Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 Frequently Asked Questions

Three major areas of innovation distinguish the 2007 release of Office Professional Plus. These areas of innovation work together to enable you and your organization to deliver better results faster:

As we’ve added more features and functionality to the applications, it has become more challenging for people to find the things they want to do with the products. For example, Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands, and you could go through the menus and see everything you could do. Today, Microsoft Office Word 2003 has over 1,500 commands, many of which are admittedly difficult to find. That element of discoverability is just one of the key issues addressed by the new UI.

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

The 2007 releases of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and the authoring part of Outlook—your calendar, your mail notes, and your contacts (versus the 'shell')—will have the new UI.

Yes, and capabilities are available to third-party developers interested in adding functionality to Office Professional Plus 2007 in a way that integrates smoothly with the new UI. Developers will be able to add their own custom Command tabs by using a rich set of controls, including buttons, list boxes, and galleries. In addition, they will be able to integrate their commands into the existing Command tabs and the existing Contextual Command tabs.

Yes, commands from existing add-in menus and toolbars will automatically appear on a new Add-in Command tab that appears when Microsoft Office add-ins are present.

Microsoft developed Microsoft Office Open XML Formats to respond to customer requests for more rapid document creation from disparate data sources and to extend our commitment to industry-standard XML. By creating a new robust, yet compact, structure based on industry standards such as XML and ZIP, the new default file formats speed document creation while reducing the size of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and improving data recovery in corrupted files.

Yes, the Office Professional Plus 2007 programs can be configured to save files in the earlier Microsoft Office formats. When configured this way, the Microsoft Office programs will operate in a Compatibility Mode which will enforce compatibility between versions of Office by disabling functionality that is incompatible with prior Office releases.

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

Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office Packaging page.

See the system requirements for Office Professional 2007.

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

Office Professional Plus 2007 when combined with the new Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers an expanded set of capabilities that make it easier to deliver better results faster across your organization. Key capabilities include:

Find more information about these new capabilities.

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. You can also personalize and customize intranet and extranet sites 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. The result is documented productivity increases that already are saving millions of dollars annually for businesses and governments worldwide.

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 2003 release of the Microsoft Office system. IRM can help prevent sensitive documents and e-mail messages from being forwarded, edited, or copied by unauthorized individuals.

XML 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.