The PC Authority Guide to Office 2007
Simon Jones
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Oct 11, 2006 2:31 PM
Microsoft’s radical redesign promises ‘better results, faster’. Be fully prepared for this world-leading productivity software.
It’s set the benchmark for office software since the early 1990s, is used by 400 million worldwide and is getting ready for its first major face-lift since 1997. Office 2007 will be commercially available for corporate customers on volume licensing plans by the end of the year, and to individuals and small businesses in January. But you don’t have to wait for that to make your own judgements about Microsoft’s biggest-ever Office overhaul – the product has reached its beta 2. We’ve explored all the major components of Office 2007 – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, InfoPath, Publisher and Access.
There are big changes in Office 2007 – most of which are designed to speed up your work under Microsoft’s bid to help you produce ‘better results, faster’. Over the following pages, we find out exactly what there is in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint to convince you to upgrade, and provide tutorials to get you up and running. We reveal where it will affect your work, and highlight areas where Microsoft needs to improve. We’ll tell you not only what’s good, but also what to watch out for and the issues for those who choose not to upgrade.You’re likely to notice a radical redesign as soon as you launch one of your Office 2007 applications, because in the most used apps all the menus and toolbars have been replaced with the brand-new Ribbon user interface. This arranges all the commands of the application into tabs and groups. If you’re looking for a command to do something to the content of a document, it’s going to be on the Ribbon.
Why change?
Applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint have developed so much over the past 18 years that Microsoft decided it had outgrown the menu and toolbars user interface. While in 1989, Word for Windows had less than 50 commands, Word 2003 had more than 250, and the number of toolbars had increased from two to 31. In addition, there were 19 task panes.
Microsoft tried to help users make sense of all the commands with ‘personalised’ menus that hide commands you don’t use often, so you can’t find them at all when you need them. The same thing happened to toolbars, with buttons you don’t use being relegated to the bucket on the end.
As Microsoft got more and more requests for features that were already in Office, it realised users just couldn’t find the features among all the clutter. So the company did some blue sky thinking and came up with the Ribbon.
In the top-left corner of each application’s window, there’s a big round button bearing the Office logo. This Office button is the replacement for the File menu. Here, you’ll find all the things you can do with a document, including saving, printing and sharing. At the bottom of the pop-up dialog, you’ll also find a button to let you see and modify the application’s options.
Tabs, groups and commands
Each application groups its commands into several tabs. The commands that are used most often appear on the Home tab and others are divided up logically between the other tabs on the Ribbon.
If the commands are simple, such as Bold, they’re just presented as a small button. Less common commands get an explanatory label, and some commands have drop-down buttons for more options.
A number of commands show galleries of different effects, which you can apply to the selected text or object. Some of the galleries show in the Ribbon, but others drop down below it to show their full contents. Galleries can implement quite complex effects with just one click, but to see their effect you don’t even have to click.
That’s because Live Preview will show you the effect of the gallery items as you move the mouse pointer over them. If you don’t like that effect, just move onto the next item. If you change your mind, just move the mouse out of the gallery and the text or object will return to its original formatting.
Many objects have commands that make sense only when that object is selected. You can’t, for instance, make any sensible use of the chart tools in Excel unless you have a chart selected. In Office 2007, these commands are presented on contextual tabs. For instance, selecting a table in Word causes two tabs, Design and Layout, to appear and, if you select a picture in a table, you see the Picture Tools tab as well as the Table Tools one.
You can, of course, use any of the other tabs while these extra context tabs are showing, so you can insert a diagram into your table using the Insert tab or change the alignment of the text in the table using the Home tab.
Sometimes you need to get precise control over a particular feature, and if there’s a dialog to do it there’s a little Dialog launcher icon in the bottom-right corner of a command group. Click this icon to show the appropriate dialog. You can also find shortcuts to dialogs at the bottom of drop-down menus or galleries.
When you select text in any of the applications sporting the new user interface, a mini-toolbar fades partially into view. If you move your mouse towards it, it becomes more solid. Move away and it fades. This toolbar contains the most-used commands in the application. Different applications present a slightly different set of commands. It may appear a little ‘shy’ at first, but for dedicated mouse users it’s very useful. It saves a trip up to the Ribbon for commands you use often.
