Office 2007 First Look

When you first look at Microsoft Office 2007 you will see that it has undergone a big make-over visually, it has a totally new User Interface. Although it looks different please do not be put off, believe me in only a few minutes you will feel right at home. I have spoken to a few people who have using it for a few weeks and they love it, they would not want to go back to using an older version of Office.

So let"s have a look at what"s new, the tool bars have been replaced with a new User Interface called the "Ribbon". This has been well designed, and everything is where you would expect to find it. At first glace you may think that there are less features, but there are actually more, with a lot of features being upgraded and improved.

The File menu which provided access to functions like Open, Save, Print, etc. has been replaced with something called the "Office Button".

This is found in the top left hand part of the screen, when you click on this button, the pane below will open. Here you will find all the usual features that you would expert to find, plus some new ones. This one feature is very smart, if you are using Word you have an option to upload your content directly to a blog.

There are lots of new features and improvements in Office 2007, there are so many that I can only list a few of the main ones here:

New Ribbon and Office Button.

Improved Security, especially in Microsoft Outlook.

New file Formats: the new format OpenXML is the default format in Office 2007. This is based on XML which means that it"s a compressed file format and the size of you files will be a lot smaller. There is no need to worry as there is still support for the older office file formats.

Live Preview: this is a great feature as you are able to see what a particular format change would make to a document without actually changing it.

Spell and grammar checking has been greatly improved, and now includes a new contextual spell checker.

The Office Help System has been upgraded with a feature called Super Tooltips. Super Tooltips explains what each feature or button does when you move your mouse over it.

Excel spreadsheets have been enlarged; there is now support for over a million rows and over 16,000 columns.

There are a lot of small enhancements in Office 2007, little things that just make life that bit easier like the zoom feature and word count feature on the status bar. Then there"s SmartArt, improved security, spell and grammar checking has been improved and now includes a new contextual spell checker, Document Inspector and the list could go on and on.

I think this is a fantastic package, the best office software in the world just got better and yes I will definitely be upgrading. With other versions of Office it was often hard to find valid reasons to upgrade but not so with Office 2007. Also Microsoft have really raised the bar with this version of office, I would say now that they are so far ahead of the game that they have no real competition.

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