? Doc, Xls and Ppt ?? have been supplanted by Office Open XML (OOXML), with the DocX, XlsX and PptX extensions. These combine Zip technology to reduce file size (if you rename a DocX extension to Zip , you can see that the document consists of several files) and XML. The latter isn??t new to Office ?? version 2000 introduced XML-based Smart Tags ?? but the new formats are claimed to ??enable rapid creation of documents from disparate data sources, accelerating document assembly, data mining, and content reuse??. As the name implies, OOXML is open-standard, but is not the same as the XML-based Open Document Format used by OpenOffice . The latter already has ISO ratification, but at the time of writing Microsoft was encountering obstacles in fast-track ISO approval. You can read more about Microsoft's ODF standard in our news story . This may cause the company to lose government contracts, but end users have little to fear since the new formats are not compulsory, and you can continue to use the former Doc, Xls and Ppt formats as default. What's more, Microsoft has made available converter packs, via Office Update , that will let 2000 and 2003 users open and save files in the new formats. The other big change is in the interface. The familiar menus and toolbars that have graced Word and Excel since 1990 are gone. Microsoft??s reasoning is that the accumulation of features and commands has made it hard to find anything through the menu system. Previous alterations to the interface ?? the irritating Office Assistant, the space-hogging task pane and the infuriating ??adaptive?? menus - have not proved popular. So, let??s hear a big welcome for the new ribbon interface. The text labels at the top of the screen may look like menus but they are really tabs; each revealing a different ribbon of tools below. Word, for example, has a Home ribbon containing formatting, clipboard and search tools, and other task-orientated ribbons for Page Layout, Mailing, and so on. Other ribbons ?? such as Excel??s Chart Design ?? don??t have a permanent tab but appear when needed. Whichever tab is open, you can still edit text, numbers and formulae. Keyboard shortcuts also work irrespective of the current ribbon. Customisation (once the joy of power users and the despair of support staff) has all but been excised. Although custom keystrokes are still permitted, the r ibbons are set in stone ?? only the Quick Access Toolbar can have commands or macros added. Is it worth upgrading? For home and small business users, the new file formats bring little benefit. XML is largely irrelevant and if file size is still an issue in these days of sub-25p per gigabyte hard disks, then XP and Vista users already have methods of file compression. It isn??t cheap, and UK purchasers have to pay 40 per cent more than their US counterparts. And elegant though the new interface is, upgraders are still going to have to devote time and effort to learning it. For new recruits who can do without Access or Outlook, then the sub-£100 Home and Student edition is an enticing proposition. Indeed, although we've given the overall suite three out of five for value for money, the Student edition is well worth five out of five in this category. More Office 2007 reviews: Microsoft Word 2007 review Microsoft Excel 2007 review Microsoft Outlook 2007 review See also: Microsoft Windows Vista review Video review: Windows Vista Also consider: Tesco Complete Office software suite An excellent budget alternative to Microsoft Office, providing all the basics required of an office suite Openoffice.org 2 Improved compatibility with Microsoft Office make this a genuine alternative for many home and business users Zoho Virtual Office productivity software Share contacts and organise calendars All Office Applications Tags: Microsoft , Office 2007 ...
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| -- Pcauthority Expert, Pcauthority 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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| Not many new features, but the new interface breathes fresh life into an already great product. The most used of all the Office applications, Word really benefits from Ribbon, the new user interface. Virtually all parts of the application have been u ...
