Get ready for Office 2007

By: Mike Fletcher

Get ready for Office 2007, the most sweeping update to
Microsoft's popular suite of productivity applications.

An extensive re-education awaits those who will upgrade to the
new Office 2007. It's truly a redesign. The menu bar and
navigation buttons for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, for example,
look completely different.

But before buying, I'd suggest you visit
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx and click
through all the explanations Microsoft has posted that
demonstrate many of the new features and controls.

There's something else that's very different: Microsoft uses a
different format to save files with Office 2007 that, without a
special viewer that will have to be downloaded, makes them
unreadable with earlier versions. When saving a document with
Office 2007, you have the option of saving as a previous version
-- which makes them compatible with earlier versions -- but I'm
betting this change alone is going to cause massive amounts of
confusion among the early adapters.

That said, the beta of Office 2007 that I've been testing for
the past couple of weeks is faster, more powerful and lots more
intuitive and interconnected to other programs and files. Once
you figure it out.

There are lots of subtle new features, too, like built-in
blogging functionality and something called the ribbon that
replaces the traditional toolbar and gives greater control over
each program's various functions.

Office 2007 is the biggest change Microsoft has ever made to the
interconnected suite of software tools so many of us depend upon.

So big, it's going to take a learning curve to master.

Buying Office 2007 also promises to be confusing. There will be
no fewer than eight versions to choose from, all aimed at
different markets ranging from home and student users, to small
businesses, midsized companies and corporate conglomerates.
Depending on what software you have bundled into Office, the
prices will range from $147 to $679.

About the author:
The author is publisher of Notebook Scoop
(http://notebookscoop.com) and PC Scoop (www.pcscoop.com, sites
devoted to notebook and desktop computers.