Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 Frequently Asked Questions

Office Home and Student 2007 provides home personal computer users with the office software essentials they need to get tasks done more quickly and easily. You can create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and manage your notes and information in one place.

Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office Packaging page.

Four major areas of innovation distinguish the 2007 release of Office Home and Student. These areas of innovation work together to help home personal computer users to get things done more quickly and easily:

As we’ve added more and more features and functionality to the applications, it’s gotten more challenging for people to find the things they want to do with the products. For example, Microsoft Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands; you could easily browse through the menus and find everything you could do. In comparison, Microsoft Office Word 2003 has more than 1,500 commands, many of which are admittedly difficult to find. Helping people quickly find the menus, commands, and options they need is the key benefit of the new user interface.

We wanted to deliver new capabilities that empower people to get the results they want, faster. We had four major design goals:

Microsoft Office 2007 programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access will all receive the new look. In addition, specific parts of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, such as authoring a new e-mail message, will use the new menus and toolbars.

Microsoft Office comes in a variety of different editions, and provides full-featured productivity applications for both home and business users. Microsoft Works is a low-cost alternative to a full-featured Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft Works is a nicely integrated productivity package designed specifically for home users and families with computing beginners.

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

Office Home and Student 2007 will be sold through a variety of resellers and distributors.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 is offered at one low price for everyone.

Yes. Office Home and Student 2007 is licensed only for non-commercial use by households. It cannot be used in commercial (business) situations.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 is licensed only for non-commercial use by households.

No.

See the system requirements for Office Home and Student 2007.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 will not run on Windows 98. Office Home and Student 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 is designed to run on both Windows XP (SP2 or later) and Windows Vista.

Yes. The 2007 Microsoft Office release will expand on the open XML support that has been in Office XP and Office 2003 by using the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas as the default format for creating and saving documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats will offer some key improvements over the binary file formats in use today within Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, and Office PowerPoint 2007. Because these new file formats are compressed, the resulting document sizes will be much smaller—between 50 and 75 percent smaller in some cases. The file formats’ architecture also improves data recovery of damaged or corrupted files.

Yes. Office Home and Student 2007 programs can be configured to save in the Office 97 and Office 2003 file formats (.doc, .xls, and .ppt). When configured this way, the Microsoft Office programs operate in a Compatibility Mode that enforces compatibility between versions of Microsoft Office by disabling functionality that is incompatible with prior Microsoft Office releases.

Yes. Office Home and Student 2007 introduces the new Office XML Formats, which are compact and robust file formats that provide improved integration with external data sources and systems. These formats are backward compatible with Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 with the addition of a file format converter patch, which will be available from Office Online and Microsoft Update. Users of Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 can open, edit, and save files using the new Office XML Formats.

Yes. You will be able to convert Office Word 2007 documents, Office Excel 2007 workbooks, and Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations to Portable Document Format file (PDF) directly from within Office Home and Student 2007. You can save your work as a PDF file by simply using the Save As command from within one of these Microsoft Office programs. It is just that simple-instead of printing the document and faxing it, or sending it by overnight mail, customers can save a PDF file and electronically distribute a read-only, "as-printed" representation of the document.

In order to create accessible PDF documents, Office Home and Student 2007 will support the PDF 1.4 specification, which is compatible with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later.

Microsoft is committed to responding to customer requests and to the adoption of open document formats for content sharing, publishing and archival needs. With Office Home and Student 2007 support for XML Paper Specification (XPS) file creation and PDF format as well as our existing support for the native formats of Microsoft Office, HTML, and Office XML Formats, customers will have a rich variety of choices when it comes to sharing, publishing, and archiving their documents.