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| -- CNET Expert, CNET 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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| Microsoft Word 2007's document types, interface, and some features--very nearly every aspect of this word processor--have changed. With this update, Microsoft Word 2007 becomes a more image-conscious application. New picture-editing tools help you deck out documents and play with fancy fonts. Bloggers and researchers may also benefit. It's easier to get a handle on document security, but those who only need basic typing features may not want to relearn the interface or deal with the new file formats. Our installation of various Office suites on Windows XP computers took between 10 and 20 minutes, which was quicker than prior editions of Office. You'll have to be online to access services later, such as Help and How-To as well as Clip Art and document templates. Our reviews of Microsoft Office 2007 detail the installation process and the ingredients of each edition. Word 2007 will operate in Compatibility Mode, shutting off some of the new graphics-rich features, should you, for example, open a Word 2003 DOC file without converting it to the new DOCX format. Interface Once you have Word 2007 running, you will notice a completely redesigned toolbar, now known as the Ribbon, with many familiar commands in new places. Instead of the old, gray drop-down menus atop the page, Microsoft's new and very colorful Ribbon clumps common features into tabs: Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View. Some tabs don't show up until you might need them; for example, you must select a picture to bring up its formatting tab. At first, you'll need to wander around to find what's moved from prior versions of Word. Clicking the Office 2007 logo in the upper-left corner drops down a menu of staple functions--such as opening, saving, and printing files--that were under Word 2003's File menu. We had the hardest time locating commands from Word 2003's Editing and Tools menus. To insert a comment in Word 2007, for instance, you must look under the Review tab instead of the Insert tab. Prepare to relearn Word . Alas, there is no "classic" view to help you make the transition to the 2007 version. While it's a challenge to upgrade, those learning Word for the first time may find its features easier to stumble upon than they would have with Word 2003. For instance, the new interface better presents page view options that used to be a hassle to get to. From the View tab, now you can simply check a box to see a ruler or gridlines, or click the Arrange All button to stack various open Word documents atop each other. Although we sometimes mixed up the placement of commands within the Review and References tabs, those features were still easier to find than in Word 2003. Microsoft placed a lot of emphasis on the wow factor of Office's galleries of graphics, which share the Aero look of Windows Vista and are found throughout the Office applications. Pull-down menus of fonts, color themes, and images let you preview changes on the page before making them. And thankfully, Microsoft killed Clippy, the cartoonish helper. Now a less-intrusive quick formatting toolbar shows up near your cursor. Keyboard shortcuts remain the same; pressing the Alt key displays the corresponding quick key for each Ribbon command. A running word count is always present in the lower-left corner, and the new slider bar for zooming in and out is a terrific, no-brainer improvement, particularly for the vision impaired. Features Aside from the interface, the other radical change in Word 2007 is its new file type. For the first time in a decade, Microsoft foists a new file format upon users, and old Word DOC files make way for the new DOCX type of Word 2007. Microsoft has taken steps to ease this transition, but we anticipate that it will not be smooth for many users. Word 2007's new Picture Tools options let you hover over galleries of changes to preview how they'll look. In the past, you may have applied a change out of curiosity, then hit Undo when it didn't meet your expectations. What happens when you're sharing work with people who use an older version of Word? Word 2003 and 2000 are supposed to detect when you first try to open a DOCX file, then prompt you to download and install an Office 2007 Compatibility Pack . After you've done this, the older Word should convert your Word 2007 files and remove incompatible features. When you reopen that same DOCX file again in Word 2007, the file's original elements are supposed to stay intact. On the other hand, if you open an older DOC file within Word 2007, it will also run in Compatibility Mode, shutting off access to some of the newer program features, which explains why two documents within Word 2007 may display different formatting options. Among the small tweaks in Word 2007 that make formatting easier, rollover style galleries let you preview the changes. However, the constant shape-shifting of the galleries can be distracting. And some options, such as for adjusting margins, use an older-style dialog box rather than the live preview menus. Still, it takes just a couple of clicks to insert a JPEG, a GIF, a BMP, a PNG, or another image type. Click the graphic, and the Picture Tools Format tab lets you tweak the brightness, the color mode, and the contrast of a picture. You can also rotate it, crop it, skew its angle, add 3D effects and shadows to its borders, and convert it to all manner of shapes, such as a thought bubble, an arrow, or a star. Options for positioning an image and wrapping text around it are also front and center, which should be helpful for creating professional-looking business documents, as well as casual party invitations. You don't get nearly the amount of control offered by Microsoft Publisher, QuarkXPress, or Adobe InDesign , but Word 2007 may do the trick for ultrabasic desktop-publishing needs. For those who don't need all the formatting choices, we're glad that Word 2007 doesn't apply a complex style to our text by default. In Word 2003, we'd have to highlight all the text, and then Clear Formatting to remove unwanted indentations and bold letters. In Word 2007, Calibri, a crisp, default font, replaces the standard Times New Roman from Word 2003. You can choose from galleries of text styles, such as Emphasis, Strong, or Book Title, and easily create your own styles and set them as a default. The Prepare menu