Although the terms of the EULA were less than transparent, we were pleased that Microsoft offered the least intrusive installation settings by default. For example, Privacy Options leaves it up to users to hook up to online Help automatically, as well as to download a file that continually tracks system problems. No Office 2007 shortcuts appeared on our desktop or in our system tray, either. The Office Shortcut Bar -- a feature that disappeared in the 2003 version -- is back, located within the Office Tools menu.
The File and Edit drop-down menus of yore get turfed
for a tabbed Ribbon toolbar and an Office-logo button.
Interface
Once you open each Office 2007 application, you'll see a radically different, blue interface that's brighter than in the past. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint arrange features within a tabbed Ribbon toolbar that largely replaces the gray drop-down menus and dialog boxes from a quarter-century of Office software. The Office logo menu, docked in the upper left corner, bundles many commands from the old File and Edit menus. Outlook lacks the logo button and adopts the Ribbon only within its message composition and scheduling windows. There's a core set of always-on tabs, as well as contextual tabs that hide until the software detects that you need them. For instance, the Picture Tools Format tab only shows up when you click on an image. We were stumped at first about how to format images, tables, and charts until we got used to clicking on them first.
The Office 2007 programs, which share a new graphics engine, strongly emphasise ways to decorate documents. Pull-down Style Galleries let you preview how new fonts, colour themes, chart styles, images and such appear before you apply the change. This is great for selecting from menus of fonts or page templates. At the same time, however, the "intelligent" shape-shifting may bewilder those who don't realise that they must click a style to apply a formatting change. In most cases, the preformatted styles only present colours within the same range already used by your document. And sometimes the pull-down galleries jut into the document and obscure the charts or images you're trying to change, and you can't turn them off.
Nor do the dynamic previews apply to all style elements. For example, from the Page Layout tab of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, you can preview Themes of colours and templates by mousing over them. But the Page Borders option takes you to an unhelpful, old-school pop-up box without dynamic previews.
On the one hand, newbies to Office software, particularly young, visual learners, may find the 2007 interface easier to master than Office 2003. Icons label most of the commands, and many expand into pull-down menus. There are inconsistencies, though, such as buttons that open older dialog boxes. And many items have moved to places that we don't find intuitive. For instance, the dictionary and thesaurus in Word are under the Review tab, not References near the footnote and bibliography buttons. And the Insert Rows command in Excel 2007 is located beneath the Home tab, not the Insert tab. Likewise, PowerPoint's New Slide button is under Home instead of Insert. Notice a pattern? Although the Home tab houses many frequently used features, it's not the first place we look for them.
After more than a year of alternating between Office 2003 and test versions of Office 2007, we still found it hard to break old habits. Microsoft advertises the Ribbon's ability to help you "browse, pick, and click." If you're upgrading, though, you could get stuck in the "browse" stage longer than you'd like, slowing your work.
Rather than piling on more features -- Word 2003 alone had some 1,500 commands -- Microsoft attempted to better show off functions that already existed. To some extent, the Ribbon meets this goal, as it's easier to find Conditional Formatting in Excel, among other sophisticated tools. And the View tab in Word and Excel better provides options for viewing two or three open documents at once.
You can customise Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to some extent, such as by adding buttons to the small, Quick Access Toolbar, but not as much as with their predecessors. Luckily, keyboard shortcuts remain the same; just press ALT at any time to see tiny "badges" that label the quick keys for the Ribbon's commands. We like that you can hide the Ribbon by double-clicking on any tab. Plus, Microsoft has killed Clippy, the annoying animated pop-up assistant that would interrupt your work in Office 2003. A subtle new quick formatting toolbar in Word 2007 fades in and out near your cursor. Overall, our favorite interface tweak is the slider bar in the lower right corner that lets you zoom in and out with ease.
Features
Many of the changes to Office 2007 feel skin deep. By that, we mean that there's a strong emphasis on making documents, spreadsheets, and presentations easier on the eyes. You can adjust the brightness of images, for instance, and add 3D effects such as drop shadows and glows to pictures and charts. And many of the features that might appear new are simply easier to stumble upon in the new interface. The useful Document Inspector provides old and new ways to clean up hidden metadata in files. But don't expect too many new features.
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