October 11, 2006 (Computerworld) Editor's Note: This story, originally published on Oct. 11, 2006 and based on Microsoft's Technical Refresh of Office 2007 Beta 2, was reviewed and updated on Jan. 25, 2007 to ensure that it is consistent with the shipping version of Office 2007.
Simplify, simplify, simplify. The challenge for Microsoft in revamping Office was to better organize all the options available without negatively impacting productivity. For new users, that's a particularly important goal, since the menus and toolbars in current versions may appear to be a mishmash.
The overriding design goal for the new user interface, Microsoft says, is to make it easier for users "to find and use the full range of features these applications provide" while preserving "an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so they can spend more time and energy focused on their work." The redesign makes most Office 2007 applications look completely fresh, clean, new -- and more colorful. From Ribbons that offer clearly labeled buttons to thumbnail previews of most graphic features, the applications bear only a slight resemblance to their former selves.
We've put Office 2007 through its paces, exploring new features, both Office-wide and in specific apps, and taking a particularly close look at the new SharePoint Server 2007.
A new look, starring the Ribbon
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 Home Ribbon in Word (see Figure 1) contains groups related to the Clipboard (cut, copy, paste and, for some odd reason, the Format Painter), Fonts (font style and size, plus formatting characteristics such as bold, italic and subscript), Paragraph (for bullets, indenting text, sorting paragraphs, alignment, line spacing and shading), Styles (displayed as a thumbnail gallery), plus Editing (find, replace and text/object selection).
The Home Ribbon covers about 90% of everything you'll need for simple text editing -- the remaining features are dispersed throughout the interface: spell check is on the Review tab, while headers and footers have been moved to the Insert tab (from the View menu in earlier versions). 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.
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Word's Home Ribbon has most of the tools you need (Click image to see larger view)
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Excel's Ribbons are similar: Home (for worksheet editing, formatting and sorting tasks), Insert (to add charts and graphs, hyperlinks and headers/footers), Page Layout (for controlling cell size, grid lines and backgrounds), Formulas (including a new Name Manager for handling named ranges), Data (for import/export, removing duplicates and grouping data), Review (for comments and data protection), and View (freezing panes, adding page breaks and more). 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. Fortunately, Ribbons can be hidden (Ctrl + F1 is the secret toggle), giving you more document workspace.
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.
Instead, Jensen suggests, users who want a customized look can add icons to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), a button strip that can be docked above or below the Ribbon. (It's above the Ribbon in Figure 1.) Right-clicking on the QAT, or from several other dialog boxes, lets you add buttons, such as the spell check, that are missing from the Home Ribbon. Keyboard shortcut enthusiasts can press the Alt key to see small boxes that represent the available shortcuts for the current Ribbon plus all buttons on the QAT.
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Press Alt to see the shortcut keys for editing commands
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We found that the new interface made some tasks in Office 2007 harder to complete than in previous versions. With no menu, and depending on what you're doing, it can take a greater number of mouse clicks or keyboard tapping to perform simple tasks, such as switching between two open Excel workbooks -- another reason you may soon find yourself with a crowded QAT.
Galleries provide visual shortcuts to many formatting tasks in Office 2007 applications, from applying styles in Word and choosing chart styles in Excel to applying a fresh design to a SmartArt illustration (more on SmartArt below) in PowerPoint. Select a range of text in Word, for example, and you can quickly apply a style by picking it from the Style Gallery. Hover over the gallery and your selection will change so you can preview its effect; move away without clicking and your selection is unchanged.
You aren't restricted to gallery defaults; you can easily add an element to the gallery, and Office will create a preview image. For example, we created red text in a 16-point font for a heading, and we were able to quickly add it to the Style Gallery; Word displayed text in that style as a button in the gallery (see Figure 3).
Of all the features in Office 2007, graphics have received the greatest (and most interesting) improvement. Apps within the suite now feature a classier, more professional look, with new 3D effects, shadows and glows, as well as more surface textures, good-looking color schemes and new ways to add emphasis.
There are more ways to see how your work will look. A new Live Preview feature helps you preview choices -- for instance, in Word you can hover over a font name and Word will change your selection to that font. Click the font, and the change is made; move your mouse away, and Word returns to the original formatting.
In Excel, you can change the look of a graph the same way. In fact, charts are dramatically better looking in Office 2007, and PowerPoint users now get the full benefit of Excel's new formatting power when incorporating charts -- say goodbye to the adequate but dull MSGraph charts of old.