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| The Ribbon is the single biggest change to the Office interface and is designed to help you find tools and features more quickly. |
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| The Ribbon interface is integrated into items in Outlook, but Outlook's main windows keep their old style. |
Customisation
From the Customer Experience Improvement Program built into Office 2003, Microsoft knew that fewer than two percent of Office users ever customised their menus and toolbars, and that 85 percent of those customisations involved adding or removing four or fewer buttons. There were, however, a great many incidents of ‘accidental customisations’, such as users who dragged the main menu off an application and then couldn’t find it again.
Customisation of the user interface wasn’t something many people wanted and it caused problems for a significant number, so it was radically rethought for Office 2007. Gone is the ability to move commands around, adding and deleting them from wherever you please. The Ribbon isn’t customisable by end users in any way. The only customisation that’s allowed is that you can add or remove commands, groups or galleries to or from the Quick Access Toolbar. This little bar normally sits in the title bar of the application, but you can choose to place it below the Ribbon if you want it to have more space.
The Ribbon always takes up the same amount of space vertically, but it grows and shrinks with the width of the window. If you shrink a window horizontally, the Ribbon adapts by making big buttons smaller, removing the text from buttons or by collapsing groups of commands into single buttons, which will then show the group in full when they’re clicked. With other changes to the UI, the space available to see your document is much the same as, or even larger than, in previous versions. If you find the Ribbon too imposing, you can hide it by double-clicking the current tab.
If you’re a fast typist, you may already know all the keyboard shortcuts for many commands. Don’t worry, all the shortcuts from Office 2003 will work in Office 2007. So, in Word, still means Save, and will insert a comment. Additionally, there are new key-tips indicators that show up when you press and release the Alt key. These show you which keys to press to activate any command.
Which apps?
The new UI only applies to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and the items in Outlook. Outlook’s main windows, the lists of items and all other Office apps keep the old menus and toolbars. There simply wasn’t time to put the new UI into all Office apps this time around.
For apps with the new UI, there’s no going back. There’s no classic mode to let you use menus and toolbars, but usability testing has shown, according to Microsoft, that most people need very little help or training to start using the Ribbon productively. Indeed, most long-term beta testers threaten to revolt if you suggest they go back to Office 2003. If your immediate reaction is ‘ugh’, give it some time. You’ll probably soon see real benefits. It’s clear, logical and helps you get great results quickly.
If the new UI is a success with customers, and all indications are that it will be, you can expect to see it in more apps in later versions of Office. |
| The Home tab in Excel gives access to many new features including conditional formatting. |
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| Contextual tabs such as Table Tools appear when you're performing certain tasks. Point to table styles to try them out on your table. |
File formats
It isn’t just the visual redesign that brings a fundamental change to Office 2007; Microsoft has also made some pretty major changes to the underpinnings of the supported file formats. In fact, Word, Excel and PowerPoint all get new default file formats, storing documents as a series of XML files inside a ZIP container.
The ZIP compression means the resulting files are smaller – down to
a quarter of the size of the equivalent binary file from Office 2003 – and they’re also more robust. Errors in transmission will corrupt the file less often and, if corruptions occur, the main parts of the document can still be read.
Based on XML and ZIP, the documents can easily be manipulated by programs on workstations or servers without needing the Office apps to be automated or even installed. This makes it possible to build efficient, robust and scalable applications that wrangle Office documents, gathering data from them or pushing data into them.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint will open and save old, binary format documents and render them with 100 percent fidelity. You can also upgrade old documents to the new format without problems, but many of the new features in the applications rely on the new file format: saving new documents in the old formats will probably mean losing some formatting or functionality. The applications will warn you if this is going to happen.
When Office 2007 is released, Microsoft will ship converters for Office 2003, XP and 2000 to enable those apps to read and write the new formats.
