Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007: Features and Enhancements

Microsoft Office 2007 marked a significant shift in the landscape of productivity suites. It introduced a completely revamped interface and a host of new functionalities. While its reception was initially mixed, it ultimately became a standard due to its integration with Windows Vista and the eventual phasing out of older Windows versions.

A New User Interface: The Fluent User Interface

One of the most noticeable changes in Office 2007 was the introduction of the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars. The ribbon is a panel that houses a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organizing commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The ribbon is present in Microsoft Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Access 2007 and some Outlook 2007 windows. This new interface aimed to make features more discoverable and accessible with fewer mouse clicks compared to the previous menu-based UI.

The Ribbon

Gone are the toolbars, the drop-down menus, and the side-of-the-window Task Panes. Stretching across the top of several of the new applications, the Ribbon divides features into categories which, Microsoft hopes, will make it easier for users to find some of the tools that were previously hidden inside the menus.

The ribbon also changes with context: if you click on an image, for instance, a "Format" tab appears in the ribbon, and a context indicator appears above the ribbon. Switching focus to something else resets the tab. If you don't like seeing the whole ribbon all the time, you can set it to automatically minimize to something that resembles the old drop-down menu bar by double-clicking on it. The whole idea is to present the user with no more than there absolutely has to be at any given time, and in that sense the ribbon works beautifully.

The Office Button

The Office 2007 button, located on the top-left of the window, replaces the File menu and provides access to functionality common across all Office applications, including opening, saving, printing, and sharing a file. It can also close the application.

Quick Access Toolbar and Status Bar

The Quick Access toolbar (by default) sits in the title bar and serves as a repository of most used functions, such as save, undo/redo and print. It is customizable, although this feature is limited, compared to toolbars in previous Office versions. Any command available in the entire Office application can be added to the Quick Access toolbar, including commands not available on the ribbon as well as macros. The status bar is fully customizable.

Live Preview

Microsoft Office 2007 also introduces a feature called Live Preview, which temporarily applies formatting on the focused text or object when any formatting button is moused-over. The temporary formatting is removed when the mouse pointer is moved from the button.

Mini Toolbar

The new Mini Toolbar is a small toolbar with basic formatting commands that appears within the document editing area, much like a context menu. When the mouse selects part of the text, Mini Toolbar appears close to selected text. It remains semi-transparent until the mouse pointer is hovered on it, to avoid obstructing what is underneath. Mini Toolbar can also be made to appear by right-clicking in the editing area or via ≣ Menu key on keyboard, in which case it appears near the cursor, above or below the traditional context menu.

Key Applications in Office Home and Student 2007

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 includes essential applications for home and academic use: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Microsoft Word 2007

Word 2007 introduced significant changes, including the Ribbon interface. It aimed to provide genuinely useful new ways of doing things.

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Coping With The Menu

The single biggest change, as you've probably heard by now, is the new menu system. The old drop-down menus and toolbars are now gone; in their place is the "ribbon," a tab-like interface with all the most commonly-used commands placed right up front. The keyboard equivalents are available as well -- press the Alt key and all of the ribbon items are marked with their corresponding Alt key commands. The Alt commands are markedly different from what they were in 2003, but their Ctrl equivalents are still the same (Ctrl-F for Find and Replace, for instance).

Getting Subtle

In fact, Word 2007 is far less habitually intrusive on the whole. Clippy and all such related annoyances are completely gone; instead, the program uses subtle cues rather than overt ones to attract your attention. If you highlight a block of text, for instance, a text-formatting hover menu appears, but it's heavily faded out; you only use it if you actually hover over it, and if you don't want it, it vanishes as soon as you shift focus to something else. I didn't use this menu much, but it was quite handy when I did need it, and the rest of the time it wasn't obtrusive at all.

Live Preview and SmartArt

Another genuinely useful new feature is "Live Preview," which allows people to see the results of a given action in real-time, such as changing the formatting of a table. Not everything works with Live Preview, though, so it's not always immediately obvious what will render with it and what won't. One element that uses Live Preview is "SmartArt" -- pre-designed graphics that are used to convey information, such as hierarchy charts or Venn diagrams. When you insert a SmartArt object, any changes are reflected in real time. In the past I've resorted to a third-party program to design such things, but Word 2007 drastically cuts down on the need to do this, and the results are attractive and useful.

Document Themes

Earlier versions of Word introduced styles for paragraphs; Word 2007 takes the idea a step further with document themes, a collection of font, color and layout choices that can be applied to a document instantly. This is another Live Preview function, so you can open up the Theme browser (Word 2007 comes packaged with about 20) and see the results of applying a particular theme to the whole document by simply hovering the mouse over your choice.

Under-the-Hood Changes

The under-the-hood changes to Word are also intriguing. Microsoft's new .DOCX document format treats each document as a .ZIP archive containing multiple files: an XML file for the document itself, copies of attached objects, and so on. The format's compressed, so it takes less space than its binary predecessors, and you can always unpack it manually by renaming the .DOCX file extension to .ZIP and using any ZIP-compatible archiving tool (including the archive wizard in Explorer). Older Word files can be edited as is, but Word also has a built-in compatibility checker to alert you if a file might pose a conversion problem before you convert it.

