I tested some massively complex Word and Excel files from earlier versions, and they opened quickly and without formatting or other hiccups. When you click in different parts of a document such a table or chart, the interface responds instantly with options that you need, and a right-click brings up a menu of the formatting and other options that you almost certainly wanted.
The new slider bar for zooming in and out appears in the lower window border and becomes addictive the first time you use it.
Different versions of Office come with different application sets, ranging from a Basic version limited to Word, Excel, and Outlook, to an Enterprise version with everything. A new addition is the easily managed collaborative workspace software Groove , which lets groups of users create menus of shared documents and messages.
OneNote also gets shared access to the unstructured information formerly available only to single users. FrontPage is history, replaced in high-end Office packages by SharePoint Designer, a site editor for corporate-scale SharePoint collaboration services. We won't miss FrontPage because a sleek, up-to-date standalone Web site editor— Microsoft's Expression Web —is now in late beta.
Thanks to the new interface, features such as fonts and page margins are blissfully easy to manage through galleries of prebuilt settings. Similar galleries give instant access to new features such as spreadsheet cells that automatically display chart-style color bars.
If you're starved for editing space, Ctrl-F1 hides the ribbon entirely. Word also gets a real-time word count—something editors and writers have wanted for years. The ribbon still has some annoying wrinkles, such as the bafflingly illogical placement of macros on Word's View menu.
Unlike the menu-modifying features in Office , the new version doesn't offer any built-in and easy way to modify the XML file that defines the Ribbon, although you can expect third-party and Microsoft tools to arrive soon.
Outlook's new To-Do Bar gives a one-glance list of pending tasks, and Outlook can now send text messages to phones and PDAs via four cooperating mobile services expect more to sign up later.
Outlook also lets you access and modify shared calendars, contacts, and tasks stored on a SharePoint server. Word includes a convenient building-blocks feature for reusing items such as boilerplate text and cover pages, plus a simple interface for posting to blogs.
Excel's charting adds subtle colors, and pivot tables are easier than ever. PowerPoint can include slides stored on a server, and the slides in your presentation can be updated to match the version on the server.
After strolling up the easy learning curve for the new interface, I found Office smoother and clearer than any earlier version, with surprisingly few wrinkles still waiting to be smoothed out—for example, the different ways in which applications support server-based libraries of reusable material, and the lack of customization tools for the interface. Office is Microsoft's finest hour in a very long time. I hope the upgrade from Windows XP to Vista can be as smooth as the upgrade from Office to Next: Individual Office Apps Rated.
Office Pricing See the complete breakdown of Office pricing. Microsoft Word Pros : Galleries of standard layouts combined with the ribbon interface make formatting tasks easier than ever. In Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and most areas of Outlook, the menus and toolbars of previous versions are history.
In their place is the Ribbon, a tabbed, horizontal bar divided into groups of icons and buttons organized by task.
The core formatting features appear on yet another pop-up menu when you select text. If you want to add a little more spice to a document, the Insert Ribbon has groups for creating and inserting tables, images, links and special text one group for boxes, WordArt and drop caps, another for equations and symbols.
Other Ribbons are provided for controlling page layouts, performing reviews, and defining the current view. Word's Home Ribbon has most of the tools you need Click image to see larger view. At the bottom of some groups is a tiny arrow button that, when clicked, opens a familiar dialog box. Most dialog boxes are unchanged from previous versions of Office -- still dull gray, but at least the options are where you expect them to be.
These "standard" Ribbons are supplemented with contextual ribbons that appear when you're working with a particular object -- a table in Word see Figure 2 , an Excel chart, a diagram in PowerPoint -- then disappear when you click away from that object.
Microsoft says the Ribbon doesn't occupy more space than the standard toolbars of previous versions, though it feels larger. The Ribbons can't be customized from within the Office application. Microsoft's Office UI guru, Jensen Harris, says that they're XML-based, and that the company is working with third-party developers who are building ribbon-editing utilities for customizing the interface.