What's missing, what's better
Some features have been radically changed since Office 2003 -- or have disappeared completely. The ability to add a favorite folder to the My Places bar is no longer found in the File Save and File Open dialog boxes. Instead, you navigate to the folder, right-click on a blank spot in the My Places bar and choose Add from the pop-up menu. Other My Places features remain unchanged: For example, you can't remove the default shortcuts such as My Documents without editing the registry.
Task Panes, which offered an attractive list of the last files used (an alternative to the file list in the File menu) in Office 2003, is no more (though it does appear in some functions, such as mail merge). The Work menu of previous versions, which allows you to keep a list of your favorite files, is also gone; however, the File list (displayed by clicking on the brightly colored Office Button in the upper-left corner above the Ribbon) lets you "pin" a file to the list so it's always available (see Figure 4). That's a nice design improvement to a feature that few users knew about, let alone used. Whether most users will intuit that clicking on the pushpin icon keeps the file in the list is unclear.
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"Pinned" files always appear in the Files list (Click image to see larger view)
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On the plus side, new options let you set the Paste command's default behavior; now you can select which format to use when you paste text within the same document, from a different document, from a different document when there's a style conflict, and from another program. You can keep the original's format, use the destination's format or just paste plain text.
Figure 5); you can quickly adjust the number of elements in a diagram, and Office adjusts the font and graphic sizes and positions automatically. The results are professional and visually pleasing. Also new: a gallery of styles for headers and footers (see Figure 6), which takes some of the fuss out of creating those elements. Inserting shapes is also easier, thanks to the Shapes gallery (see Figure 7).
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Pick a shape, any shape (Click image to see larger view)
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While the Help system has been entirely redesigned, much Help information is now handled by pointing you to Office-wide topics, so there's more text to wade through to get your answer. The File Save command, for example, lists commands for eight applications (including Visio), not just the application you're currently using. To find equivalent keyboard commands from Office 2003, enter "Office 2003 shortcuts" into the Help system to get a link to a program that lets you use a mockup of the current application's menu system to show you the equivalent commands (when they're available).
Files and formats
The core application formats have undergone a significant change -- they now store parts of a document as separate files in a single, compressed, Zip-compatible format. This should make files easier to restore should they become corrupted (since you might be able to restore the text but not macros); in earlier versions of Office, a corrupt file meant no data was retrievable. In Word, the format is named .DOCx. In Excel it's .XLSx and in PowerPoint it's .PPTx.
Complicating matters is the fact that some applications actually have a pair of new formats. For instance, a Word document containing a macro will be named .DOCM, and in Excel, a macro-using file is saved with an .XLSM extension. One advantage of the new format: Files are smaller, saving both hard disk space and network bandwidth requirements.
When a file saved in the new file format is opened in Office 2003, Office pops up a warning message and, if needed, asks if you want to download a conversion program (a step that's needed only once). If you answer yes, you'll be linked to a Microsoft page where you can download a 26.6MB "Compatibility Pack." Download and installation took us more than 20 minutes, even with a broadband connection.
If you're an early adopter of Office 2007, asking your partners or clients to jump through such hoops is probably asking too much. Fortunately, you can tell Office 2007 applications to default to saving in the Office 2003 file format, a step we recommend until users of earlier Office versions are more likely to have updated their systems with the Compatibility Pack.
Speaking of making files smaller, now built in is the ability to remove sensitive and space-using data from a document before you save it, a feature previously available as an add-in for Word. This new "Prepare" feature lets you strip sensitive information (your name from the author field, tracked changes and the like) from your files.
If you want to protect your documents from changes, you can convert them to XML Paper Specification (XPS), Microsoft's answer to Adobe's PDF format. PDF output was part of the original Office 2007 betas; that was yanked (a Microsoft/Adobe spat is alleged), though the functionality is still available -- you simply need to download and install an add-in from Microsoft's site.
A few words on Word
Word has some small but annoying changes for experienced users -- for example, the Normal.dot template defaults to 10-point spacing following a paragraph. On the other hand, there's a new default font (Calibri) that we like, though it often appeared too light when viewed in previous versions of Office.
The status bar in Word 2007 sports buttons for the different views (Print, Web, Reading, Outline and Draft), plus a slider to change the zoom level. You also have more control over the status bar -- check some boxes and you can display the word count (updated constantly), caps lock status, and more. Thanks to some refinements in the interface, watermarks, citations and cover pages are easier to work with, and a new dialog box makes more sense when comparing documents (see Figure 8).