Blogging Integration

Word 2003 had blogging functions available through an add-on, but they're now native to 2007 and have been refined a great deal. Said feature is essentially a version of the standalone Microsoft Live Writer application, so it also works as an impromptu generator for clean HTML. Most popular blogging services are directly supported -- Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, TypePad, plus any blogging system that supports a number of popular discoverability protocols.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel 2007 focused on making the software and the results of calculations easier to understand.

Enhanced Interface and Data Visualization

As with Word, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Excel's new interface overhaul is designed to put more features at your fingertips, bringing commands that were buried three levels down in dialog boxes and menus up front to the ribbon interface. Like its siblings, drop-down galleries and quick preview help you can see your formatting changes immediately, and the wide variety of designer-quality formatting options give your charts and tables a very professional look. That's to be expected -- many of the Excel improvements Microsoft touts have to do with visualizing your data.

Increased Capacity

More is better, of course, and in Excel 2007 you'll get more -- much more. Excel will now support 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. Dozens of other limits have been removed (you can use an unlimited number of format types in a single workbook -- up from an already huge 4,000), and a formula can now refer to as many cells as your system's memory can accommodate (up from 8,000). Memory management has been doubled to 2 GB, which should increase computational speed for larger worksheets.

Data Manipulation Improvements

There's more help with data manipulation, too. For example, you are no longer limited to three levels of sort -- you can now sort by up to 64 levels, and sorts can be performed based on cell color, font color, or icon, in addition to the traditional cell contents. AutoFilter, useful for selecting rows that meet specific criteria, can now display more than 1,000 items in its drop-down list, and you can select multiple items to filter just by clicking on them. If you have duplicate rows, a new Remove Duplicates feature lets you remove rows containing duplicates based on the column(s) you specify.

Better Looking Graphics, Tables

Themes -- a collection of colors, fonts, fill effects, and other visual properties -- are shared with other Office applications, so a chart you create in Excel and paste into Word will have the same visual properties as other images in Word. Themes are reflected in tables, charts, shapes, SmartArt diagrams, and even PivotTables.

Styles and Conditional Formatting

Styles, familiar to Word users, now come to Excel in a big way. Styles are used to format cells, controlling the font, font size, and background. You can also use conditional formatting to apply a special kind of style that defines cell backgrounds and icons. Microsoft calls this visual annotation -- it's just another technique to indicate a cell's value with an icon, color, or bar.

Enhanced Table Features

With Excel 2007's new user interface you can quickly create, format, and expand an Excel table to organize the data. Table formatting is easier, too. What I really like is how Excel now replaces column headings (A, B, C, etc.) with the header row -- so as you scroll through a long table, the column headings are replaced with the column headings from the table's header row. It's a nice alternative to having to freeze a row as you scroll through a table, then unfreeze it when you're done.

Also new in tables are calculated columns, which are similar to array formulas. Add a table, choose a cell in a column, and enter a formula, and the formula is automatically copied to all cells in the same column -- no Fill or Copy command needed. In addition, adding a Total Row, then specifying what each column's total should be (sum, average, etc. or your own formula), is incredibly easy to set up.

Improved Charting

One of Excel's strengths is its charting ability, and the new layouts bring the charting look into the 21st century. There are subtle changes, such as shadows and bevels, plus new color combinations that finally give your data the professional look they deserve.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007

PowerPoint 2007 introduced enhancements to visual effects, SmartArt diagrams, and charting and graphics galleries.

The new applications within Office 2007 emphasize visual effects more than in the past, so you can create documents with snazzier pictures, graphs, and flowcharts. Office 2007's other notable features include a strong emphasis on style templates, with the ability to preview changes to fonts and graphics on the fly. There are more options for dressing up documents with the sorts of charts, diagrams, and pictures usually offered by desktop publishing software.

Slide Library

PowerPoint features a Slide Library, which lets you reuse any slide or presentation as a template.

Customization

PowerPoint allows for user-defined custom slide layouts, giving you more control instead of being bound by one of the prepackaged, standard layouts. You can save your custom layout for use in future presentations.

Microsoft OneNote 2007

OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that lets you gather text, images, audio, video and web clippings on one page to keep your projects better organized than ever before. Just like in a paper system you can categorize things into notebooks, sections and pages.

Organization

Office OneNote 2007 is organized into notebooks, sections, and pages, which helps you arrange your notes the way you want. It provides an easy-to-use layout of notebooks, sections, and pages.

Sharing

Notebooks can be shared across multiple computers. Anyone can edit even while not connected and changes are merged automatically across machines when a connection is made. Notebooks can be synchronized between two or more machines without an Internet connection when stored on removable media such as an SD card or USB flash drive; changes made to a notebook on a machine where…

New File Formats

Microsoft Office 2007 introduced a new file format, called Office Open XML, as the default file format. Such files are saved using an extra X letter in their extension (.docx/xlsx/pptx/etc.). However, it can still save documents in the old format, which is compatible with previous versions. Office Open XML is based on XML and uses the ZIP file container.

Collaboration Features

Microsoft Office 2007 includes features geared towards collaboration and data sharing. As such, Microsoft Office 2007 features server components for applications such as Excel, which work in conjunction with SharePoint Services, to provide a collaboration platform.

System Requirements

Actual requirements and product functionality may vary based on your system configuration and operating system.

Home and Student Edition Specifics

Families rejoice, Microsoft’s Home and Student 2007 can be installed on up to 3 PCs for the same low price. That means everyone in the family gets their own legal copy of the 2007 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

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