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 organisation to deliver better results faster:

In addition, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 is now part of the Office Professional Plus 2007 suite. Office Communicator 2007 helps people be more productive by enabling them to communicate seamlessly with others in different locations or time zones, with a range of different communication options including instant messaging (IM), phone and voice conferencing, video conferencing, or Web conferencing. Integration with 2007 Microsoft Office system programs Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint Server gives teams immediate access to a full set of collaboration tools.

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 more than 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 Outlook (with the exception of the main Outlook window) 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 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 tabs and the existing contextual tabs.

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

Microsoft developed Microsoft Office Open XML Format 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 Microsoft Office by disabling functionality that is incompatible with prior Microsoft Office releases.

Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office Packaging page.

Yes. To try Office Professional Plus 2007, get 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2.

See the system requirements for Office Professional 2007.

Office Professional Plus 2007 introduces the new Office Open XML Format, which are compact, robust file formats enabling improved integration with external data sources and systems. These formats are compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 with the addition of file format conversion software, available from Microsoft Office Online and Microsoft Update. With the File Format Compatibility Pack, users of Microsoft Office 2003 and Office XP applications can open, edit, and save files using the new Office Open XML Format. Users of Microsoft Office 2000 programs will use and external utility to convert Office Open XML Format files to 2007 version binaries and back again.

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 organisation. Key capabilities include:

Using the collaboration features in Windows SharePoint Services technology, organisations 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 organised, discovered, and used throughout the organisation. Features such as document versioning, approval workflow, check in and check out, document profiling, and publishing can help improve information flow. You can also personalise and customise 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 unauthorised individuals.

XML is an open, industry-standard language for organising and storing data. Having data in XML means that the information is transportable and can be easily shared and reused.