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A more useful Compare Documents dialog box (Click image to see larger view)
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Some productivity options are implemented with no apparent thought at all. For example, the Insert Table command offers a variety of Quick Tables. That sounds promising, but selecting the Calendar2 option inserts a calendar for May (no year specified) rather than the current month's calendar (you can't even choose the month and year you want). This is certainly quick -- and completely useless.
Quick Parts is the new name for inserting fields (current date, for example) or document properties (such as author name); hover over the field and a box appears to indicate the field name displayed (see below). You can also copy text or graphics from a document and create your own Quick Part, which you can preview in the Building Blocks Organizer (see Figure 9).
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Hovering over a field shows you the name of its property
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Excel: The eyes have it
Some of Excel's useful but underused features have been brought to the fore in Office 2007, including saving a workspace (a collection of open workbooks), freezing panes and tracking changes. You can quickly remove duplicate rows thanks to a new interface.
Likewise, PivotTables, powerful but complex analysis tools, are easier to create and manipulate thanks to a Task Pane that lets you check boxes rather than use the awkward drag-and-drop technique of previous versions. The interface makes it easier to apply filters and select multiple conditions at once. New styles make PivotTables more attractive.
In addition to the graphic artistry of SmartArt, Excel's charts are much better looking -- shadows and glow effects add great dimension (see Figure 10) -- and are easier to control.
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Shadow effects on a pie chart (Click image to see larger view)
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Charts aren't the only way to understand data quickly, however. Excel offers new ways to compare data or spot anomalies. For example, you can set the background of a cell to show a bar with a length proportional to the data value contained within it.
The feature uses gradient fills with moderate success; we found it useful for comparing values but not for evaluating values (a bar twice as long as another is only a rough approximation of the values it represents). A further caveat: In some worksheets we created, a bar representing a value of 200 didn't always look twice as long as a bar representing the value 100 (see cells D2 and D3 in Figure 11).
If you like, you can instead use full-color backgrounds to indicate values (see Figure 12), or assign icons (up or down arrows, for example) based on the values within cells.
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Indicate cell values with color (Click image to see larger view)
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A different approach to visualization is to use a color scale (from green to yellow to red, for example -- you can choose a default color scheme or specify your own beginning and ending colors). This is easy to apply but initially proved more puzzling to change. (The secret is to use the Manage Rules option from the Conditional Formatting button in the Home Ribbon, then select "Format all cells based on their values" -- see Figure 13.) Also new: icon sets (think of inserting a traffic signal's red, yellow or green light into a cell) based on cell values.
Table formatting takes advantage of a gallery of styles (shown in Figure 14), and a new set of cell styles lets you highlight individual cells or ranges with some attractive, predefined settings (similar to styles in Word).
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Pick a table style and go (Click image to see larger view)
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Speaking of formatting, as with Word, PowerPoint and Access, if you're connected to the Internet, you can easily choose from a variety of templates from the Microsoft Office Gallery. Use one and it is added to the File/New dialog box's "Recently Used" section (complete with thumbnail image).
As with Word, the organization of some Excel 2007 features is puzzling. Locking cells is under the Format command of the Home Ribbon, not in a separate security group. Many formatting buttons actually sit in the Number group on that Ribbon (for changing the number of decimal points, for example) -- options that were found using the Format/Cells menu command in Excel 2003. To insert a symbol, you'll find the Symbol button in the Text group of the Insert Ribbon in Excel but in the Symbols group in Word (which has a small gallery of frequently used symbols).
One thing's for sure: There are fewer constraints in Excel. You can now have 16,385 columns (up from 256 in previous versions) and 1,048,576 rows (up from 65,536). Other limitations have also been eased: A workbook can have 1,024 spreadsheets, there are 64 levels of sorting (including the ability to sort by color) and AutoFilter drop-downs can show 10,000 conditions (up from three). Functions can now have 255 arguments, and the maximum length of formulas has been raised to 8,000 characters (up from an already generous 1,000) with support for up to 64 levels of nesting (up from seven); in addition, the formula bar now expands to handle long formulas. Functions can now have 255 arguments (up from 30). For other new limits, see MSDN's Excel 2007 blog.
Excel has a neat trick up its sleeve when it comes to tables. Right-click in a table and choose Create Table; Excel will automatically create column headings and AutoFilters. Those headers stay in view (the column headings replace the standard column letters) as you scroll down the page -- without any work on your part.
