Microsoft Office Professional 2007
Office desktop productivity suite with editions for all business
sizes.
By Jon Deragon,
Visca Consulting
Thursday, February 22, 2007; :500pm EST
The new 2007 version of Microsoft Office is
heralded by Microsoft as being a large leap forward in usability and
collaborative capabilities. With this
version's interface enhancements and other great new features it may
very well live up to those claims; so lets take a trip through Office 2007 to
find out...
Microsoft Office this time around comes in a multitude of different
packages to suite a variety of needs and budgets; including everything from the Office
Ultimate edition that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business
Contacts Manager, Accounting Express, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, Groove,
OneNote; down to the more simple Office Basic edition that ships with Word,
Excel and Outlook; with a variety of versions in-between. Many would most likely
consider the Office Professional edition the "sweet spot" for price and
features, and any components that are not included can be purchased
individually. Sadly, Expression Web (formerly FrontPage) is no longer available
as part of any Office edition and must now be purchased separately.
Once you figure out how to open the nifty new
"keep-sake" style box and insert the installation DVD, you're almost done
believe it or not. Installation isn't more than a couple clicks to complete -
especially if you are happy with a "typical installation". We are glad that most
Microsoft applications now ask all the questions they need at the beginning of
installation, rather than throughout, saving you from having to stand by waiting
throughout the install process. Once installed you can then individually access
all of the individual office applications as per previous versions.
Office Professional includes Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contacts Manager, Publisher, Access and
Accounting Express, in this review we'll focus on Word, Excel, PowerPoint and
Outlook. One of the key new features found in many of the new Office
applications, but not all, is the new "Ribbon" interface. Essentially it is a
departure from the time tested tradition of using drop down menus, sub menus and
tool bars to interface with application features. The ribbon is a bar along the
top length of the application that replaces all that with an incredibly
intuitive tab / button combination that showcases all the most readily used
features in large easy to understand combinations of icons and text labels.
There is only a very brief learning curve while you reacquaint yourself to where
all the features have been relocated, but the reward for your time is well worth
it. Once you get into the ribbon style mode of working with the application, you
will never want to go back to regular drop downs and toolbars. You almost
instantly become more productive, no joke. Especially with what was once the time
consuming task of formatting and stylizing your documents, PowerPoint slides or
spreadsheets. Everything feels as though it's in such close reach, like it knows
what you want and has it waiting there on the ribbon for you. The centralization
of all the open, close, print type functionality into the Office logo was also a
nice touch. The only disappointment was that not all applications were converted
to this new interface such as Publisher, or were only partly converted such as
Outlook.
Another winning new feature is the real time
nature of all the style related functions. Want to change the look of fonts,
tables, paragraphs, headers, and so on? Simply use the intuitive
ribbon style options to change them in real time! Older applications require a
"trial and error" approach of changing, seeing what happens, changing again
until it's right. The new Office changes them while your mouse hovers over the
style change, giving you instant feedback. Once you've used it for more than a
few times, you find yourself in other applications waiting for things to change
in your document in real time, and then it dawns on you that you aren't using
Office. Truly a sign of its usefulness, and its need to be a part of all future
applications.
Outside of these major new features, each
application individually has had it's share of new features and updates.
Microsoft Word sports a new art rendering engine making it easier to add spiffy
diagrams to your documents; building blocks lets you quickly assemble documents
by tapping into a library of existing document snippets you may have already
created to expedite document creation times; directly export to XPS or PDF
document format; a new open XML format that provides strong security measures
and reduced file size; easy publishing to a blog directly from within Word; and
a document cleaning tool that ensure there is no unwanted comments, hidden text
or other such things. I must say that Word made best use of the new ribbon
feature, making things such as writing proposals infinitely easier to prepare -
with a very real lowered cost of production time. With formatting being so much
easier to apply and use, documents look a lot better, you can make a pro
document, on a budget timeline. One thing we wouldn't make a habit of doing in
Word 2007, is to produce web pages. Its save to web page option results in web
pages with horrifically bloated HTML code - we were hoping this well known issue
would have been resolved in the 2007 release. To illustrate the point... when
saving a page with "Hello, world", it produced 48 lines of HTML in "Web Page
Filtered" mode; and a whopping 445 lines of code in standard "Web Page" mode,
all for a page with 2 words in it.
