Microsoft Office

Office 2007 - What's New

With the release of  "Office 2007", Microsoft introduced a variety of changes to the user interface and functionality the office suite products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access). Highlights of the major changes are detailed below.  Information is categorized as follows:

All of these items, which apply to all programs within the Office Suite, are discussed in more detail below.  Additional details about changes within each product  (i.e. Word, Excel, etc.) can be found within the product-specific sections of this web site by selecting one from the right of this page.

File Extensions

Microsoft Office 2007 introduces new file formats for the office suite products including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. The new file formats are called Office Open XML Formats and represents a major change to how Office saves files.  An "X" at the end of the file extension marks this new file format.  For example:

While the new file formats work fine when everyone that is sharing a document is using Office 2007, they present a number of issues when documents need to be shared with people that have other versions of Office such as Office 97/XP/2003 or Mac Office.  Office2007 does provide options to save documents in the older formats. There are many important considerations with the choice of the file formats.  Please see the full Office 2007 File Formats Page for important details.

Office Button

The new "Office Button" brings together all the most used functions of previous releases of MS Office by consolidating it into one single location.  This includes such things as: creating a new document - "New", opening a file - "Open", saving a file - "Save", saving a file as something else - "Save As".  As you can see in the below image most of the old standbys are still there.As you can see, this button helps users find these valuable features as well as simplifying the core authoring scenarios by allowing the Ribbon to focus on creating great documents.

The "Ribbon" Interface

This new feature is a common element in the Office 2007 program group (i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access).  With this new feature, the Ribbon uses tabs to group commands and features in logical, task-oriented categories.  In PowerPoint 2007, in addition to the familiar Home, Insert, Review, View, and Add-ins tabs, which are common to other Office programs, you’ll find tabs labeled Design, Animations, and Slideshow that are dedicated to those presentation elements.

Office PowerPoint 2007 has a new, intuitive user interface called the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, which helps you create better presentations much more quickly than you could in earlier versions of PowerPoint. Office PowerPoint 2007 offers new and improved effects, themes (theme: A set of unified design elements that provides a look for your document by using color, fonts, and graphics.), and enhanced formatting options that you can use to create great-looking, dynamic presentations in a fraction of the time that you used to spend. You can:

• Find features and commands in intuitively categorized tabs and related groups.

• Save time and create better presentations when you select easily accessible formatting options from galleries of predefined Quick Styles (Quick Styles: Collections of formatting options that make formatting your documents and objects easier.), layouts, table formats, effects, and more.
• Take advantage of the live preview feature to review your formatting choices before you apply them.

The following illustration shows an example of the Ribbon, a component of the Office Fluent user interface.

1. Tabs are designed to be task-oriented.

2. Groups within each tab break a task into subtasks.

3. Command buttons in each group carry out a command or display a menu of commands.

For additional information about the Ribbon, see office.microsoft.com

Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access Toolbar is a customizable toolbar that contains a set of commands that are independent of the tab that is currently displayed.

You can move the Quick Access Toolbar from one of the two possible locations (beside the Office Button or below the Ribbon), and you can customize the buttons/commands on the toolbar.  Selecting the drop down arrow at the far right of the toolbar will display the "Customize Quick Access Toolbar" options.  To add a command to the toolbar, you can also right click any command in the Ribbon, and select  "Add to Quick Access Toolbar".  For additional help with the Quick Access Toolbar, see office.microsoft.com.

The Mini Toolbar

The Mini Toolbar is a ghost toolbar that appears when you select text. It hovers there in the ether unless you move the mouse pointer over it, when it materializes with several buttons for common text formatting tasks. Move off it or click somewhere else, and it disappears.

Tabs

Contextual Tabs:

Some tabs, called "Contextual Tabs", appear only when certain objects are selected. Contextual Tabs expose functionality specific only to the object with focus. For example, selecting a picture brings up the Pictures tab, which presents options for dealing with the picture. Similarly, focusing on a table exposes table-related options in a specific tab. Contextual tabs remain hidden when the object it works on are not selected.

Command Tabs:

These tabs appear by default whenever you open the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint programs.

Program Tabs:

If you switch to a different authoring mode or view, such as Print Preview, program tabs replace the default command tabs that appear on the Ribbon.

Enhanced Screen Tips

When you move the mouse pointer over items in the Ribbon, you'll see Enhanced ScreenTips. They'll probably come in handy for beginners and those who are just learning Office 2007.  More experienced users may not pay much attention to them, although in some cases, they should. For example, if you forget you're working on a document in "Compatibility Mode", you might otherwise be confounded if you run into limited functionality. The ScreenTip shown here serves as a useful reminder.

Not all ScreenTips are this colorful or verbose. Some offer the feature name and a terse description and possibly a keyboard shortcut.  If you don’t like the ScreenTips, you can suppress them or eliminate the “Enhanced” characteristics. Choose Options from the Office menu and under the Popular settings, choose either Don’t Show Feature Descriptions In ScreenTips or Don’t Show ScreenTips.

Galleries

A gallery is a palette of prefab formatting attributes you can apply to various elements in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. Examples include tables, styles, charts, and PowerPoint themes, shown here.

Live Preview

Along with the gallery feature comes Live Preview, which is aptly named. When you move the mouse over the various selections in a gallery, your document takes on the formatting attributes of the current selection - just as a preview. So you can flit from one choice to another and try on the various sets of formatting without committing to anything until you're ready. In the image below, you can see the various offerings in the gallery of table styles.

Where can I go for more help?

Please contact the Help Desk in Computing Services at helpdesk@clarion.edu or x2640 with any questions.