The Good:
A major upgrade in both technology and user interface. More flexibility for buyers in the way Microsoft has packaged the software components.The Bad:
Open-source document format is a wise move, but it will pose problems with users of earlier versions, despite workarounds; most of the changes have been made for business users, leaving consumers unimpressed.The Verdict:
Business users might find the new features attractive, but would be wise to hold off buying it until the dust settles; I'd recommend consumers stick with Office 2003.
For years, Microsoft has blithely dismissed criticisms of its Office suite as a victim of the Pareto principle — that 80 per cent of its owners use only 20 per cent of its features. That's just the way people use their tools, I was told.
It's now obvious that the Gnomes of Redmond have been stung by that criticism. Almost everything that's new about Office 2007 has been designed to emphasize as many of its features, new and old, as it can.
For instance, Microsoft must feel that not enough people have been using the style sets, because half the menu bar on the opening page of Word is dedicated to preset document formatting, colours and fonts. And too few people must have known about the format painter, a tool that applies formatting used in one section to a highlighted area elsewhere, because it's now one of the first features Word offers.
At first I thought this was not such a good idea; I don't mind a bit of a shakeup in the way I use Office — I hadn't realized I had been getting tired of the old interface until I sat down to Office 2007 — but then I don't like having to hunt around for tools I once knew where to find without looking. But after a couple of weeks, it started to become familiar, and I'm getting comfortable with it.
And that means productivity workers upgrading to Office 2007 will probably find upgrading something of a chore; to beginners, I suspect it will be easier to learn than the old interface.
The big change is the menu. Gone are the drop-down menus in Word, Outlook, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint; they have been replaced by a tabbed ribbon running across the top of the screen. Get used to saying it — "the ribbon" — because you're going to use it a lot. The ribbon always shows options that you couldn't see in previous versions unless you clicked on a drop-down menu. Essentially, the ribbon is like one of those old drop-down menus, but always dropped — sideways.
The menus in previous versions of Office, by default, hid the less-frequently used commands, and you had to fiddle with the options to make the options show all the possible commands. Every time I installed Office, the first thing I always did was to set each program to show the entire drop-down menu as a default. I never understood why it was like that in the first place — that "feature" alone must have served to obscure much of what Office could do, and now Microsoft has to undo years' worth of trying to make us do it the old way.
Hover your cursor over a specific item in the ribbon, and a larger-than-before window pops up to explain what the item does, along with a keyboard shortcut (the "insert hyperlink" icon on the Insert ribbon, for instance, reminds you that you can also insert a hyperlink by pressing Ctrl+k).
There are a series of these ribbons, attached to menu items across the top (Word, for instance, has Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review and View). This time, each usually contains more items than the old drop-down menus.
What's more, each ribbon is contextual. If you insert a pie chart, for instance, the ribbon automatically changes to Chart Tools, and if you insert a table, you get Table Tools. If you jump out of the inserted item, the ribbon will return to its "home" setting, and when you go back into the item, the ribbon will change back.
