Review: Office 2007 a Worthy Successor

By NewsFactor Network | February 2, 2007

With each update to its Office suite, Microsoft Corp. has piled on features aimed at boosting users’ productivity and goosing sales of the world’s most widely used collection of programs for handling documents, spreadsheets, e-mail and presentations.

Office 2007 for Windows-based PCs, launched Tuesday alongside the company’s new Windows Vista operating system, is no different, except for one feature that makes it vastly easier to figure out what these programs have to offer.

Most of the suite’s applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access — have done away with the old, familiar menus and toolbars. In their place is the Ribbon — a horizontal strip of screen real estate populated with tabs and icons grouped by function.

Want to add clip art to a Word document? Just click on the “Insert” tab and choose the “Clip Art” icon, which, incidentally, is hard to miss. Creating a complex formula in Excel? Click on “Formulas” and pick your poison — all broken down by type.

It’s also dynamic: When handling a photo in Word, the Ribbon presents the tools suitable for that task. No more clicking on the “View” menu, choosing “Toolbars” and then figuring out which of the tiny icons might be of use.

The Ribbon ranks among the most significant improvements to Office to date. It’s not the first software to break out of the “File,” “Edit,” and “View” mold, but it’s the most convincing alternative I’ve seen. Other programs will surely follow suit.

The Ribbon isn’t customizable and can’t be repositioned, though it can be minimized. There’s no option to switch back to “classic” view, and it isn’t universal — the old menus and toolbars can be found in parts of Outlook, for instance.

It took me a few weeks to get used to it, but after trying out Office 2007 for a couple months,…

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