Office 2007: Finally here

The most revolutionary release of Office has finally arrived. Newest edition is the complete makeover. New UI stands out and is the first thing users will notice. It's intuitive, accessible and feature-rich. No more menus, option dialog boxes we used to have for almost everything. Now all is in the Ribbon, nicely laid and context sensitive. All this makes it so easy to use Office in comparison with previous releases. People are amazed how much time they save where everything is just one click away. Oh and the live preview - this feature is another time saver. This is a technology that shows the results of applying a formatting change as the user moves mouse over styles presented in the menu. Everything in real time! You can try all that for free here

Office 2007: reviews

It seems that people really love new Office. All major magazines are describing 2007 release as well worth evaluating for an upgrade. e-Week has nice review of major applications from the suite: Word, Excel Power Point, Outlook and Access are all covered in this article

Outlook 2007: HTML rendering

Some people complain about Outlook 2007 improperly rendering their e-mails. They state that Microsoft takes e-mail rendering 5 years back. However this does only be an issue for people sending complicated HTML heavy CSSed e-mails not the regular home or corporate users. Besides Microsoft documented everything here so it should be clear what does and what doesn't work.

Office 2007: best new features

Below is a quick summary of best features that Office 2007 has to offer.

Fluent

Fluent (formerly known as Ribbon) is a new UI in Office authoring applications: Word, Excel, Power Point and Outlook's mail editor. It replaces old-style menus with a set of panels that contain buttons and icons. Single panel groups relevant commands. All this makes application easier to use and results in fewer number of mouse clicks required to accomplish given task. Some of the Fluent's panels appear only when an object of a certain class is selected. Most obvious example is table. When it's selected new tab shows up in the command are with all table-related commands.

Live preview

This is a technology that provides real-time preview of document when hovering over formatting option in the UI. Let's take word document as an example here. You select a paragraph and then expand font picker. As you move mouse over given font it will be applied to the selected text offering you the preview of how would it look like. This is one of these features that you have to see in action to actually understand how valuable it is.

Smart Art

Smart Art is a new technology that makes creating and editing diagram-like graphics easier than ever before. In a nutshell you select the type of diagram and then type in text that will be displayed in nodes. Text is usually provided as bullet lists. Based on that SmartArt figures out relationships between nodes and construct diagram. You can change the style of the diagram without retyping anything and you will get completely different graphics.

Office XML file formats

It's said to produce documents up to 75% smaller in size than old 97-2003 binary format. That's because text documents compress well (and as we all know XML is a pure text). But it has also drawback in longer loading and saving time especially for large documents. By default these new formats are Macro free and so it should put an end to Macro viruses. Of course macros might be included, but they will have different extensions (for example Word 2007 macro-free format is .docx while macro-enabled format is .docm). New formats are open - they are documented, XML schema is provided, there is an API to write and read data. For old releases of Office, compatibility packs have been released that allows old application to read and write new Office XML formats. However this does not enable new 2007 specific features such as more than 65,536 rows in Excel spreadsheet.

Outlook 2007 Gadgets

There are two new Sidebar gadgets. Outlook Tasks and Outlook Upcoming Appointments. First one shows all your tasks and flagged items from Outlook 2007 on your Vista sidebar. Second one shows upcoming appointments (from three to five) on the Vista Sidebar. They are very handy are allow you to leverage Vista Sidebar instead of using Outlook's ToDo Bar.