Four years in the making, Office 2007 is nothing short of a revolution in the way we interact with software. The main applications all have a radical new look and new file formats. And, while the changes to the minor applications may be less obvious, they’ve all been updated with new features and capabilities.
Here at PC Authority, we’ve been testing all the components of Office 2007, both client and server, for nearly a year. In this review of the final code, we bring you the truth of what’s good, what’s great and what could still be better in the client apps. We also get Microsoft to try to persuade you to upgrade and OpenOffice to tell you why you should switch. Then, look out for our feature on the server-side of Office 2007 in the next issue.
User interface
The most obvious change, which hits you as soon as you start Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Access, is the revolution in the UI (user interface). (In Outlook, the shock is delayed until you open a mail message, task or appointment.) Out go menus and toolbars, and in comes the Ribbon.
From usability testing, watching real people do their real jobs and from the data collected by the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Microsoft noticed that people’s experience using Office degraded over time. Toolbars popped up to let you do something but were never dismissed.
TaskPanes sprouted all over the place. Users could unintentionally drag the main menu off an application and then not know how to put it back. People who spent a lot of time using Office but weren’t experts could end up with a very untidy display.
It also noticed that a lot of requests for features to be included in Office actually concerned things the program was already capable of; people just couldn’t find how to do them.
Microsoft realised that this was mainly its own fault, as Office applications had got more and more complex the menu and toolbar UI model was breaking under the strain. Office 2000 introduced adaptive menus, where little-used options were hidden from the user. But it was a bad move.
If you didn’t use a feature for a couple of months, it disappeared so you had even less chance of finding it. Toolbars also hid lesser-used icons in a “bucket” at the end. If you didn’t know this, you rapidly got frustrated looking for tools you were sure were there last week.
The Ribbon aims to be the one place you look for commands to do things to your documents. It takes up the top part of the application’s window, and all the commands for the application are logically arranged in different tabs, grouped according to their function. Each application has its own set of standard tabs, which are available all the time, and several context-sensitive tabs that appear when you select particular types of object.
For example, if you select a picture in a Word document, you see an extra tab of tools, which let you format that picture. If you select a picture in a table, you see extra tabs for table tools and picture tools.
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.
Themes
Word, PowerPoint and Excel now also include the concept of Themes: collections of fonts, colours and effects, which work well together. Changing a document from one theme to another changes everything at once, redrafting the look of a document with just a couple of clicks. Even when copying a chart from Excel to Word, the chart will take on the look of the document, automatically following the new theme.
Graphics
Office has also completely overhauled its graphics engine. Excel gets much better-looking charts, and all the main apps share SmartArt. This quickly turns a boring bullet-point list into smart graphics of arrows, blocks, circles, cogs and so on.
These blend with the theme of a document, picking up the fonts, colours and effects to make great-looking graphics with the minimum of effort. Pick the type of diagram you want from a large gallery of options and then type or paste in a list.
The diagram creates, arranges and colours itself to the current Theme. If you change your mind later, you can add, remove or rearrange bullet points and the diagram gets redrawn to suit.
Server side
As well as updating all of the client desktop applications, Microsoft has updated and extended the server-side capabilities. There’s a new version of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), plus the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), combining SharePoint Portal Server with Content Management Server and adding support for rendering InfoPath forms and Excel workbooks in a browser.
Wikis, Blogs and Workflow are just some of the new features in both WSS and MOSS. MOSS costs money to deploy, depending on the number of features and licences you want, but WSS is a free add-on to Windows Server 2003.
Conclusion
The new user interface is bold and exciting and, because all the commands that are relevant are visible to you, it’s much easier to get the job done rather than playing hunt the command.
Control-freaks and stick-in-the-muds may not immediately enjoy it so much, but if you spend a little time getting used to it it’s easy to make good-looking documents quickly. We really don’t think you’ll want to go back.