offers choices for inspecting, encrypting, and restricting access to your Word files in addition to checking to see how its elements will appear in older versions of Word. While Corel WordPerfect has traditionally offered better features for managing longer documents, Microsoft Word 2007 has improved a bit in this regard. For those working on a dissertation or book report, the References tab lets you manage citations and bibliographies in styles from APA to Turabian. Just click Next Footnote, and the cursor takes you there. However, the Table of Contents feature still isn't easy to figure out. Editors who collaborate on documents with others can make use of the Review tab. The new Compare pull-down menu lets you look at two versions of the same document side by side, as well as merge changes from several authors and editors into one file. Administrative assistants and those charged with mass-mailing tasks should find those features much easier to access than in Word 2003. Bloggers can now compose and post entries to their Web sites without leaving Word. If you deal with sensitive information--in a private diary entry, a resume, or a company financial statement, for example--Word 2007 allows more control over buried data, such as the original author's name or your supervisor's cursing comments. Office 2007's Prepare options step you through inspecting that metadata, as well as adding a digital signature and encrypting a file. You'll also find some of these options under the Review tab's Protect button. However, should you plan to black out text, you'll have to turn to Adobe Acrobat 8 to make secure redactions (highlighting the font in black within Word won't do it). As integration has improved throughout Office 2007, you can click Send from the Office logo menu to attach a Word document to an e-mail message through Outlook's composition window. A message recipient using Outlook 2007 can preview that Word document within the e-mail message pane. And if you paste an Excel 2007 chart into a Word 2007 file, just right-click the chart and select Edit Data to launch Excel in split-pane view. When you change the source data within Excel, the chart adjusts in Word. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn't providing an option for storing or editing Word files online to most users who buy below the $679 Ultimate edition of Office, and there's no browser-based version of Word. Need to collaborate on a file with specific people or take work on the road? At this time, you may have to e-mail those documents. Alternately, you could upload a Word file into one of the many free, Web-based word processors served up by other companies, including Zoho Writer, which offers a free upload add-in for Word 2007. Options for blogging include an editing interface that lets you insert art and charts and lets you post entries without leaving Word. Service and support Boxed editions of Microsoft Office 2007 include a decent, 174-page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact tech support for free, and help at any time with any security-related or virus problems also costs nothing. Beyond that, paid support costs a painfully high $49 per telephone or e-mail incident. Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. We especially like the Command Reference Guide for Word , which walks you through where commands have moved since Office 2003. You can also pose questions to the large community of Microsoft Office users via free support forums and chats. Microsoft Office Diagnostics tool, included with the Office 2007 suites, is also designed to detect and repair problems if something goes haywire. Conclusion Is Word 2007 worth the upgrade? If you primarily work with plain text and don't need to pretty up reports and newsletters and the like, then it might not be right for you. For our purposes as editors, for instance, Word 2007 doesn't introduce must-have goodies, although commenting commands are within easier reach. At the same time, Word 2007 handily presents options for footnotes and citations under its References tab, which researchers should appreciate. Mail-merge functions are also easier to reach. Bloggers might use Word's posting tools in a pinch, but we found Word 2007's rebuilt HTML to be clunky still. Above all, Microsoft's new word processor is most upgrade-worthy if you want to play with pictures, charts, and diagrams in addition to text. ...
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| -- CNET Expert, CNET 0 out of 0 found this reivew helpful |
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| Compare editions For a side-by-side comparison chart of Microsoft Office 2007 editions, click below. Photo gallery: Microsoft Office 2007 The ambitious, ground-up rebuild of Microsoft Office Standard 2007 presents drastically different interfaces and new file formats. The new Office looks so unlike its predecessors, it's likely to spark intense love-hate responses from users. 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 more-polished documents and presentations, and Outlook's new scheduling abilities make it a handier communications hub. Professionals who want to impress clients and co-workers with attractive reports, charts, and slide shows will find this a worthy upgrade. First-time Office users may have an easier time than veteran users getting their bearings. However, if you only use a small fraction of what Office offers or you felt that getting the hang of Office 2003 was painful enough, then you might want to leave Office 2007 on the shelf or try it free for two months first. We imagine that power users who have mastered the nooks and crannies of the older versions will curse the steep learning curve. But take heed: The new era of Office affects even those who don't upgrade, and a conversion tool is needed to let older Office versions open Office 2007's default, Open XML files. Office 2007 does offer complex features that you can't yet find elsewhere. However, it also falls short in key areas. Integration among the applications isn't as thorough as we'd hoped, and there's no one-click way to collaborate with others on an edit without buying Microsoft's Groove online collaboration tool or working within a server setting. The advent of Office 2007 comes as a growing number of competing tools are simpler, cost less (if they aren't free), and handle the same core features. Oddly, despite its bevy of Windows Live and Office Live services, Microsoft chose not to build a bridge to the Web for