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Office is back - smaller than before

REVIEW / MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007

DBy the time you read this Office 2007 will have been released to the general public and as usual it looks completely different from previous versions. The biggest change, apart from the whole of the interface, is the size of both the application and the resulting documents - they are both smaller.

Yes, smaller. Over the years we have been used to seeing Office grow and grow in size from a floppy to a CD, to multiple CDs and then a DVD. Feature after feature was added until there was not a person on the planet who used everything and the vast majority barely used more than a couple of percent of the functionality.

The new Office has brand new Word, Excel and PowerPoint products. Floating toolbars are gone, dialogue boxes have been dramatically reduced and the menu bar has vanished as in IE 7.0. The file menu is actually still there but shown as the Office logo.

A bunch of things are gone and all that is left is the "Ribbon." The ribbon is a big series of icons on the top of the page. This takes up space so it will be time to bump yourself up to the next resolution and perhaps invest in a pair of reading glasses. Basically most stuff is now on the ribbon.

When you point to an option, the page auto changes to reflect what the format would look like after the change. These features scream graphics and processing power to me, so I suggest you make sure you have a half-decent PC before you rush out and upgrade.

With the new version comes the bad news. Just like previous versions of Windows, you now have to play that favourite Windows game - find the option. The Ribbon dynamically changes depending on which tab you click on. Some Ribbon items only appear in context, such as when you have selected a graphics image or a table.

More bad news is that you cannot rearrange or hide the items you do not use, as they are fixed. So all those options you never use will be taking up space in the Ribbon whether you want them there or not. Custom Toolbars are also missing from the new version, the ones where you placed your favourite Style options and so on.

The only respite is a tiny set of unlabelled icons in a Quick Access Bar sitting below the Ribbon that you can customise.

Office 2007 comes with a new XML-based file format, which means that you'll need to get the conversion utilities if you plan to stick with the older versions and still swap files with users who have upgraded. Word .doc files are now .docx, in line with the .NET naming scheme.

Mac users will need shareware utilities, although you could of course tell Office to save everything in the older formats. However, you will miss out on smaller file sizes and an easier recovery from corrupted documents.

The whole installation takes about 10 minutes on an XP PC of reasonable speed and you can install the product on two computers for your personal use. The user licence agreement requires that you agree that you will download updates whenever Microsoft thinks it necessary, and at any time Microsoft may verify your licence key to make sure that you're not using pirated software.

One good aspect of the new release is that, with the exception of Outlook, you will be able to run both Office 2003 and Office 2007 programs side by side. Apart from some macro library issues this will be useful for updating any VBA apps you have.

Word

Each individual component has its own changes. Word, for example, now includes coordinated styles so that a click on Format will reformat everything for you. It also contains blogging support.

The seven common tabs are Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View. Some of the ribbon placements are unusual, with Insert Comment found under Review instead of Insert.

Picture tools have been upgraded and allow for previews of changes. You can now adjust things like brightness, contrast and the colour mode applied to a picture. Rotation, 3D border effects and picture container shapes are now also included. Positioning options have also been upgraded so that you can get basic desktop publishing functionality.

On the other hand things do not always work as you might expect. You cannot click on a picture and find the delete option under the reformatted File menu, though the delete key still works.

You do get better tools under the Prepare menu for encrypting, access control and seeing how the document will look if viewed in an older version. You can easily add a digital signature to a sensitive document and embed comments.

Given the XML base, you might think that web editing would be possible. But so far Microsoft has no browser-based version of Word so you still have to email those documents for collaboration. Or you could use a free web-based word processor from Google, Zoho, ThinkFree and others. Blogging options include an editing interface that allows you to insert art and charts and post entries without leaving Word.

The document window now has a zoom in/out slider and the spell checker now flags correct spelling but incorrect usage phrases. Translation is supported to give basic foreign-language translations. The final addition of PDF export will be another enticing feature.

