WORD 2007
About the only difference between Word 2007 and its predecessors is the menu ribbon; much of everything else works as before, with some smaller changes. And all the major differences are directed at offices and workflows, meaning there is little new in Office 2007 to give home users an excuse to buy it.
Word has a greater ability to insert illustrations, a feature more suited to professionals: 3D shapes, flow charts, pie charts and such. It has also taken the clipboard, fed it some steroids and turned it into a "building blocks" set for boiler plate, or pre-defined content, that you might want to put in a document: disclaimer text, pull quote, cover pages and sidebars.
Word can now save documents in Portable Document Format (viewable with Adobe's AcrobatReader) as well as the XML Paper Specification (XPS), Microsoft's document format, which allows digital signatures and digital rights to be applied to the documents, and even reduces file sizes.
Beware, however, that once Word saves a document in another format, it loses all its ability to undo changes. Sad, but true.
There is a new three-panel view of documents showing their revision history; built-in workflow services for SharePoint servers to track documents and approval processes; the ability to create "smart documents" that connect with a central server and update the contents automatically; the ability to create a "clean" document, free of the metadata that so often escapes with the document and causes embarrassment later.