PowerPoint improvements
Just as galleries help you apply Styles in Word and chart templates do so in Excel, the new PowerPoint 2007 Theme Gallery gives your presentations a more sophisticated and graphically appealing design, and the one-click feature lets you apply a consistent look and feel across the entire slide set. It's more than just changing such simple things as fonts and colors -- in addition to changing background colors, it will change the color scheme for diagrams, tables and charts.
As in Word, you can convert a bulleted list into a rich SmartArt graphic (perfect for flowcharts and workflow illustrations).
Useful new features in Outlook
In terms of new and useful features that help you get your work done, Outlook 2007 leads the pack. Some improvements focus on making components work together -- previous versions let you flag a message for follow-up, but in Outlook 2007 you can right-click on the flag icon to add the message to your task list.
Calendars are an important part of Outlook; the 2007 version lets you display multiple calendars side by side (see Figure 15) or with appointments superimposed (color coding tells you the source -- see Figure 16). Below the calendar display is a brand-new task view with your appointments and tasks listed. To schedule time for the task, just drag it into the calendar.
Also new in this version is a To-Do bar that integrates a calendar, a look at a few of your upcoming appointments and a task list -- all contained in a single, optional pane (shown in Figure 17).
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Your To-Do list in a single pane (Click image to see larger view)
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In terms of messages, Outlook finally adds the ability to view RSS feeds as just another message type (see Figure 18), though we'd like to see a smarter way to add such feeds when you view a Web site that hosts them. As with e-mail messages, you can apply rules to RSS feeds, moving an RSS feed item to another folder based on a keyword, for example.
Not much new in Access
Access has mostly undergone a facelift (see Figure 19). The program continues to provide a strong set of tools for building database applications, but while its new interface and set of prebuilt database templates is a welcome addition, there's little under the hood that makes it a more powerful product.
As in previous versions, you can work with many data sources, including Microsoft SQL Server, and now you can integrate an Access database with SharePoint (you can save it to a Document Management server to provide greater access and control, a feature we did not test), but that's about it.
Introducing SharePoint
In early 2006, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called SharePoint Server 2007 "the most revolutionary element" of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 suite. It's a separate product, not technically part of the actual Office suite of applications, but it is revolutionary.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) allows groups to easily create and update sites for collaboration and communication. It offers well-designed screens that help you customize the content, and you can quickly interact with these sites -- adding new files, updating reports and so on -- from several spots within Office applications.
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A SharePoint site (Click image to see larger view)
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Central to SharePoint is the ability to select components -- a calendar, a document library, a list of headlines from an RSS feed -- and organize their display into a "site" (see Figure 20). The components, called Web Parts, are organized in one of three areas on a site, with a choice of layout variations available (see Figure 21). There are several predefined Web Parts, including forms, images, task lists, announcements, discussion forums, and more. You can have more than one Web Part type -- a production team and a testing team calendar, for example -- on your site. Your SharePoint site can have multiple pages, and you can organize subsites in a hierarchy, much like folders on your hard drive.
If you don't want a site with multiple Web Parts, you can create what SharePoint calls a Document Workspace -- a simple layout that lets you share documents about anything you choose (see Figure 22). We built a Document Workspace to serve as a central repository for next year's marketing plans -- Word narratives that explain assumptions and high-level plans, Excel forecasts, and the like. Defining the Document Workspace took a couple of mouse clicks, and in just a few seconds we had a separate SharePoint site devoted to the project. In addition to creating a shared-document list, the default Document Workspace we chose included team announcements and a task list. As with any other SharePoint site you create, you can incorporate any additional Web Parts you need.
Sharing with Office applications
The power of SharePoint comes not only from its simplicity in setup but its interaction with Office applications. For example, Excel 2007 offers the ability to render a spreadsheet in HTML and then permits others to view only the parts of a spreadsheet you want them to see via their Web browser. That's a useful feature, but pair Excel with SharePoint and you can create a worksheet that is shared on a SharePoint site (using the Excel Web Access Web Part) and which can be viewed or edited (your choice) by visitors. An example is shown in the right column of Figure 20.
There are interrelationships galore. Information stored in a SharePoint site can be taken off-line using Outlook folders. You can share OneNote notebooks via a SharePoint site, and OneNote's optical character recognition search is then shared with SharePoint (the feature lets you search for text within an image, among other capabilities).
We created our first site in about 10 minutes, added a few Web parts in another five minutes, then rearranged the Web Parts we had added just as easily. By checking a few options, you can add a team calendar (shown in Figure 23); with a few more mouse clicks, visitors can add it to their list of available calendars in Outlook 2007 and then view team and personal appointments in Outlook's new multicalendar view.
