Introducing the Beta Undercover Reporter
Let the undercover reporter show you some of the highlights of the 2007 Office system
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When Microsoft Word for Windows was first released some 17 years ago, its menus offered less than 100 features. The current version, Microsoft Office Word 2003, uses a similar menu structure but crams in some 1,500 features. As a result, most of us use only a small proportion of what the application can do, and that’s not because we haven’t got a use for these features – it’s because we don’t know they’re there. Which is why the team developing the 2007 system found that nine out of ten of the new features requested by customers already existed in the current release.
The beta version of 2007 Microsoft Office system is now available for download, and the first thing you notice when you open up one of the new applications is that the menus and toolbars have been completely re-designed.
On This Page
 | Easier to use |
| New ways of working |
| Working together |
| Get in the Groove |
Easier to use
For those of you used to the old way of doing things, the changes might at first seem unsettling, but you will soon come to appreciate how much easier the new design is to use. No longer do you have to hunt down commands that always seem to be under the ‘more’ tag at the end of a lengthy drop-down menu. Instead there is a tabbed ribbon that is wide enough to display a much more informative image of what each command will achieve.
Click on a command and you are presented with a preview gallery that shows off the various fonts, text effects, diagrams, graphs and so forth that are available. Pass your mouse across one of the options and Live Preview means that your whole document changes to show you what will happen if you select that option.You will also find that the commands displayed in the ribbon change according to context. Select an area that has been formatted as a table in Office Excel 2007, for example, and the ribbon changes to display commands appropriate to working on tables. Select a cell outside the table and the ribbon reverts to more general formatting commands. All this means you can spend more time getting on with the job, and less time working out how to achieve the result you want.
New ways of working
Over the next months we will be looking in more depth at the many new features offered by the applications that make up the 2007 Microsoft Office system. In the meantime, here are a few highlights to whet your appetite:
| • | You can now save documents in Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification from all applications. |
| • | There is a new graphics engine that is shared by all applications and allows you to add effective 3D effects, shadows, glows and blurs to your graphs and diagrams. |
| • | SmartArt makes it easy to create diagrams that illustrate processes, hierarchies, relationships and so forth, and will automatically format your text to create a professional result. You can use SmartArt in Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007, and even in an Office Outlook 2007 email. |
| • | You can create and apply Document Themes that ensure consistent use of fonts, colour, format and design across documents created in Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007. |
| • | Use Conditional Formatting in Excel 2007 to apply formats to your spreadsheets that depend on the values in each cell. You could arrange, for example, to have the background colour of each cell colour coded according to whether its value is low, medium or high. |
| • | The To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007 makes it much easier to organise appointments and tasks, and effectively becomes the control centre for your day. You can also drag tasks into your calendar so that you can better schedule your time. |
| • | Create up to 25 different colour-coded categories that you can apply to emails, tasks, posts, appointments and other items in Outlook 2007. |
| • | Manage and view your RSS Subscriptions from within Outlook 2007, and use its powerful search facility to search RSS posts alongside your emails. |
| • | Not only has the junk email filter been improved, but Outlook 2007 also boasts a new anti-phishing feature that will disable links in suspect emails and display the content in plain text only. |
| • | You can now create multiple notebooks in Office OneNote 2007, each containing multiple sections and multiple pages. |
| • | OneNote 2007 is much more integrated with other Microsoft Office applications. For example, select a meeting in Outlook 2007 and you have the option to automatically open a corresponding page in OneNote 2007. As you later review your notes you can turn any item into a task that will appear in the appropriate place in Outlook 2007. |
Working together
However that is only part of the story. If you work in a team, then the 2007 Microsoft Office system really comes into its own with a set of tools that can help you work together, and put the information that is available within your organisation at your fingertips.
A key product here is Office SharePoint Server 2007 which your IT department can use to create an internal Web site where you can manage the flow of ideas, information and documents through your organisation. You can view this Web site using a Web browser, or work with data managed by SharePoint Server 2007 directly from the appropriate Office application.
For example, imagine that you’ve been passed a number of documents for final approval before they are mailed to your customers. The documents are conveniently listed in Outlook 2007, from where you can load them into Word 2007.
Once you are satisfied with each document you select the Finish option from Word’s File menu, and run it through the Document Inspector which automatically finds any comments, tracked changes and other personal information that you wouldn’t want customers to see. Having done that you select the Start Workflow option which sends the document on to the next stage in the process. Behind the scenes, SharePoint Server 2007 may be routing the document to different people depending on the importance of the customer or the size of the order.
Get in the Groove
Using SharePoint Server 2007, your IT department can automate complex business processes across large organisations. However the 2007 Office system also supports more adhoc collaboration through Office Groove 2007.
New to Microsoft Office, Groove 2007 allows you to share folders and workspaces with groups of colleagues on a peer-to-peer basis. Workspaces can contain task lists and calendars, or even custom-built forms to help you keep track of projects. Particularly impressive is the ability of Groove 2007 to keep each member synchronised, even if they are working from home and are only intermittently connected.
We will be looking at Office Groove 2007 in more depth later in this series of articles. In the meantime, you can download the first public beta version of this and any of the other applications that make up 2007 Microsoft Office system from the Beta Download site, or alternatively order a copy of the beta on DVD. See you next month!