Microsoft Office 2007

By Rich Eichacker
Vibrance Technology Corporation

Microsoft Office is about to get a face lift. Office 2007, which is slated for release in early 2007, is focused on making Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint easier to use.

Statistics show that people use less than 25% of the features in Office. This new release aims to make all the features more accessible and more intuitive. The big change? Command Tabs and Ribbons.

Command Tabs and Ribbons have replaced menus and toolbars, respectively. Ribbon buttons are now grouped and have better graphics and they are large enough to accommodate titles and verbose descriptions. This is a big improvement over the tiny toolbar icons in previous versions of Office.

Galleries and Live Preview help users select features and better visualize how the command will effect their document. Galleries give you a visual representation of a formatting option. For example, when creating a chart in Excel, a gallery of chart formats pops up from the ribbon and displays a thumbnail image of each format choice. This is where Live Preview comes in. As you hover over each format thumbnail, the chart on your spreadsheet changes to reflect the format, so not only do you get the overview of format choices presented on the ribbon, but you also see exactly how that format will look in your document. Another example of this is font formatting. Select the paragraph you want to format then browse through the font choices. Not only does the font menu display the fonts, but the selected paragraph changes font as you hover over the choices on the menu. Galleries and Live Preview totally eliminate the “pick, click, and undo” trial-and-error formatting of previous versions.

The Mini Toolbar is another nice feature. Select some text and this toolbar becomes partially visible near the selection, presenting you with a quick way to adjust font size or paragraph formatting. If you move your mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes less transparent, if you move away from it, it disappears.

To see these new features in action, visit the Office 2007 site. Particularly interesting is the link “See the new user interface at work” in the middle of the main page.

I have to admit that when I started writing this article, I was skeptical. I assumed that this new release would offer a bunch of features that most people, including myself, wouldn’t use. Now, I have to say that I’m impressed. I believe Microsoft has met it’s goal of making Office easier to use and more intuitive.

Winter 2006 -Volume 17, Number 1

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