The export to PDF document format,
on the other hand, was most definitely a welcomed addition being
such the popular format that it is. Removing
the need for the clumsy, bug ridden and generally lethargic Adobe PDF plug-in is
an excellent move. The Office PDF plug-in exports equally well rendered documents;
in a fraction of the time; and you aren't having to sit through a shuffle of
flashing documents and rendering windows... just a simple status bar at the
bottom of the page, well done Microsoft.
Excel has also gone through some much needed
improvement in the style department; all of the great styling functionality in
Word has been applied to Excel giving the ability to finally produce attractive
looking spreadsheets if there is such a thing. Only minor styling could
realistically be applied to spreadsheets in previous versions; but with 2007
you're creating great looking spreadsheets in minutes. Other new features
include large spreadsheet sizes up to a whopping million rows and 16,000
columns; multi-core processing support; all new chart rendering engine for more
polished reports; a new PivotTables view; have more control of your spreadsheets
and versioning, with the ability to distribute it with SharePoint 3 and improved
file damage recovery and reduced file size in new XML format.
With the new PowerPoint, again it takes full
advantage of the new ribbon interface and real time style applying. It's the
perfect type of application for such an interface, slicing slide design times
down to a much more desirable time. The new SmartArt engine has also been
employed into PowerPoint making the addition of customizable diagrams a snap.
The new Slide Library service lets you store individual slides for use in later
presentations to cut down on unnecessary redevelopment time. Other features
include PDF and XPS file format exporting; document themes let you make style
changes throughout your document easily and new security measures to ensure
presentations are unalterable once distributed.
Outlook, while at first would appear to be very
familiar to anyone who has used Outlook 2003 day in and day out for the past few
years, does have some nice touch ups done throughout. A better integrated search
engine makes finding old mail and calendar events easier than ever before. A new
panel on the right displays upcoming events, and other pertinent information.
The new Outlook gives you a better ability to mark and color code events, tasks
and emails for easier future referral. The email composing window uses the
ribbon feature improving email composition times and making it easier to design
richly formatted emails; the addition of the Business Contacts Manager is a nice
lite CRM add-on to Outlook that enables a nice assortment of customer relations
functionality without having to invest in a major CRM system.
Overall, there were a hand full of truly
impressive updates to the application suite on the whole, and a number of nifty
tweaks, features and improvements that really help the overall productivity a
typical user will experience. Once you have used Office 2007 for a while, it
really does have a sense of living up to Microsoft's claim of improved usability
and collaboration. The applications run smoothly, with no apparent shortcomings,
bugs or inconsistencies between applications. Would a user of Office 2003
benefit from an upgrade to 2007? While the answer would be yes in terms of
productivity gains, the overall cost to deploy the upgrade to a business would
certainly need to be determined on a case by case basis. Any companies still
relying on an Office version prior to 2003 would be highly recommended to
upgrade, while 2003 users would really need to review the features and make a
determination based on what would be useful for their particular needs.
So what are the system requirements for all of
this new found productivity? A minimum 500MHz processor, 256MB memory, 2GB hard
drive space, 1024x768 screen resolution, Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
Depending on the actual functionality you will be using, the requirements may be
more. I believe reality would dictate a significantly higher specification, with
a more modern processor, memory and hard drive configuration to actually take
advantage of the productivity gains. While our test machine (a Windows Vista
based Pentium 4 with 3.6GHz processor, 3GB memory and SATA 160GB hard drive) ran
the applications fluently, the performance was slightly less enthusiastic with
1GB. Overall, most machines purchased within the last year or two should be
sufficient for typical Office 2007 usage. Microsoft Office Professional, and
other editions are available now from all major electronics online and
traditional retailers. Current retail pricing for the Professional edition is
$499.00 USD, with some retailers providing great purchase incentives such as
free software, memory sticks and other such things depending on the retailer.
PROS - Excellent new usability features that actually improve
productivity such as excellent ribbon interface; better real time style
selection system makes producing professional looking documents and
presentations a snap; great PDF exporting implementation for quick PDF saving; a
generally cleaned up, uniform set of applications that work seamlessly with one
another.
CONS - Bloated HTML of Word produced web pages; dropped inclusion of HTML editing tool (Expression Web
or SharePoint Designer) from packaged applications.
About The Author
Jon Deragon is president and founder of Visca Consulting, a firm
specializing in
web site design, development and usability for
businesses of all sizes. His many years in the technology industry has
enabled him to write quality, in-depth product reviews to assist
businesses make more informed technology purchases. He welcomes any
questions or comments you may have regarding his company's services,
this review or interest in having your company's products reviewed.
info@viscaconsulting.com
http://www.viscaconsulting.com/
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