4 Reasons To Like Microsoft Office 2007
As if sending out Windows Vista was not enough to keep us all busy for a while, Microsoft has also released Office 2007 into the wild and if first impressions are any indication, its looking good so far. Lets get one thing clear right up front, this is not a simple upgrade with just a few new features (like Vista?). Word 2007, Excel 2007, and Access 2007 have been completely upgraded and sport a totally new graphical user interface.
Unlike Vista, Office 2007 seems very much designed around the needs of today’s users. Many of the changes provide a much better experience than previous versions and enable users to limit how they use the product without having to deal with “hidden” features. This is not to say that Office 2007 does not have some problems, in fact I discovered several issues which may plague early adopters. Some small problems I noticed were two minor performance issues (scrolling through complex documents was much slower in Word 2007 vs. Word 2003 for me) and the new display zoom feature sometimes seemed to freeze up. These two small issues aside, here are four great reasons to take a closer look at Microsoft Office 2007!
New “Ribbon” Toolbar – The new “ribbon” toolbar is not only a great idea but in the case of Word 2007, something Microsoft should have implemented years ago. This just plain rocks, letting you organize your most commonly used components into easy, logical groupings. The icons are clean and easy to read and the default groupings are just about right for most users. With the previous version many features became hidden “below the fold” in pull-down menus making that version somewhat problematic for new users. Often the feature(s) they were looking for simply was not visible until they stumbled upon it or someone told them which menu it was hiding in. Word 2007 does away with the pull-down menus entirely for this new style of toolbar and I think I like it.
Right-Click Context Menus – Not sure what Microsoft calls this feature but it can really save you time when you are in a hurry. When you right-click on something (word, sentence, etc) you get the usual pop-up menu but just above that is a new toolbar that contains shortcuts to popular tools such as font settings and alignments. This feature is so intuitive you will be using it right from the start. No more trips up to the toolbar at the top of the screen just to indent something or change a font size.
Significantly Improved Templates – One of the silly features that I have always liked about several Apple products such as Pages and Keynote are the very high quality templates provided right out of the box. With past versions of Microsoft Office the templates seemed down right boring! Thankfully this has completely changed in Office 2007 with plenty of high quality templates available right from the start. Only possible complaint with the new templates is the fact that they seem to be stored on Microsoft’s web site and you need to download them locally before they can be used. For those who need to run Office on systems that do not have internet access this might restrict access to some of the new content.
Microsoft Office Diagnostics – As with any complex piece of software things can (and will) go wrong. Thankfully Microsoft has combined several diagnostic tools into one simple easy to run application that can detect and repair (sound familiar?) your Office 2007 installation. One major improvement with this process is the ability for the Microsoft Office Diagnostics to detect problems with your memory and hard drive. This is a godsend for large corporate IT help desk operations tasked with supporting hundreds of Office 2007 installations. They can simply ask the user to run this one diagnostic application and get most of what they need to track down problems.
I have to say, all things considered I am very impressed with the effort Microsoft has made with Office 2007. Although it remains to be seen if the new version will be a home run with users or not I would definitely agree that Microsoft is headed in the right direction.
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