The undercover reporter gets under the covers of Microsoft Office Word 2007
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As with all the applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the first thing you notice when you open up Microsoft Word 2007 is that the user interface is radically different from what’s gone before. At first this is inevitably confusing, but you soon come to realise how much easier – and indeed how much more fun – it is to use.
Easier to use
The most obvious change is the ‘ribbon’ control that runs across the top of the screen. When you first open a document the ribbon is divided into sections labelled Clipboard, Fonts, Paragraph, Styles and Editing. This is the Home ribbon which contains those tasks that you are most likely to use as you start creating a document.
Other ribbons cover other common tasks such as inserting items into the document, changing the page layout, and so forth. Select the Insert ribbon, for example, and you are presented with options for inserting shapes, pages, tables, illustrations and so on.
However this is only the start. Click on the Table option and a panel drops down containing a grid of small squares (see above). As you hover your mouse over the grid, a table magically appears in your document at the current cursor position. Move your mouse across the grid to add more columns and rows, and these are simultaneously added to the table in the document. Move the mouse away and the table disappears. This is Live Preview, and it gives you a foretaste of what will happen when you click the mouse.
When you do click the mouse, not only does the table become part of your document but the Insert ribbon is replaced by the Table Tools ribbons ready with options for changing the design and layout of your new table. Click away from the table and the Home ribbon re-appears, ready for you to work with your text. What’s more, this all happens without any apparent slow-down of your machine, which is particularly impressive in a Beta product.
Doing it with style
Style is much more central to this version of Microsoft Word, and far easier to apply. For a start, the Style section of the Home ribbon shows you what styles are available in a much more visual fashion, complete with Live Preview so that hovering your mouse over one of the styles instantly applies it to the current paragraph. If you don’t like what you see, simply move the mouse away. If you do, click and the style is applied to your document.
Alternatively you can try out a Quick Style which applies a co-ordinated set of fonts and paragraph settings to your document. Out of the box, Word 2007 comes with a number of preset Quick Style sets such as Fancy, Formal Modern and Elegant, but you can create your own and save them so they can be used by others in your organisation.
You can do much the same with tables. Rather than simply insert a grid of squares, you can choose the Quick Tables option which drops down depictions of a whole range of table styles with different colour header bars, different fonts and column delimiters, and so forth. An even greater range is available from the Table Tools Design ribbon.
You can take this further by selecting a Document Theme. This is a co-ordinated set of colours, fonts and effects that apply a professional design to your documents. Once you’ve selected a theme the various colour menus include a set of Theme Colours appropriate to the selected theme, for example, while the top section of the fonts menu displays the Theme Fonts. Indeed another reason this version of Microsoft Word looks different is because the default theme uses two new fonts: Calibri, which replaces Arial for body text, and Cambria for headings.
Then there are the Building Blocks, which you will find under Quick Parts on the Insert ribbon. Here you can insert all kinds of document elements such as headers and footers, cover pages, ready-styled text boxes and even watermarks. What makes this particularly powerful is that you can create your own Building Blocks and share them with your colleagues, so ensuring that all the documents generated by your organisation have a consistent design.
The overall effect is to make it much easier for the non-professional to create compelling documents, calling on the design expertise that has been built into Word 2007 itself.
Finishing and Publishing
So far we have just touched on a few of the many innovations to be found in this new version of Microsoft Word. We haven’t mentioned the new document comparison features, or SmartArt diagrams, for example. There isn’t room here – you’ll just have to download the Beta and try them out for yourself!
However one thing we must take a quick look at before we go is the File menu, now to be found under the graphic to the left of the Quick Access Toolbar (which is just about all that’s left of the old-style menu system). Click here and you will find the usual options for opening, saving and printing a document. You also find new options under Finish and Publish.
The Finish option centres around the concept of a document as a shared work-in-progress, rather than as a stand-alone creation. For example, here are options for stripping out personal data and comments that you might not want anyone else to see, and when the document is complete, you can mark it as Final which makes it read only. You can also use Information Rights Management to restrict the ability of others to edit, copy or print the document, although this only works if your organisation has implemented Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services.
At first glance the Properties option is very similar to the 2003 version. It displays the Document Information Panel which is where you edit the metadata that is stored with the document. By default this includes author, title, status, category and associated keywords. However, if the document is being managed by Office SharePoint Server 2007, then the metadata can be specific to the requirements of the workflow and determine how the document is handled once it is published.
You use the Publish option to save your document to a SharePoint site. Alternatively you can choose to publish it to a blog, in which case the Blog Post ribbon appears giving you options to manage your blog accounts, or publish the document directly to your selected blog. It is so intuitive that I can see Word 2007 becoming the bloggers’ editor of choice.
See you next time when your undercover reporter gets to grips with Microsoft Excel 2007!
