Thread: Microsoft Office 2007

AT THE TOP LEFT-HAND comer of the new Office programs is the brightly-coloured Office button, which has much in common with the previous File menu. This is the place to see the list of recently opened documents and to access New, Save and Print Options. It is also possible to close the current document as well as the Office program itself from here. The Send, Prepare and Publish commands give easy access to emailing documents, finalising and distributing them.


JUST TO THE RIGHT of the Office button is the Quick Access toolbar. By default, this contains only a Save button and Undo/Redo buttons but, as in earlier versions of Office, it is possible to add further commands. There isn't such a need for this as before since all commands are now far more accessible. However, if a command gets a lot of use it can be handy to have it constantly available . Click on the down-pointing arrow by the Redo buttons to add more.


ALONG THE TOP OF Office programs is the Ribbon which is organised as a tab system rather than as menus and tool bars. Click on a tab to see the task groups it offers. That tab stays open until a different one is selected. The Home tab is automatically selected when a program opens and this displays most of the items that previously appeared on the standard and formatting toolbars. The Clipboard, Font and Editing task groups are common to Word, Powerpoint and Excel, though with minor variations.


WORD ALSO HAS PARAGRAPH and Styles task groups on its Home tab. The Paragraph tasks include alignment, indenting and bulleted or numbered lists. The Styles tasks offer a quick way to apply consistent formatting to selected text, such as headings or subtitles. Other tabs are intuitive, so spelling and grammar checks are to be found in the Review section, borders and margins in Page Layout and so on. Tucked away in the View tab is the command button to Switch Windows (to swap between open documents).



IN EXCEL THE TASK groups on the Home tab focus on managing cells, formatting numbers and applying styles. The command buttons in both the Cell and Numbers groups are self-explanatory. All the commands in the Styles group are powerful, with the graphic presentation making it far easier to understand their purpose than previous versions. Use Cell Styles for attractive presentation. Quickly make a table by highlighting cells and selecting Format as Table. Conditional fom1atting will highlight cells depending on what range their contents fall into. The Page Layout tab has more options for designing the spreadsheet.




WORKING WITH SLIDES AND accessing the drawing tools have both become easier with the new-look PowerPoint. Get straight to the shapes on the Drawing task group, apply special effects and arrange and rearrange them to get the best result. Selecting a different layout on a slide now requires only a couple of clicks on the Slides group. Colour schemes and themes are found on the Design tab and go to the Animations tab to add transitions between slides or to animate an element on a slide.


ACROSS THE WHOLE OFFICE suite Tool Tips have improved, being larger, easier to read and more detailed than the earlier versions. To see one, just hover the mouse pointer over a command button. This works even when a command button is greyed-out and so not currently available. Another change to all programs is accessing the Help system. As there are no longer any menus, there is no Help menu. Instead, Help is available from the little blue and white question mark that sits near the top right-hand comer, below the Close button.


A USEFUL INNOVATION IN Office 2007 is that previews happen live. So, with text selected, open the dropdown font list on the Home tab and highlight a new font.
The selected text automaticalLy displays in the new font; move to a different font and the text updates again. Click to choose the new font, or move the mouse pointer away to keep the original. Similarly, when resizing a picture, a ghost picture shrinks or grows with the mouse pointer, making it easy to judge where to place it.


ANOTHER GHOST APPEARS AS text is highlighted. In this instance, the ghost is that of a mini formatting toolbar; move the mouse pointer over it for fast access to basic formatting, regardless of which tab is selected on the Ribbon. The Ribbon can change its appearance or disappear altogether. With a low screen resolution, some items may become hidden under a button. Click to reveal them. To hide the Ribbon altogether, click the down arrow by the Quick Access toolbar and click on Minimize the Ribbon. Click here again to restore it, or click a tab for temporary use.


OFFICE DOCUMETS HAVE new file extensions with the letter x on the end. This marks them out from documents created with the earlier programs. It is essential to know the difference as the 2007 suite has new features, which means it's not possible to read a .docx file in Word 2003 or 97. It is possible to read the old type of files in Office 2007 and equally it is possible to save files in the old format, via the Office button. This may mean that some features are lost, but files will nonetheless be readable in Office 97 or 2003.