Many complex formatting tasks are represented in galleries of choices and they often provide a “live preview”. Hovering the mouse pointer over the choices causes the text or object you’ve selected to take on the formatting. Point to a different choice and your document changes again. Then, just click the mouse to make the change permanent.

Each application’s Ribbon of commands is fixed. There’s no built-in way to rearrange tabs, groups or commands. Microsoft found that in previous versions of Office, very few people ever deliberately customised the menus and toolbars other than accidentally.

Being able to move buttons around also caused problems for IT support personnel when trying to help users. In Office 2007, the only bit of customisation left is the ability to add any group, gallery or command to the Quick Access Toolbar.

This normally lives on the left-hand end of the window caption, next to the big round Office Button, but you can move it to below the Ribbon if you need more space. This lack of customisation may annoy power users, but it will be a great relief to most people.

If you really need to tweak the UI, you can write Add-Ins in Visual Studio Tools for Office or buy one of several third-party tools.
Another innovation is the mini-toolbar, which fades into view when you select text, carrying the most common commands. Move your mouse towards it and it becomes solid. Move away and it fades. For mouse-centric users, it saves a trip up to the top of the window.

One change that may cause more hair-tearing in the first few days of using Office 2007 is the loss of the File menu, replaced by a big round Office Button in the top-left corner. This is the home for all the commands for doing things with your document. Save, Print, Send by Email and so on are all here, as are New, Open, Publish and Close. You also get the recent files list and the application options.

File formats

The file formats used by Word, PowerPoint and Excel haven’t changed substantially since 1997, when computers were constrained by a lack of memory and people needed their documents to save quickly to floppy disks. The new formats for these applications store the document text and formatting in XML files, which are then compressed using standard ZIP compression.

Embedded files such as images are included in them with no conversion, so they don’t degrade. The resulting files (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) are 25-75 percent smaller than the equivalent files in the previous format and are more resilient against corruption.

The files can also contain structured business data in the form of custom XML packets. These ZIP XML file formats mean that Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents can all be generated or processed automatically without having to use the Office applications. This is a serious advantage for switched-on IT departments, which will be able to automate the production of documents and collect data for use in line-of-business applications.

Older versions of Office (2003, XP and 2000) will be able to open and save files in the new 2007 format via a free compatibility pack. This can be downloaded and installed now, and will be pushed out via Office Update/Microsoft Update and the corporate Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

The result varies according to the features used in your documents, but each app has a compatibility checker to warn you of features not available in other versions.