What’s New in MS Office 2007?

A. Summary:

Here is an overview of some of the new things you will find in your MS Office 2007 applications. The first change you will see is where you find your usual commands. Give yourself a little time to get acquainted with the new interface.

B. Key Points:

· The new Office 2007 applications replace the menus and panes with a Ribbon interface

· The Office button on the top left of the Office 2007 applications contains the most commonly used tasks

· Link to Office 2007 Button and Ribbons

· Link to Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

· You can preview many things like style changes by moving your mouse over the choices instead of having to apply them first

· The small blue question mark on the top right of the Ribbon replaces the Help Menu

· To go to Microsoft’s web site explaining each Office 2007 application, click on Get Started with the 2007 Microsoft Office System

· Word, Excel, and Powerpoint now have new file formats with an “x” on the end of the file extension: docx, xlsx and pptx

· You can save these “x” files in an older format, or your recipients can download converters

· For corrections, updates, or clarifications on this Star Point, please email Elizabeth Wallace

C. Details:

As soon as you open any of the new MS Office 2007 applications – Word, Access, Excel or PowerPoint – the changes may at first be confusing. Give yourself a little time to get used to the new interface and you may find you prefer it, because many commands that were “buried” in different panes and menus in Office 2003 are easier to find. The most commonly used commands have been made more visible. You can also easily customize the toolbar along the top with your most-used commands. The elimination of the traditional menu bars requires a different way of working, so power users should give themselves a few days to figure out where to find everything.

Below are some highlights of the new features.

Appearance

The Office button at the top left corner of the different Office applications will give you quick access to many of the most important tasks: Open, Save, Print, etc.

The menu system in MS Office 2007 applications has been replaced by the “Ribbon”. Here is the Ribbon you see when you open a Word 2007 document:

This Ribbon runs across the top of the Office application window and it contains a default set of what Microsoft considers to be the most-used commands. The “Home” tab in Word, as you see in the example above, contains most of the commands you will need when writing a document. The small arrow in the lower right corner of most of the sections of the Ribbon will open up the more traditional dialog boxes. If you click on the “Mailings” tab in Word, you will see the commands you need for a Mail Merge or for printing envelopes or labels:

The other MS Office 2007 applications are similarly organized. Learn more about the Office 2007 Ribbon with the Office 2007 Ribbon Guide Star Point. If you find the Ribbon too space-consuming, you can toggle it out of sight in several ways: either double-click on any of the tabs, such as Home; or press CTRL—F1; or you can right-click on a tab and choose Minimize the Ribbon.

The Galleries look like drop-down menus of styles, charts, PowerPoint themes, page numbering, tables, etc. But as you run your mouse along the different choices that are available, you will see a live preview of what your text will look like. You can see how the formatting you select will change your text without having to apply it first. After selecting some text in Word 2007 for example, run your mouse along the different styles in the “Home” tab and see how it changes your text. Similarly, when setting up a numbered list, after selecting some of your text, click on the down arrow next to the styles of numbered lists in the “Paragraph” section of the “Home” tab. As you run your mouse over the different types of numbered lists, you will immediately see your selected text change to the style you mouse is over. To apply the style you want, just click it.

Quick Access Toolbar: you can customize this toolbar with your most frequently-used commands. If you choose “More Commands” from the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” menu in each of the Office 2007 applications, you can add any command, including styles, fonts, macros and other items not found on the Ribbon.

Look on the bottom right of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 applications and you will see a slider bar for zooming in and out to enlarge or decrease the area of what you are viewing.

Help: There no longer is a Help Menu. Instead, all the applications have a small blue question mark on the top right of the Ribbon. Clicking on this will take you to MS Office Help in any of the applications. You can also press F1 to bring up the Help screen. To go to Microsoft’s web site that will explain more about each Office 2007 application, click on Get Started with the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

About: To display version information, click on the Office button, then the Options button. Then click on Resources in the left pane and then About in the right pane.

File Formats

Word, Excel, and Powerpoint now have an “x” on the end of the file extension: docx, xlsx and pptx. This means they are now in XML format (Extensible Markup Language). These files are more secure, smaller and more easily shared than the older file formats. Until most of your recipients have upgraded to Office 2007, save any files you want to share with them in the older format. For example, if you do a “Save As” in Word, it will give you the choice to save as a Word 2003 document. Alternatively recipients still using Office 2003 can download a free file converter that will allow them to read files in the Office 2007 format.

AFSC’s network administrator has set it up so that Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 save in the Office 2003 format by default.

If you open a file that was created in a previous version of Office, you will be asked if you want to convert it to the new format. If you choose to save your file in an older format, some features of 2007 won’t be available.

If you have a previous version of Office and you try and open an Office 2007 file, you will be told that the file was created in a newer version and you will be asked if you want to download a compatibility pack so you can work with the newer file. Offices with servers will find the converter under \APPS\Office 2007\. Other offices should go to Microsoft’s “Download Center” web site and search for “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.”

Word 2007

You will find many of the old Word options by clicking on the MS Office button . You will see a couple of new menu items here: Prepare (preparing a document for distribution) and Publish. Other familiar tasks will be found in Word Options at the bottom:

In addition to the Styles Gallery mentioned above under Appearance--Galleries, there are new default styles in Word 2007. Even the Normal style has a new look and new behavior. For example, the Normal style is now based on the new Calibri font; and the Normal style now adds space between paragraphs.