Export as PDF/XPS
Virtually all Office 2007 Beta 2 apps will allow you to export your documents directly, either as PDF or as XPS (XML Paper Specification), the new Microsoft rival for PDF. These formats allow you to share final format documents with other people if they don’t need to be able to edit the document contents. You can choose whether to save a small file for viewing onscreen or a larger file for printing on an office printer. Due to the reported anti-trust concerns, Microsoft looks likely to take out the ability to save PDF or XPS from the final version of Office 2007, but you should be able to download a patch from Microsoft to add those capabilities back in.
Themes
All the main applications now make use of a common set of Themes that control the fonts, colour schemes and effects used in the documents. Picking a theme will change the body and heading fonts, the colour scheme and the glow, highlight or shadow effects on objects, all with one click. Office comes with a set of 20 themes and you can also make your own. Corporate customers will be able to define one or more corporate standard themes and, if they want, not distribute the other themes, so that all users can easily produce documents that conform to the corporate standard.
Diagrams
Another feature that appears in many applications is the new diagramming tool called SmartArt. Building on the previous Office Diagrams feature, SmartArt lets you turn a boring list of words into a diagram with a couple of clicks. The diagrams have circles, rectangles and arrows. Browse the gallery of diagram types and pick one. Paste your text into the outliner and you have a diagram. Add colour and effects such as shadows or 3D with just a couple of clicks. SmartArt certainly livens up a document and is simple to use.
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| You can publish documents to PDF or XPS directly from most Office applications. |
Word is the application that people use most often, and for 2007 it’s had a radical makeover. The Ribbon, the Office Button and Live Preview are all here and used to their full advantage. Most general editing tasks are a little easier using the Ribbon interface, as all the main tools are within a couple of clicks of whatever you’re doing. Live Preview really makes an impact when formatting tables, pictures or textboxes, or when you’re selecting fonts or styles.
Several new fonts are distributed with Office 2007, including Corbel and Calibri, which are the new default body and heading styles in Word, usurping the venerable Times New Roman and Arial fonts. Word, by default, will also space the lines a little wider on the page, which improves the readability of documents.
You can choose from a wide selection of Themes to set the main fonts, colours and effects in your document. You can also create your own themes and set one as a default to help create documents with a consistent look. Also helping to create good-looking documents quickly are the new headers, footers and cover pages you can add to your document with a couple of clicks.
But there are only so many combinations of fonts, style sets and colour schemes that will look good for business or academic documents and, while the ease with which you can try out these settings may lead some people to experiment with some more wacky combinations, there’s also the chance that many people will stop at the first option that looks halfway decent. This may lead to many documents looking slightly better but very much the same. Companies would be well advised to look long and hard at the new features to work out how their corporate document standard can be adapted, implemented and enforced using Word 2007.
New document
When creating a new document, you’re offered the full set of templates available from Office Online, or you can choose from your own templates. Unfortunately, this means that creating a new blank document now takes three clicks (Office | New | Create). You can, however, add the ‘New Blank Document’ command to the Quick Access Toolbar or use the shortcut .
One area that’s had a massive makeover, courtesy of the new Ribbon interface, is the Equation Editor. Always powerful but hard to use, it’s now ridiculously easy to construct both simple and complex equations.
Don’t think that you have to be a professor of mathematics to make use of it, though. It’s equally useful for ‘word equations’.
There’s a gallery of pre-built equations illustrating what you can do, and you can save your own equations to the gallery to reuse them in other documents. You can save any other bits of documents you use often in much the same way. If you have a standard way to lay out headers and footers, lay them out once using document properties such as title and author, select the header or footer and add it to the header or footer gallery. If you have standard paragraphs that you use often, you can save them as building blocks too. Select the text then choose [Insert | Text | Quick Parts | Save selection to Quick Part Gallery…]. This is much easier to use and far more flexible than the AutoText facility in previous versions of Word.
Review
The experience of reviewing a document has also been significantly improved. The full-screen reading view is cleaner and easier to use and reviewing tracked changes is also simpler, with the list of changes and comments shown down the left-hand side. Word now shows text that’s moved as being moved, rather than as having been deleted from one place and inserted into another. Comparing two documents (or final and original versions), you can now have a triple-pane view showing those documents in small windows on the right and the marked-up version in a bigger window for you to edit. All these changes let you more easily make sense of complicated edits.
