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GCN Home > 03/05/07 issue

Office 2007 has the all the right tools

New version shines in looks, performance

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Normally a new version of Microsoft Office does not warrant a huge party. That was certainly the case with Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003. But with Office 2007, grab your funny hats and get ready for a productivity fiesta. It really raises the bar for office suites, and looks darn cool in the process.

The first thing you will notice is that the interface is completely different than anything you have seen before. Even Office 2003’s graphical improvements are nothing compared to 2007. All the functions that you could possibly perform with a document are located in a long ribbon interface that sits by default at the top of the screen. This approach puts helpful functions into clustered tabs.

At first it appears a bit daunting, especially for people used to digging deep into menus to find what they need. But this office suite is pretty smart. It will bring up buttons that represent functions depending on what you need to do.

For example, say you want to insert your agency logo into a Word document. When you carry out this task, buttons come up on the ribbon, giving you the ability to rotate, enlarge or shrink the logo (or photo).

This slickness goes hand in hand with the new look and feel of the Vista operating system, which came out at the same time. The automatic surfacing of the correct buttons would break down if the artificial intelligence software were not good enough to bring the right functions forward, but it seems to work every time.

We could not come up with a scenario when a needed function was not brought to the surface. Office has come a long way from the idiotic paper clip asking if you are trying to write a letter.

The only real negative we found to the ribbon interface is that some users might not know that a function exists unless they are doing a task that brings the relevant buttons forward.

Also, longtime Office users who know all the shortcuts and can navigate the menus like a minotaur hunting in its labyrinth are going to be as out of luck with that knowledge as a Cobol programmer after Y2K. At least the file menu commands are pretty much where they have always been.

New users with no experience with office suite programs however, can probably get up and running in less than half an hour with little or no training, something that could not have been said for other versions.

More news on related topics: Software Applications



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