1. Office 2003 And Its Predecessors Are Out Of Date
The old Office platform was built
on what are now outdated technologies and it has accumulated a lot of rust over
the years. Consider that the first version of Word for Windows had roughly 100
commands and two toolbars. Word 2003 has more than 1,500 commands and 30-plus
toolbars. As the bells and whistles piled up, a lot of flaws and problems were
worked around, and left unfixed. Office
2007 represents a clean break in platform design, built from the ground up
2. Office 2007 Comes In Eight Flavors
It may seem as needless packaging
complexity, but in fact, it might serve you well to have eight editions to
choose from.
·
Microsoft Office Basic 2007
·
Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007
·
Microsoft Office Standard 2007
·
Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
·
Microsoft Office Professional 2007
·
Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
·
Microsoft Office Professional Plus
·
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007
You'll definitely want to closely
analyze the included applications, supported technologies, upgrade paths, and
pricing to make sure you're not paying for more than you need or sacrificing
essential components.
3. Pricing Is About On Par With Office 2003
The price for Office 2007 is
fairly close to Office 2003. For example:
The retail price for Office
Professional 2007, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with
Business Contact Manager, Office Accounting Express, Publisher, and Access,
costs $499 dollars or $329 for the upgrade.
The retail cost for Microsoft
Office Small Business 2007, which includes Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Office Accounting
Express, and Publisher, costs $449 or $279 for the upgrade.
The Microsoft Office Standard
2007 edition, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, costs $399
dollars at retail for the full version or $239 for the upgrade.
4. If You Need A Lot Of Stuff, The High End Versions Can Deliver
If your company is large enough
or you just enjoy a bunch of neat stuff, it might make sense to purchase
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. This will provide you with a huge variety of
Office 2007 applications. Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, and Publisher, as well as InfoPath, Groove,
OneNote, and Communicator, as well as integrated electronic forms, and advanced
information rights management and policy capabilities. The Office Professional
Plus edition offers a more modest lineup: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access,
Outlook (without Business Contact Manager), Publisher, InfoPath, and
Communicator.
5. New File Formats Offer Numerous Advantages
Office 2007 introduces the
XML-based Open XML file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These formats
offer a number of significant advantages:
·
More compact size
·
Less chance of corrupted files
·
Better integration of business information
·
Interoperability
·
Security
·
Compatibility
·
Open and royalty-free specification
·
Easier integration
6. The Interface Is Redesigned To Improve Productivity
Office 2007 offers what Microsoft
is calling the fluent user interface, designed to achieve some pretty huge
design goals. The main challenge was to free users from having to find their
way through the annoying menu structure in an attempt to locate the commands,
tools, options, and features needed to accomplish a particular task. The Ribbon
replaces the menu structure and offers a context oriented display of options
organized according to function. Along with the Ribbon come a number of other
usability aids, including Live Preview, which gives users a look at the effect
of various formatting options on selected text before they make any changes;
the Mini Toolbar, which offers basic formatting buttons and hovers just above
the selected text, and a customizable status bar with buttons for genuinely
useful features.
7. App-Specific Enhancements Add Efficiency And Power
Apart from their interface-lift,
Office 2007 applications provide some legitimate feature improvements that in
many cases, will allow users to be more productive and produce better results.
A few examples:
Word 2007 offers an enhanced
document comparison feature lets you view the original copy against the revised
copy in a tri-pane window; its Document Inspector finds and removes comments,
hidden text, and personally identifiable information; it offers building
blocks; like cover pages and sidebars, to speed up document creation.
Excel 2007 has expanded its
spreadsheet capacity to 1 million rows and 16,000 columns; charting is
simplified; conditional formatting is easier to apply; new tools make it easier
to discover trends and variances in your data.
PowerPoint 2007 lets you set up
slide libraries on a SharePoint Server 2007 site and keep presentations
synchronized with the slides stored there; you can design custom slide layouts;
you can apply a theme to globally transform the appearance of a presentation.
Access 2007 includes new database
templates to help you set up things like inventory tracking and project
management; you can use new grouping, filtering, and sorting features to refine
your reports; it includes some new field types.
Outlook 2007 offers a To-Do bar
that shows you flagged e-mail and tasks; calendar sharing has been improved; an
attachment preview has been added; it includes support for reading and managing
RSS feeds.
8. New Features Make It Easier To Turn Out Better-Looking Results
Although improving productivity
is high on the list of Office 2007 design objectives, a number of new tools and
features are aimed at helping users produce more attractive documents and
presentations. For instance:
Word's Quick Style sets make it
easy for even style-phobic users to format document text consistently
The new SmartArt feature, which
you can use in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook e-mail messages, lets you
create slick graphics to convey all kinds of information.
Word comes with a gallery of
building blocks, which you can drop into a document to add preformatted
elements like headers and footers, cover pages, sidebars, and pull quotes.
An enhanced set of
themes-coordinated across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint lets you develop a
standard look and feel across all your documents and presentations.
Excel's charting features
(supported in Word and PowerPoint) have been improved and include new special
effects and templates. Excel also offers more color choices, richer conditional
formatting, styles to simplify formatting, tables, charts, and pivot tables,
and a much improved implementation of cell styles.
PowerPoint allows you to create
custom layouts and offers new text options, such as columns, wrapping, vertical
text, and special effects.
9. Beefed-Up User Assistance Reduces Support Overhead
Office 2007 includes a
considerable number of user support features. For starters, Enhanced ScreenTips
generally provide more than just the name of a tool or button. In many cases, a
ScreenTip will offer a picture or diagram, an explanation of the tool's
purpose, and a link to relevant online help topics. Also, since the tools and features are
designed to be more accessible and intuitive, users should be able to complete
various tasks without requiring too many support calls.
10. Numerous Deployment Options Are Available
Microsoft Office 2007 support a variety of
deployment options, whether you need to install it on one system or hundreds
(or even thousands) of systems. You can prepare disk images, deploy it on
networks with limited bandwidth using precache technology, upgrade existing
versions, or deploy it across an enterprise using Group Policy or Microsoft SMS
2003.
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