- 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.
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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 Gone are the drop-down menus in Word, Outlook, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint; they have been replaced by a tabbed ribbon running across the top of the screen.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.
The most annoying problem with the ribbons is extremely simple to get over, but it's totally counter-intuitive: Not everything is in the ribbons. Across the very top of the window, Microsoft has put a series of tiny icons for such things as save, undo and redo, new document and open document, send by e-mail, quick print, spell check and a few others. Why here and not on the Home ribbon?
Moreover, the top-left corner of the screen contains the Office icon, which looks purely decorative. Microsoft now calls this the "Office button," and if you click on it, you will get another menu in - guess what - a drop-down form. There you can find a bunch of other commands, some repeated elsewhere (new and open document, for instance), and save as, which will become one of the most important tools for people switching to Office 2007 (more on this below, where I discuss open standards). That's where you can also find the Word Options, that was once under the Tools menu in previous versions.
Another example, albeit a small one, of what has changed is what Microsoft has done with the layout views in Word - you know, those four buttons at the bottom left of the screen on the status bar called normal view, Web layout, print layout, outline view and reading layout. The buttons are now at the lower right, and have changed orders of preference. Normal View used to be the default; most people changed it to Print Layout. Microsoft listened, and made Print Layout the default, and placed it first on the left.
In Office 2007, many of these menu items have been moved around, sometimes inexplicably. It took me a long time to find headers and footers in Word under the View menu; they've been moved to the Insert ribbon. Spell check, even when it is running in real time, is now on the Review ribbon, which is not intuitive. Word count is also there, but it took me a while before I discovered that the word count feature is also automatically displayed at the bottom-left of the screen, just after a little tab saying I'm on page 24 of 32 and before I am reminded that I'm writing this in Canadian English. And I still haven't found the change-case feature I once used a lot.
A much more important change, however, is Microsoft's move toward open-standard file formats, the way Office stores work. OpenXML, the new format, is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), an industry standard.
This means several significant changes. First, by dropping its proprietary format standards, Microsoft is allowing other software manufacturers to write programs that can handle files created by Office applications. Next, OpenXML is not as friendly to malware attacks as were Microsoft's own standards; this is perhaps a very important example of how Microsoft wants to improve its security.
But there are a couple of problems with this move. First, although Office 2007 can work with documents and files created by previous versions of Office, the reverse is not true; they will have to be converted by add-on software before they can be sent on. Or, you can use the "save as" command (hidden in the Office button, as I mentioned earlier) to save a file in the earlier Office formats, from Office 97 to 2003. The new file format includes an "x" in the filename suffix (document.docx) to differentiate it from earlier formats (document.doc). I'd rather this was more prominently displayed, because I can't guarantee the rest of the world will adopt Office 2007 standards very quickly.
Next, the move to an open standard suggests that Microsoft did not make this change purely for reasons of security. I suspect the company made the move also as an acknowledgment that other open-source systems (Linux, others) are becoming so popular that Microsoft could find itself on the losing end of the stick by trying to coerce everyone to use the Microsoft standards. That strategy worked when there was little competition. At a certain point, that notion would become dramatically counter-productive, and that time has come.
Another significant feature across most of the applications is SmartArt, the cute name for inserting fast visual aids into documents. Its great strength is its ability to turn information into graphics, and offer you quick previews of how it could look in different formats - turn a list of bulleted items into a flowchart, for instance.
And oh, yes, one very important change: That annoying Office assistant, the wretched paperclip whose only redeeming feature was its clever name (Clipit), has been tossed. I've never understood why Microsoft put such a child-like helper in a product meant for enterprise customers as well as home users. I always believed most people clever and wealthy enough to own a computer would know how the help features works without the paperclip or a little puppy bouncing around. Well, there's now a tiny blue button at the top-left of the screen, with a question mark in it. Click on it, and you get the help menu. Now how difficult was that to do?
There's always been one problem I've had with Microsoft Office, and it's probably only because of my journalistic perspective, but I know it's shared by a number of people. Microsoft has taken it as an article of faith that as an office tool, the suite must have "collaborative" features, which it installs at all costs. It works on the assumption that some documents should be shared, so everyone can have input.
Fair enough, I suppose, but many people I know don't share their documents that way; when they're done with them, they simply send them on. After that, they expect a dialogue about them - you know, the kind in which people talk, using their mouths. Other people - those in marketing, sales, press relations and law - can't possibly let a document go by without getting the entire office staff's thumbprints all over it. It might be a good idea for review, but I often wonder how much faster the office would work if it didn't have to wait for everyone's tweaking. ("The strongest desire is neither love nor hate," wrote Gilbert Cranberg in the Columbia Journalism Review a number of years ago. "It is one person's need to change another person's copy.") It also makes for a useless feature for those who might want to use Office as a home tool.
Microsoft has dealt with this issue (for businesses, at least) by including the SharePoint Server with the more work-flow-oriented versions of the Office suite. This tool makes it really easy to share documents and files.
This seems to be to be begging for a massive slow-down, and I'm not being entirely fair here. You have to fine-tune Office's collaboration tool to ensure the software actually speeds work flow. And that takes some adjustments.
The SharePoint server can choose various different components - such as an RSS feed, a sheaf of documents or a calendar - and put them all into "sites," another word for "folders." Microsoft has given the components the collective name Web Parts (think documents, Excel forecasts, PowerPoint presentations and the like), and organizes them into various categories that others in an organization can look at and process.
Should you buy Office 2007? That's a tough question, and depends on whether you see yourself as an office or a home user.
I'm not so sure upgrading is very important for home users - almost none of the improvements here are worthwhile for consumer use. If you're running a small business, you would have to balance the benefits offered by the improved interface and the server integration against your ability to use previous Office versions, and then factor in the costs of upgrading. You should also consider the all-important matter of file formats, and consider whether you expect to share files with people who might not have Office 2007. If you're a large enterprise, you would have to consider whether your existing databases are capable of offering data to Office 2007, and prepare yourself for training people how to use the database integrations.
One thing that should make the choice a little easier to bear is that Microsoft is releasing seven versions of Office 2007.
- Office Home and Student (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
- Office Standard (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook)
- Office Small Business (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Outlook with Business Contact Manager)
- Office Professional (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook, with Business Contact Manager), Office Professional Plus (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook, InfoPath and Communicator)
- Office Enterprise (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook, OneNote, InfoPath, Groove and Communicator)
- Office Ultimate (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, OneNote, InfoPath and Groove.)
Be sure to click on the links at left for mini reviews of Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and more.