So as a Word user should you upgrade? If you are a basic word processor user and are not into making things look really nice, then probably not. As a student, however, there are better options for footnotes and citation under the Reference menu. As a document designer the better pictures and diagram handling is worth a look.

Excel

So where are the Chart tools in the new Excel? You have to click on a chart for them to appear and if you want to add a row it is under Home, not Insert. This kind of thing will drive old Excel users crazy for a while.

In line with the better formatting approach of Office 2007, however, you can now format a whole table area with a selection from the new Table Style Gallery. There are 48 designs but mostly variations on colour. You can also create your own. Ironically these chart styles are not automatically previewed like other font and style options shown with a simple mouse over.

There are some new functions, like the ability to have Excel flag duplicate data in a data set and some powerful Conditioning Formatting options, but most of the changes are on the surface.

Analysis has been upgraded to allow you to pull out, say, the top ten values in a column and apply icons like arrows and smiley faces to pictorially highlight good and poor values or automatically apply different colours. This is something that took a lot of programming in past versions.

Excel has been upgraded to handle very big tables of up to 1 million rows and 16,000 columns. Charting has also been upgraded to allow for more complex charts and formatting options.

So should you upgrade? If you are one of those who has memorised the old Excel formulas and don't worry about the look of your sheets, then probably not. If you are a regular Excel user this is worth a look, particularly if you like those quick visual representations of information for analysis purposes or if you do this kind of thing for your boss.

PowerPoint

The new version now gives you easy access to icons for dropping a table, a picture, a movie, or SmartArt diagram into a slide. The View tab makes it easier to run through the different slide show layouts like Normal and Handout Master. The Animations tab has a drop-down gallery of fades, wipes, and other effects that you can see before making the change to your document. In other words, the new PowerPoint makes things easier for the presentation designer.

Like the other products in Office 2007, the focus is on style. Background styles show you backgrounds that match your current colour selections. There are also new style galleries that can be applied to pages and you can create your own. There is a new applet for creating diagrams and flow charts, and slide libraries now let you create self-updating slides.

PowerPoint integration with Word and Excel is also a lot better. If you try to Insert a chart, for example, you will get a split screen with Excel on one side to allow you to create or modify the chart, with changes in Excel instantly shown in the PowerPoint slide.

Those looking to upgrade will appreciate the new layout options and the better synergy with other Office products, though there are not enough changes to make this a must have for well versed PowerPoint users.

Outlook

The biggest change here is Instant Search. This allows you to quickly locate information from the mass of email, attachments, calendar appointments, addresses and to-do items you have built up. Those who have used the "take a coffee break" Search in older versions will appreciate this.

At last, Outlook can now subscribe to RSS news feeds and your email in-box no longer needs to be you be your to-do list, as you can drag a message directly onto the real To Do list.

Attachment handling is also better with the attached documents now visible in your email body instead of the old "this has an attachment" message.

Overall comments

The focus for Office 2007 is on style, smaller files, and better ease of use. Selecting the correct version will be interesting with eight possible choices. They all include Word, Excel and PowerPoint but each has a different set of extras starting at the bottom with OneNote instead of Outlook and ranging up to inclusions in the Ultimate version like Access, Accounting Express, InfoPath (electronic forms), Groove for collaboration "workspaces" and Publisher. Office 2007 is supposed to work the same whether running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Vista.

Overall the aim is to make your Office experience more pleasant but at the same time there will be a learning curve for current users in finding where that darn option or function has been moved to - and they do not always make sense. Expect productivity to drop until you know your way around the Ribbon. Keep this in mind if you may be planning to upgrade before some important document delivery deadlines.

You do get access to some neat Flash-based tutorials found at http://www. microsoftoffice.com and the smaller files will free up some of that ever dwindling disk drive space and make it easier to send the result as an attachment.

Some people will want to upgrade and others will be quite content with what they already have. As for me, I'll be interested to see if the underlying macro language has been upgraded.

JAMES HEIN

Bangkok Post, 14 Feb 2007