Microsoft Office 2007 New Features

With the new release of Office 2007, Microsoft has completely revamped the user-interface and the way we use the application. At first blush, it is very confusing, and may even make you frustrated. In all honesty, it took me some time to get used the new concepts and usability. You no longer have to be a power-user to get the most out of Office, as the design has become very intuitive and friendly.

The first thing that will hit you is that menu bars are gone. They have been replaced by a new term called “Ribbons”. The ribbons are tabs categorized by the features you prominently use. When you start Excel, the ribbons you will see are: Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, View, Developer and Add-Ins.

Contextual-tabs will appear when the functionality is available. Once it is no longer applicable, it disappears. An example of this is would be if you where to insert a picture into your document, a new tab will appear in the ribbon called “Picture Tools”. As you guessed it, the picture tools tab will contain picture related functionality. Once I click or move away from the picture, the picture tools contextual-tab will disappear.

Prior to Office 2007, format modification would be a pain-staking and time-consuming process. First, you would make the change only to undo and try a different option. This process would continue until you found one you liked or just gave up. With the new galleries, this ordeal can finally be put to rest. Galleries are visual representations of the change. This real-time preview enables you to see what the outcome will be before you actually commit the modification.

Tool-tips have been enhanced to not only name the feature, but describe it as well.

The “Office Button”, located to the top left of every window, enables you to quickly see other functionality that you can do with your document. The most common features are Open, Save, Print, Sharing, etc.

To the right of the office button the “Quick Access Toolbar”. This customizable toolbar contains frequently used commands. You can customize it by right clicking on the toolbar and selecting the appropriate command.

A “Mini-Toolbar” becomes visible when you highlight text for formatting. The Mini toolbar helps you work with fonts, font styles, font sizing, alignment, text color, indent levels, and bullet features.

At the bottom right-hand corner of every window will be the various views you’ve come to expect. One nice feature is the zoom level slider. You can easily zoom or zoom out simply by dragging the slider. You can just as easily go back to 100% by clicking on the center point.

If you need to send your 2007 documents to people that use prior versions of Office, make sure you save the document as a 97 - 2003 format, because the new format is saved as .???X (Excel example: XLSX) format.

As you can see, Microsoft has really done a nice job with Office 2007. It is not just a version upgrade, but rather a whole new way of creating compelling documents with total ease. Give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.

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Microsoft & Cisco Compatibility

I came across this interesting video that talks about future compatability with Microsoft and Cisco products. They discuss creating more interoperability where the consumer is not penalized by having to purchase all-or-none software/hardware from vendors.

Should be interesting to see what these guys come up with. Hmm, maybe next generations of Excel may have Cisco communication capabilities built in, with video and other cool features.

Let's hope that they do make something more productive where it's advantagous for the end-user.