There’s a huge number of other improvements in Word, such as the Document Properties panes and how standard and custom properties are automatically promoted to SharePoint when you store documents there. Plus, there’s the new blogging template that will save directly to blogging websites and also the signature line tool that will collect a handwritten signature, a signature image and apply a digital signature all in one action. For more information, see the Editorial section of the cover DVD, for a full 200-page ebook on Microsoft Office 2007.
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| Formatting text and objects such as Text Boxes is quick and easy using a gallery of effects and Live Preview. |
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| Adding a cover page is simple. Word shows a gallery of possible pre-fab cover pages for you to choose from. |
There’s no disguising the fact that Outlook 2007 has a split personality. At first glance, it looks much like the 2003 version, but some major work has gone on behind the scenes. The main interface still has menus and toolbars, but when you open an individual item you’ll see the new Ribbon interface.
When creating a new email message, you have access to just about all the features available in Word. That’s because the email editor is Word – all the sensible features that make sense in this environment are available. You can insert tables, charts and SmartArt. Spelling and grammar errors are shown with red and green squiggles. You can use styles, fonts and colour. Of course, you can still choose to send email in plain text if you wish to.
Categories
In Outlook 2003 you were able to mark mail with coloured flags to remind you to do something with them. For 2007, the colour has been moved from the reminder flag to the categories. The colours show up as little blocks or bars on the items that have one or more categories assigned. Separately, you can flag an item to be dealt with today, tomorrow, this week, next week, and so on. Converting existing coloured flags to the new system is a pain, but the new system makes more sense in the long term. Marking items with categories also means that colleagues no longer have to guess what you meant by ‘the blue flag’ on items in public folders.
The navigation pane on the left of the main Outlook window has also evolved and now lets you hide or show its parts individually or, indeed, collapse it so it takes up minimal space.
On the right-hand side of the main window is a new To-Do Bar. This shows a miniature date navigator and the next few appointments from your calendar. You can customise how many months and how many appointments to show and the rest of the space is taken up with a Task List. This lists not only the tasks from your tasks folder but also the emails and other items you’ve flagged for follow-up today, next week, and so on. You can open the items, change their categories, mark them as complete or reschedule them by right-clicking them or dragging them around.
Calendar and Contacts
The Calendar view has changed quite substantially. Appointments and events are shown more subtly and coloured according to their categories. In Day or Week view, you can also see the list of tasks to be done each day, below the appointments. You can drag the tasks from day to day to reschedule them, or drag them up into the calendar area if you want to block out some time to deal with an item. At last, you can set up appointments in foreign timezones. Click the Time Zones button on the Ribbon of an appointment and timezone pickers appear next to the start and end times. These are great for trips abroad when you often need to set up appointments at your destination before you’ve left. There are also some great new tools for sharing and publishing calendars: you can email people a copy of your calendar for a day, a week or a month, or you can invite someone to share your calendar or publish it to Microsoft’s Office Online website for other people to subscribe to.
For Contacts, the only real addition is a new view called Business Cards. By default, this lays out brief details of all your contacts as though they were regular-sized business cards. You also get the opportunity to design business cards for people, specifically yourself, deciding what information is shown and adding colour and/or a picture. If you attach your vCard to outgoing email, this business card shows up at the bottom of your mail and the recipient can add all your details, including the card layout, to their Outlook Contacts folder. The theory is that people often look for contacts based on what their card looks like, rather than what their name is.
Indexed search
If you’re a bit more logical and can think of a word or phrase you want to search for, you might like the new Instant Search feature. Built on Windows Desktop Search, every folder in Outlook presents a small search dialog. Typing some characters makes Outlook filter the items shown in that folder to those that contain the characters you typed. It isn’t quite instant for larger mailboxes, but it’s a vast improvement over previous versions. It also highlights the matching characters in yellow. Clicking the chevrons next to the search box expands the dialog to show more options. You can widen the search to other folders by clicking the link in the search results for ‘all mail items’ or ‘all Outlook items’.