We know of only one that is shipping: RibbonCustomizer Professional. The useful Document Inspector provides old and new ways to clean up hidden metadata in files. But don't expect too many new features.
Word offers some basic tools that you'd otherwise look to in desktop publishing programs such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign. A host of new templates as well as preformatted styles and SmartArt diagrams let you dress up reports, flyers, and so on with images and charts.
However, you can't precisely control the placement of design elements on the page as you can with professional publishing software. And for wordsmiths who just work with plain old text, there's little need to upgrade.
There's a new method of comparing document drafts side by side, but you still can't post a password-protected file to the Web without having Groove or server tools. At the same time, academic researchers should appreciate the Review tab's handy pull-down menus of footnotes, citations, and tables of content. And Word's new blogging abilities might be handy, but even its cleaned-up HTML is far more cluttered than we'd like. We find that the Ribbon layout in Excel improves its usefulness for working with complex spreadsheets.
For instance, scientists and other researchers can access all the formulas in handy pull-down menus. You can make deeper data sorts and work with as many as a million rows. It's easier to find the Conditional Formatting for drawing heat maps or adding icons in order to display data patterns. Plus, along with the other glossier graphics throughout Office, Excel charts get a facelift. You'll probably want to upgrade to PowerPoint if you frequently depend upon professional-looking slide shows to help close a deal.
The new template themes are more attractive and less flat-looking than those of the past, although there's little new in the way of managing multimedia content. Among the four applications in Office Standard, Outlook provides the most practical improvements. To start, it lets you drag tasks and e-mail messages to the calendar, a long-awaited feature that makes scheduling more simple. The new To-Do Bar's task and calendar overview and the ability to flag an e-mail for follow up at a specific time are terrific for time management.
Outlook's built-in RSS reader is useful if you manage lots of news feeds, but we were disappointed that it matches up only with RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7 and not other browsers. We also wish there were a simpler way of organizing e-mail messages than in nested folders and Search Folders.
Tagging messages by subject might be nice, as Gmail allows. The new Instant Search--which lets you troll through e-mail messages, calendar entries, to-do items, and contacts--improves upon Outlook 's clutzy lookups. Plus, Outlook's new protection against junk mail and phishing scams disables suspicious links. But Outlook uses Word 's HTML standards rather than those of Internet Explorer 7 , which could make some of your newsletters look lopsided when compared with their appearance in Outlook When sending e-mail attachments from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Outlook composition window opens with all of its formatting options.
Integration has improved throughout the applications, but it's not fully there yet. For instance, we like that you can tinker with a chart's appearance within Word and PowerPoint while managing the connected data in Excel at the same time.
You can click through a preview of a PowerPoint slide show attached to an Outlook e-mail message. But why can't you get a quick, split-pane view of two applications at once at any other time? We're disappointed at the current lack of integration with Web-based services. We had hoped to see such capabilities added, perhaps in the form of tie-ins to Microsoft's Windows Live or Office Live.
The documents, presentations, and spreadsheets squeeze more data into fewer kilobytes than their predecessors did.
If a file becomes corrupted, you should be able to recover its contents better than in the past because the files store text, images, macros, and other elements separately. Note that when you open older Office files with the applications, you'll work in the Compatibility Mode with fewer features until you convert files to the new format. And as with the release of Office , you can't open a file with the new extension right away when using earlier versions of the programs.
What if you have the new software but need to share work with people who have not upgraded? The applications let you save backward-compatible files, but not by default. Service and support Boxed editions of Microsoft Office include a decent, page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact tech support by toll-free phone number for free between a. Pacific on weekdays, and a. Help at any time with any security-related or virus problems also costs nothing.
It could take up to a business day to receive an e-mail response. Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. That said, we especially like the Command Reference Guides for Word , Excel , and PowerPoint , which walk you through where commands have moved since Office
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