Microsoft Office Word 2007 Frequently Asked Questions

Office Word 2007 helps you create great-looking documents more quickly and more easily than ever before. With a new, results-oriented user interface, you can get to the tools you need. New editing, diagramming, and charting tools deliver visually effective results without requiring you to spend excessive time formatting your documents.

Office Word 2007 is for people who want to create and share documents. People will benefit from the improvements in editing and formatting capabilities, new charting and diagramming tools, the new user interface, and many other features. Specific audiences—such as academic or scientific users—will benefit from the inclusion of a new Equation Builder; publishers and other user segments will benefit from the addition of a Reference Builder. There are many new capabilities in Office Word 2007 to improve the document authoring experience for everyone.

Office Word 2007 will help you create great-looking documents more quickly than ever before. Use Office Word 2007 to:

Office Word 2007 can still be used as the everyday workhorse for document authoring, but it is equally applicable to more advanced scenarios that require the interaction of many people. Using Office Word 2007:

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Microsoft Works is targeted at home users who want a basic, task-based tool. The Works suite includes templates designed for personal use, such as cards, invitations, flyers, and home budgets. In contrast, Microsoft Office offers productivity and collaboration tools for use in businesses and home offices.

Find pricing and licensing information on the 2007 Microsoft Office System Pricing page.

Yes. Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office Packaging page.

The Microsoft Office system provides you with a set of programs you can choose from to best address your business needs. Office Word 2007 can be used as the interface to help gather information more effectively. Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a spreadsheet program that can help you analyze numerical data. Microsoft Office Access 2007 is a database management program for storing information and creating reports. Use Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to graphically present information.

See the system requirements for Office Word 2007.

Office Word 2007 introduces the new Microsoft Office Word XML Format, a compact, robust file format enabling improved integration with external data sources and systems. The Word XML Format is compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office XP, and Microsoft Office 2000 with the addition of a file format converter patch, available from Microsoft Office Online and Microsoft Update. Users of Microsoft Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 can open, edit, and save files using the new Word XML Format.

Office Word 2007 introduces a new file format that addresses a number of important issues. File sizes for documents stored in this new format are significantly smaller than earlier Microsoft Office file formats (.doc, .dot). Because of the way that data is stored within the documents, the recovery of corrupt or damaged files is much improved. Additionally, because the file format is XML-based, with an open, royalty-free license, developers can more easily build solutions that use Word document contents and metadata.

When combined with Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Word 2007 provides powerful out-of-the-box functionality for creating and managing document review and approval workflows, and other types of workflows that can be defined. Office SharePoint Server 2007 takes care of the management and administrative tasks for the workflow, leaving Office Word 2007 to consume the results and complete the processes successfully. Organizations can automatically assign document policies to newly created Word documents, without requiring users to take any special action.

Using the collaboration features in Windows SharePoint Services technology, organizations can help their employees create and manage rich, easy-to-build Web sites to work together on documents, projects, and tasks. These sites can be organized, discovered, and used throughout the organization. Features such as document versioning, approval workflow, check in and check out, document profiling, and publishing can help improve information flow. Intranet and extranet sites can be personalized and customized using advanced user-profiling capabilities.

Windows Server 2003 is the foundation for an integrated infrastructure. By adding the power of smart clients and collaborative servers, you get easier, more secure, and more reliable access to your own and shared information, including team documents.

For example, Windows Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services together can help teams collaborate through team collaboration sites. Similarly, Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) for Windows Server 2003 enables you to implement information rights management (IRM) technologies introduced in the 2007 Microsoft Office suites. IRM can help prevent sensitive documents and e-mail messages from being forwarded, edited, or copied by unauthorized individuals.

XML, or extensible markup language, is an open, industry-standard language for organizing and storing data. Having data in XML means that the information is transportable and can be easily shared and reused. Office Word 2007 supports XML in many ways. The default file format for Word is the Word XML Format, which is a compact, robust file format based on XML. The Word XML Format offers a substantial reduction in document sizes, improved data recovery for damaged documents, and support for custom-defined schema to facilitate the inclusion of custom-defined XML data in Word documents. Office Word 2007 also enables you to create and deploy structured document templates that integrate custom XML information with other document contents. By creating content bindings, you can link the data in a Word document to an external data source.