The “Undo” function has moved from the Edit menu to a small reverse-arrow icon on the Quick Access Toolbar. By clicking on the arrow to the right of this icon, you can select from a list of recent changes to undo:

After you select text in a Word 2007 document and hover your mouse pointer over it, Word pops up a Mini Toolbar, which initially appears transparent. Move your mouse over an item on the toolbar to make the toolbar fully visible. If the Mini toolbar’s popping in and out annoys you, you can disable it clicking on the Office button—Word Options—Popular and clear the “Show Mini Toolbar On Selection” option.

You can now save your Word documents as PDF files by downloading an add-in after the initial Office 2007 installation. This PDF add-in can be found on your server under \Apps\Office 2007\ and it is called “SaveAsPDFandXPS.exe”. Or you can find it on Microsoft’s Download web site.

Excel 2007

Again the first change you will encounter in Excel 2007 is the Ribbon:

To find your old menu commands in the new Ribbon, you will find it helpful to look at the “Interactive Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 Command Reference Guide”. You can get to this by clicking on the Help button (the blue question mark on the top right of the Ribbon) and entering “interactive” in the Search box.

To insert PivotTables, Charts or illustrations, look under the “Insert” tab. Excel 2007 offers many new formats with styles and themes, including new cell styles, Chart styles, and PivotTable styles. For example, new cell styles give you a quick way to show “good” and “bad” values differentiated by colors, as well as to distinguish the different sections of a worksheet (e.g., data from calculations).

Excel 2007 has expanded the worksheet capacity to allow 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. When sorting, you are no longer limited to three fields; you can specify up to 64. Formulas are no longer restricted to seven levels of nesting, but can also go up to 64.

Excel 2007 has a new conditional formatting feature so that, for example, spending figures turn red only when they exceed an associated budget value. Menu choices now let you flag conditions such as “top 10%” or “above average” with different colors or icons.

Pressing “CTRL + T” within a worksheet range turns that range into a table (a much stronger feature than 2003’s “list”). Once you make a table, you can apply styles to it. You can have the data in your table expand automatically as you add new data.

As soon as you type an equals sign followed by a single letter, Excel 2007 displays the names of all available functions starting with that letter. Type another letter and the list narrows. Select an item in the list and a tip appears describing the selected function. If you then press the parenthesis key, the tip changes to enumerate the function’s arguments.

Excel 2007’s Formulas tab lets you reference complex formulas from pull-down menus:

PowerPoint 2007

As with the other Office 2007 applications, there are no more menus and toolbars – these have been replaced by the Ribbon, which contains categories of tabs of what you used to find on the menus. When you click on the Slide Show tab, you see only those choices you need for slide shows:

You can now preview how a slide will look with a different design by hovering the mouse over the design button, instead of having to apply the theme first. There are many more style galleries and it is easier to change the color themes throughout your slide shows.

The design templates are now called “Themes”, which contain your selection of colors, fonts and formatting. There are a lot more formatting tools, such as textures and shadows, available for creating pictures and text. You can convert your text to “SmartArt” so that your text becomes more visual. (However, you can’t change existing bullet points into SmartArt; you have to type the bulleted text into the SmartArt diagram.)

You can now save your Powerpoint presentations as PDF files. This will enable you to more easily share your presentation by email. And the new XML file format reduces the file size of your PowerPoint presentations a lot. But if you need to, you can still save your presentation in earlier versions.

Outlook 2007

Unlike Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007, Outlook 2007 keeps the same File menu format as 2003 on its main page. However, once you click on other options, such as “New” or “Reply”, you will see the same Ribbon format as appears in the other 2007 applications:

The same is true of the Calendar in Outlook 2007: the main page uses the older File menu format, but clicking on Calendar options such as “New” will give you the new Ribbon format.

Outlook 2007 has an improved search tool, called “Instant Search,” that will help you find the Email you are looking for no matter what folder it is in. Messages that contain the text you typed in are displayed with the search text highlighted. Attachments are searched, but the search results from attachments are not highlighted. You can make your search more focused by adding criteria:

You can add and delete your own search fields in this criteria list.

New color categories will give you a quick, visual way to distinguish one type of item from another. For example, if you want to assign a color to all items related to a certain project, you can add this color to your project items in Email, Calendar and Tasks. You can also search and sort by these color categories.

A new “To-Do Bar” can help you consolidate your priorities by integrating Tasks, Emails flagged for follow-up, upcoming appointments, and Calendar information in one place. Tasks can now be integrated with your Calendar, so you will see them displayed below your daily appointments and meetings. To allot time for working on a Task, drag the Task onto your Calendar. You can add Emails to the To-Do Bar either by adding a flag to an Email message or by dragging the Email to the To-Do Bar.

In Calendar, you can drag and drop appointments to change the time, date, or the duration, of your appointment. To make scheduling meetings easier, users can now specify their working hours. When changes are made to a meeting, the attendees will receive an update, rather than having to reaccept the meeting. And whatever changes are made are highlighted in the meeting update.

RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) are now an item in your Inbox. Here you can easily find updates to blogs or other Web sources that are pushed out to one place on your computer. You no longer have to visit Web sites to obtain the latest information on your topics of interest.

You can now embed a form within an Email message for your recipient to fill out. Once you get the data back, you can export it to Excel 2007 for analysis, or you can merge the answers from the form that you sent out into one master form.