Welcome to Office 2007

Office 2007 is the latest version of the Microsoft Office suite - which remains the world’s most popular office productivity software. This article takes a peek under the bonnet to look at some of its new features, which will be most welcomed by healthcare professionals.

The chances are that you will be using at least some pieces of the Microsoft Office jigsaw already - for example Outlook for email, Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets, and PowerPoint for presentations.

Moving to the new version, Office 2007, may still come as something of a shock, though, because the tools you will be used to using often appear in a different place on the screen.

"The most instantly satisfying new tool is in the email program, Outlook 2007...The To-Do bar contains your immediate calendar, tasks and any urgent-flagged messages."

Office is also packed with new tools to make daily tasks much easier, and because so much more has been squeezed in, it will take a couple of days to get used to them. However, it really is worth the effort, so let’s look at some of the new features.

The To-Do Bar

The most instantly satisfying new tool is in the email program, Outlook 2007. It’s called the “To-Do Bar” and it collects up all your urgent information to give you an instant view of your day and a single view of your priorities: particularly useful for anyone working in a fast-moving healthcare environment.

The To-Do bar contains your immediate calendar, tasks and any urgent-flagged messages. And because it integrates seamlessly with collaborative software like SharePoint and OneNote, if your colleagues update tasks and jobs these will automatically be reflected in your To-Do bar.

Read more on the To-Do Bar and how it can help you keep organised and efficient

Introducing the Ribbon

Key to using Office 2007 is the Ribbon. In previous versions of Office, you got access to most of its functions through drop-down menus across the top of the screen. This meant it could take several clicks to perfect an object on the page.

In Office 2007, all the tools you need at any one moment - such as the typesetting functions in Word - appear in the Ribbon at the top of the screen.

The Ribbon is highly intelligent. It takes an educated guess at what you’re trying to do and gives you the commands you need to do it, making editing and tweaking documents much more intuitive.

With the old style menus, every function was in the same place all the time. With the Ribbon, every function is in the most useful place all the time.

Live Preview

With tools grouped together on the Ribbon, you’ll also soon discover Live Preview. Live Preview allows you to see what effect a change will have before you commit to it.

While you are editing a Word document, for example, you can select appropriate options on the Ribbon - such as font sizes and styles - to see what they will look like before accepting them. This makes editing, particularly in presentation documents, much simpler and more natural.

Find out more about the Ribbon

The Document Inspector

Few working environments contain as much sensitive information as hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. Yet hidden within many everyday documents are pieces of text you wouldn’t want anyone else to see; for example comments or revisions which ought to be removed from the final version of a document.

The Document Inspector is a new function for Word, Excel and PowerPoint which cleans out this residual information at a stroke, avoiding embarrassment and overcoming some potentially nasty data protection issues.

Run documents through the Inspector before sending them out, and you can be sure that the recipient will only get the version you want them to see.

Review a step-by-step guide to the Document Inspector

Designing and filling in forms

With Office 2007, the paperless office comes one step closer. Much of the administrative burden in healthcare organisations comes from filling in forms. Historically, these have been paper-based and therefore open to being misplaced, illegible, or full of errors that crept in due to endless copying out.

The Office 2007 System includes InfoPath 2007 and integration with SharePoint Server 2007, which allow you to design electronic forms and make them available throughout your organisation. Data collected can be safely stored and made available to other staff in whatever format is most useful for them; reducing errors.

Learn more about Integrated Electronic Forms

Graphics and Galleries

If there is one, constant criticism of PowerPoint presentations, it is that they encourage people to use flashy graphics. Nothing irritates an audience more than text whooshing in with a fanfare pulled out of sound effects.

Office 2007 comes with new, advanced graphics, so you can use some very elegant “brochure-quality” effects to spice up your presentations instead of resorting to too much movement. The 3D effects for charts and graphs, for example, are extremely elegant and easier to edit than was the case in previous editions of Office.

All the major applications also include Smart Art, which makes it easy to create “house style” graphics that include effects like reflections and glows.

Find out about using SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint 2007

Different means better

It takes a couple of days to get used to the Office 2007 interface, but everything really has been designed to make life easier, while simultaneously increasing the quality of the documents and presentations that you can achieve.

Complete integration throughout the Office System also means that sharing documents with colleagues securely, in real-time and with a natural audit trail becomes intuitive.

Related Links

• Find out more about Office 2007 and review the interactive demo
• As an NHS employee, you can benefit from the Home User Programme and get a free copy of Office 2007 for your home. There is a small charge for postage and packaging.