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| The main window is busy but the navigation pane and the To-Do Bar will roll away, or you can turn them off. |
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| The new Business cards view may be interesting if eveyrone produces virtual business cards. |
Excel 2007 is arguably the application that makes most use of the new Ribbon UI, with extensive galleries of effects for tables, charts and formatting. Plus, many of the more complex commands for reviewing and debugging are more prominent and so more likely to be found. Along with the new look, the new file format brings benefits, not least that the maximum size of a worksheet has been increased to more than a million rows and in excess of 16,000 columns.
Microsoft is making much of the new conditional formatting options. You can quickly format cells based on their value with colour scales, icon sets or data bars. Colour scales give you a sort of heatmap, fading from one colour to another depending on the value – very good for spotting trends. Icon sets let you put traffic lights, flags or arrows in, again based on cell values. Data bars show a coloured bar in the background of the cell – the length being determined by the value in the cell. All this is quick to apply and pretty easy to edit.
Tables and charts
Formatting data as a table does more than just apply colour and lines to the display. It creates named ranges for the columns based on the labels in the first row and lets you quickly sort and filter the data by clicking a button next to the column name. Filtering is intelligent, so a date column knows how to filter to show just last month’s data, while text columns can do ‘begins with’, ‘ends with’ or ‘contains’. Filtering data doesn’t disrupt the table formatting, so ‘candy stripe’ banded rows still work as expected.
Pivot tables have been tidied and are now easier to use. To select a field to be included on a pivot table, you just have to tick its box. Excel will guess where it should go – rows, columns, filter or data – and place it there automatically. This avoids common mistakes where inexperienced users would drag a field to somewhere it didn’t make logical sense. You can, of course, disagree with Excel’s decision and move fields around yourself. Multiple levels of row labels are displayed more neatly and total, subtotal and conditional formatting give very understandable results.
Charts have had a much needed face-lift. The Ribbon UI helps to simplify creating and editing charts with galleries of type, layouts, colour schemes, and so on. Gone are the fixed colour schemes that you had to struggle to change. By default all the charts look brighter and easier to read and changing them is simple: select a new layout or colour scheme from the gallery and, presto, it’s all done. If you don’t quite like some aspect of the chart, the Chart Layout tab lets you get at every aspect of a chart to twiddle and tweak it to perfection.
External data
Obtaining and analysing data from external data sources has always been one of Excel’s most powerful features. For a lot of people, ‘powerful’ in the last sentence was a synonym for ‘scary’. The whole external data experience has been revamped for use with the Ribbon UI. There are now big, friendly buttons to get data from Access, web pages, text files or other external sources. Grabbing data from sources such as SQL Server is relatively easy, providing you know which server to go to and which table or view you require. The data is then returned as either an Excel table or a Pivot Table for you to sort, filter, format and analyse to your heart’s content. You can arrange for the data to be refreshed from the original source every ‘n’ minutes, whenever the workbook is opened or only on demand.
Page layout
The new Page Layout view lets you see how your data will look when printed, complete with headers, footers and margins; but, unlike Page Preview, everything can still be edited. Adding headers and footers becomes easier, with no need to remember arcane codes to include the date or the name of the file.
Down-level experience
While older versions (2000, 2002 [Office XP] and 2003) of Excel will be able to open and save the new file formats through the addition of a converter, they won’t be able to understand or use the new features such as data bars or the new layout for Pivot Tables. Charts from Excel 2007 may not render accurately in older versions either. If you need to share workbooks with users of older versions of Excel, it would be better if you saved your workbook in 97-2003 format, so that it goes through the compatibility checker to warn you about any larger potential problems.
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| Charts look bright, fresh and professional, and are very easy to format. |
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| Excel 2007 can handle huge workbooks of more than a million rows. |
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| The new UI makes getting data from external data sources much easier. |
PowerPoint is the smallest of the applications to get the new user interface, but the benefits are obvious as soon as you start to use it: the interface is now much cleaner and uncluttered. You can concentrate on getting your thoughts down in an outline or illustrating a point with a diagram, chart, picture or art. The logical layout of tools means you can be more productive and more creative at the same time.