all Office users. Office editions We reviewed Microsoft Office Standard 2007, which costs a substantial $399, or $239 to upgrade. This suite includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook in addition to Office Tools that manage language settings and pictures and include a diagnostics tool for use in the event of a crash. Households that don't need desktop e-mail should opt for Office Home & Student at $149 (no upgrade option), a new suite roughly equivalent to Office Student and Teacher 2003 but with OneNote instead of Outlook. The Basic package, with Word, Excel, and Outlook, only comes pre-installed on computers sold by manufacturers that have Microsoft software licensing agreements. At $449 ($279 upgrade), Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 costs $50 less than the Professional edition that includes the Access database program. Only the Enterprise and the $679 ($539 upgrade) Ultimate editions include the new Groove tool. And oddly both the Enterprise and Professional Plus editions lack the Business Contact Manager component of Outlook, which corporate users might want for their marketing efforts. Setup Breezing through the options, our fastest installation of Microsoft Office Standard 2007 took no more than 20 minutes on a Windows XP computer. However, settle into your chair if you're curious about the fine print. We spent 40 minutes just skimming the 10,379-word End User License Agreement and stopped before we could understand it all. Here are some of the highlights: You're allowed to install Office 2007 software on two computers; you must agree to download updates whenever Microsoft decides you need them; and Microsoft may verify your license key at any time to make sure that you're not using pirated software. We wished that Microsoft better explained the Internet-based services Office 2007 can connect to. When we chose to Customize the installation on another PC, the process was more involved. It's too bad that while this process lets you handpick which items to install, it doesn't explain what you'll miss if you reject, say, Office Tools. And while Microsoft displays your available hard drive space as well as how much of that is needed by your selected set of applications, there's no indication of the size of each individual application and you're left to your subtraction skills here. In the end, we installed everything available. From that point on, loading the Office suite onto our hard drive took 15 minutes flat. Office Standard 2007 is smaller than its predecessors, at about 3GB. Unlike the Windows Vista operating system , the new Office does not demand the newest hardware. Office 2007 is supposed to work the same whether running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista. At a minimum, you'll need to have Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or Windows XP SP2 on a 500MHz processor with 256MB of RAM (512MB or more for Outlook with Business Contact Manager, which comes in the Small Business, Professional, and Ultimate editions). However, of course, this rules out those still using older versions of Windows. Although the terms of the EULA were less than transparent, we were pleased that Microsoft offered the least intrusive installation settings by default. For example, Privacy Options leaves it up to users to hook up to online Help automatically, as well as to download a file that continually tracks system problems. No Office 2007 shortcuts appeared on our desktop or in our system tray, either. The Office Shortcut Bar--a feature that disappeared in the 2003 version--is back, located within the Office Tools menu. 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. Service and support Boxed editions of Microsoft Office 2007 include a decent, 174-page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact tech support by toll-free phone number for free between 5:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Pacific on weekdays, and 6:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. on weekends. Help at any time with any security-related or virus problems also costs nothing. Beyond that, paid telephone and e-mail support costs a painfully high $49 per incident. It could take up to a business day to receive an e-mail response. You'll pay an outrageous $245 per incident ($490 after hours) for telephone help with "advanced" issues, most of which apply to businesses. Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. That said, we especially like the Command Reference Guides for Word , Excel , and PowerPoint , which walk you through where commands have moved since Office 2003. You can also pose questions to the large community of Microsoft Office users via free support forums and chats. And the included Microsoft Office Diagnostics installation is designed to detect and repair problems if something goes haywire. Conclusion Should you upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007? It depends on how you work. If you're style-conscious and want to play with new document templates, then Office 2007 should please you. Outlook outshines its predecessors if you need to lean on it daily to manage meetings and tasks. At the same time, if you already use few of the features of Office 2003 or earlier and are getting along well, then there's little need to spend hundreds of dollars on the new software. The radical new interface of Office 2007 applications is here to stay, and it's likely to spawn some copycats. For a software package with so many layers of features, it makes sense to cluster functions within icons and tabs rather than a hodgepodge of menu boxes. At the same time, we think that some users will find the dynamic tabs and galleries more distracting than useful. We anticipate that some makers of rival Office software will capitalize on Office 2007's steep learning curve and try to attract users with the relative simplicity of applications with pull-down menu interfaces that look and feel more like Office 2003 and earlier. Because Microsoft has opened some of the Office 2007 source code to developers, prepare to see all sorts of add-ins, such as additional interface tabs, from third party developers. At this point, however, Microsoft hasn't created a gallery on its Web site to help you find such extras. Office 2007 doesn't approach the simplicity of upstart, Web-based alternatives, but it better serves up myriad features, and it's much less bloated than in the past. ...
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