OFFICE 2007: MICROSOFT FINALLY GETS IT RIGHT

Microsoft Office is like the weather-you can't get away from it-but the 2007 version combines power, ease of use, and visual clarity in ways that leave earlier versions far behind.

Microsoft Office 2007 packs more improvements into the world's leading application suite than any previous upgrade. For most users, the big question isn't whether to upgrade but when.

Experts, beginners, and corporate users all get major benefits from the upgrade. The only downsides I could find are minor ones that will probably disappear in the first service pack.

Once you get past the few minutes needed to navigate the new Ribbon interface, you'll wonder why Microsoft waited so long to get so many things right.  So here's how you can use it right.

Button Help Graphics  – rich contextual help appears when you hover the mouse over any interface feature, such as the new Office Button at the upper left of all windows.

Online Menu Help. An online help screen shows the 2007 equivalents of 2003 menus-just click on this screen, and a picture of the matching 2007 menu appears.

The code has been released only to manufacturers. Enterprise customers should be able to download the software by November 30, and boxes should hit the shelves early next year. I was able to download the suite because I am a Microsoft Developer's Network Premium subscriber.

The Ribbon interface gives quick access to dozens of features that used to be hidden behind labyrinthine menus, and it also displays even quicker keyboard shortcuts.

Microsoft Outlook finally gets built-in indexing and RSS feeds. The SmartArt graphics engine makes dazzling organization charts, pyramid charts, and other visuals for displaying verbal data. Corporate users get access to server-based slide libraries, collaborative workspaces for storing and sharing documents, and improved document-security and document-comparison features.

  
PowerPoint Smart Art.  SmartArt is Microsoft's name for an easily customizable graphic display of verbal data.

A new, fully documented XML-based document format gets my vote for doing away with openings to macro viruses. My hat goes off to Microsoft also for eliminating the usual headaches of sharing files among versions.

And good news for those who're making the change but have to work with others who aren't: When a user of an Office 2003 setup (with all recent updates) double-clicks on an Office 2007 file for the first time, a prompt offers to download a converter package that lets the 2003 version open and save files in the new format. It's a large download (about 27MB) but a vital one, and the filters work as expected.

The new interface doesn't force you to rethink the underlying logic of your work, because Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Project, InfoPath, Visio, and OneNote all work basically as they did before-only more easily. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are the only programs to get the full interface upgrade.

Actually, Outlook gets the new interface upgrade only in its content-creation screens.

Outlook Message. Outlook gets the new Ribbon toolbar in its message-editing window, but not in the main mailbox interface.

The new suite feels right from the start. I tested some massively complex Word and Excel files from earlier versions, and they opened quickly and without formatting or other hiccups.

When you click in different parts of a document such a table or chart, the interface responds instantly with options that you need, and a right-click brings up a menu of the formatting and other options that you almost certainly wanted. The new slider bar for zooming in and out appears in the lower window border and becomes addictive the first time you use it.

Different versions of Office 2007 come with different application sets, ranging from a Basic version limited to Word, Excel, and Outlook, to an Enterprise version with everything.

A new addition is the easily managed collaborative workspace software Groove 2007, which lets groups of users creates menus of shared documents and messages.

OneNote (which I wrote about a couple weeks ago) also gets shared access to the unstructured information formerly available only to single users.

FrontPage is history, replaced in high-end Office packages by SharePoint Designer, a site editor for corporate-scale SharePoint collaboration services. I won't miss FrontPage because a sleek, up-to-date standalone Web site editor-Microsoft's Expression Web-is now in late beta.

Thanks to the new interface, features such as fonts and page margins are blissfully easy to manage through galleries of prebuilt settings. Word is particularly robust.

Word Header Gallery Word now offers simple designs for headers, footers, title pages, and other layout features.

Word Combined Revisions.  Word can combine revisions from two versions of a document into a third document. This cluttered screen is less confusing to work with than it looks at first glance.

Similar galleries give instant access to new features such as spreadsheet cells that automatically display chart-style color bars.

Excel Cell Styles.  Excel cell backgrounds can use the same elegant color palettes as charts.

If you're starved for editing space, Ctrl-F1 hides the ribbon entirely.

Word also gets a real-time word count-something editors and writers have wanted for years. The ribbon still has some annoying wrinkles, such as the bafflingly illogical placement of macros on Word's View menu.

Unlike the menu-modifying features in Office 2003, the new version doesn't offer any built-in and easy way to modify the XML file that defines the Ribbon, although you can expect third-party and Microsoft tools to arrive soon.

Outlook's new To-Do Bar gives a one-glance list of pending tasks, and Outlook can now send text messages to phones and PDAs via four cooperating mobile services (expect more to sign up later).

Outlook also lets you access and modify shared calendars, contacts, and tasks stored on a SharePoint server.

Outlook To Do Bar. Outlook's new To-Do Bar opens up to a small calendar and to-do list (to the left of the bar in this image).

Word includes a convenient building-blocks feature for reusing items such as boilerplate text and cover pages, plus a simple interface for posting to blogs. Excel's charting adds subtle colors, and pivot tables are easier than ever. An Excel spreadsheet can be posted in HTML format on a SharePoint server and dynamically modified in a Web browser. PowerPoint can include slides stored on a server, and the slides in your presentation can be updated to match the version on the server.

After strolling up the easy learning curve for the new interface, I found Office 2007 smoother and clearer than any earlier version, with surprisingly few wrinkles still waiting to be smoothed out-for example, the different ways in which applications support server-based libraries of reusable material, and the lack of customization tools for the interface.

Office 2007 is Microsoft's finest hour in a very long time. I hope the upgrade from Windows XP to Vista can be as smooth as the upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007.

Dennis Turner