Extra formatting options for text allow you to add effects such as soft shadows or double strikethrough. You can also use custom underlines and WordArt is much easier to use through the Ribbon interface. Pictures can be re-coloured, framed with bevel or shadow effects, tilted or rotated in 3D and have reflections added as though they were sitting on a shiny surface.
The new Office Themes are fully implemented in PowerPoint so you can quickly change a presentation’s look, applying a set of fonts, a colour scheme and effects with one click. While the range of Themes provided in the box isn’t that large, you can define your own and save them to the Themes gallery from where they’ll be available in all applications with the new UI.
SmartArt
SmartArt really shines in PowerPoint. Want some words in circles over arrows with more words in them? That’s three clicks. Type the words you want in the outline box and you’re done. Want the whole thing in 3D with the arrows heading off into the distance? That’s just another two clicks. The boss wants to add another arrow? Don’t panic. The words and layout are all still editable. Just click the flyout pane to show the outline box and type in the extra text. As if by magic, a fourth arrow and circle appear and you’re done. That sort of layout change was a nightmare in previous versions of PowerPoint as every object had to be sized, positioned and rotated individually. What could take hours can now be done in seconds.
Animations and transitions get their own tab on the Ribbon complete with easy-to-use galleries of their effects. If you want the circles and arrows you built with SmartArt to fly in one at a time, that’s just two clicks, but you have full access to the Custom Animations task pane to tweak and twiddle to the nth degree if you need to.
One small change that’s definitely worth the time and trouble it took to program is the big ‘Start Show from Beginning’ button on the Slide Show tab. Presenters of a nervous disposition, and that means most of them, often had great difficulty clicking the tiny 16 x 16 pixel Start Show button on the status bar. The big button is a lot easier to hit and its tooltip does remind you that you could press F5 instead.
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| Roll the mouse over the themes for a live preview of what youre presentation will look like. |
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| The gallery of transitions makes it obvious what each effect will do. |
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| SmartArt really shines in PowerPoint - it's easy to use, powerful, productive and fun. |
Office Versions
Office 2007 will be available in eight editions and as individual applications. The top two editions, Enterprise and Professional Plus, will be available from November through volume licensing schemes only.
Full versions of Ultimate, Professional, Small Business, Standard and Home & Student editions will be available from retailers from January 2007. Office Professional edition differs from Small Business edition by including Access, which most people don’t need, and it costs an extra $50. If you don’t need Publisher or Business Contact Manager, you could save another $50 by buying the Standard edition.
The Home & Student edition is keenly priced at $149, and it allows you to install Office on up to three PCs for use within your household. It doesn’t include Outlook, but Windows Vista includes an email client and calendar application.
You’ll be able to buy upgrades over the counter for Office Standard, Small Business and Professional editions, but remember that if you have an OEM licence for a previous version of Office, buying an upgrade won’t extend the life of your Office licence beyond that of your PC. If you got your previous version of Office with your PC and are thinking of upgrading your PC soon, you should consider buying a full licence rather than an upgrade so you can legally transfer Office 2007 to your new PC rather than having to buy it again.
If you buy a new PC from January 2007, you should be able to get Office Basic, Standard, Small Business or Professional pre-installed with an OEM licence. Office Basic is available only with a new PC and contains just Word, Excel and Outlook.
Conclusion
Office 2007 is a huge change, with the new file formats and completely revamped user interface being the disruptions most likely to stop people in their tracks.
But the file formats had to change – the old binary formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint were designed in 1994 and last changed in Office 97 – while the Ribbon UI is logical, productive and fun. If you’re one of the few that don’t immediately take to it, don’t just dismiss it and go back to your old version. Stick with it for a few days at least.
There are some caveats about this new version of course. It will only work with Windows XP SP 2, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista (Beta 2); Outlook 2007 won’t connect to Exchange Server 5.5 using MAPI; there are some problems with Instant Search, and Beta 2 requires Windows Desktop Search 3 Beta and so partially disables WDS 2 if you have that installed.
And, as with every version of Office, there are commands and features that fall out of favour and are removed. There were a couple of hundred commands and features listed as significantly changed, deprecated, removed or replaced at the last count. Any one of these changes could affect you as much as the new UI or file formats.