Changes made to the team calendar from the SharePoint site are automatically updated in Outlook 2007; changes made to the team calendar in Outlook get synched back with SharePoint.
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Share an Outlook calendar with SharePoint
(Click image to see larger view) |
Once it was set up, we added a new document library for sharing PowerPoint slides. These slide libraries provide a two-way connection between shared content and your application. You can build a PowerPoint presentation and select which slides to add to the library or create a presentation and easily incorporate slides from these libraries (see Figure 24) into your current slide set. If you wish, you can ask SharePoint to notify you when a shared slide changes (when a logo or company motto changes, for example), and you'll be prompted to update your slides the next time you open the presentation.
Any member of the team can be permitted to contribute files to these libraries. These shared libraries, which can store any document type, have an additional benefit: They come with automated check-in/checkout and versioning functionality. SharePoint also enables permissions-based control so you can manage who can access, view and make changes to documents stored on the server. All Office applications add a new "Publish" feature that provides links to the available SharePoint sites.
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Use slides from a SharePoint library in your PowerPoint presentation (Click image to see larger view)
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Users can take advantage of SharePoint's power and simplicity by creating their own "My Site." Not only do they get the same tools as a SharePoint administrator, but they can build and manage their own sites with the same tools. The "Publish" option from within the Office suite puts saving a file to your own My Site document library just a couple of mouse clicks away.
Managing workflow
Another SharePoint feature lets you attach a document to a workflow, so it will be routed from worker to worker following the rules you define. This makes it possible to route a PowerPoint presentation or Excel worksheet through an approval process so each team member can be part of a formal approval process and must sign off on a document. The Workflow Designer lets you specify each step, the conditions to look for, and the actions to take (send an e-mail, update a list item, and so on).
A checked-out document (denoted by a small icon with an arrow) cannot be changed until it is checked in, of course, but just using SharePoint shared libraries (be it a full site or a simple Document Workspace) may solve one common IT problem: controlling the proliferation of a single file running amok -- multiplying as duplicate files on every team member's desk and making it impossible to track who has the latest copy. From within Office applications a new "Publish to Office SharePoint Server 2007" option lets you post a single copy of a document to a central location so team members are always working with the most up-to-date document. (Additions or changes to the library can also trigger e-mail notification, either immediately or in daily or weekly summaries.)
If you can't remember where you have a document, the new Search Center lets you find whatever you need anywhere on the SharePoint site, including looking into the content of shared documents. It can highlight the term you are looking for within the results, collapse duplicate results and offer "Did you mean...?" alternative spellings. You can set an alert so that any new or changed content matching your query triggers an e-mail message.
Don't confuse SharePoint with a wiki. While both are designed to share documents and (to some extent) manage workflows, and both can be viewed in a browser, SharePoint has tight integration with Office applications, can notify you when content changes, can integrate multiple calendars (and sync them with Outlook) and allows that content to be almost seamlessly incorporated into your own documents.
Other components of Office we did not test include Groove 2007, which lets you review documents collaboratively in real time, InfoPath as a collection tool for an Access database, the ability to update Microsoft Project files through SharePoint and Excel's Data Connection Library (to connect spreadsheets to corporate data sources). We also did not test the ability of SharePoint to administer and deploy business forms using Office InfoPath 2007 templates as browser-based forms that don't need any additional software running on the user's machine.
Who should take the plunge?
Exact release dates have not been announced for Office 2007. We do know that businesses should be able to purchase Office suites before year's end, while consumers will have to wait until 2007. But should you update to Office 2007? That depends on the investment you're willing to make (see Microsoft's Office 2007 pricing information; SharePoint pricing is not yet available) and the benefits you expect to receive.
For users new to Office, who may stumble on menus and a conglomeration of options spread across many dialog boxes in the 2003 version, the attractive user interface will probably make learning the applications easier. Advanced users who are accustomed to customizing their interface -- including this writer -- will learn to adjust, albeit perhaps grumbling loudly along the way.
If you use Office for everyday correspondence and not for creating documents with fancy formats, or to analyze data or create budgets and update lists in Excel, Office 2007 offers little in the way of new features for the stand-alone user. PowerPoint profits most from the new graphics capabilities, and Excel charts and graphs will definitely look more polished. Galleries and Live Preview make it easy to get more visually exciting documents, but that's insufficient justification for the hassle and expense of upgrading.
If you're an IT manager, keep in mind that if you move to Office 2007, your training materials will become obsolete (or unreliable at the very least). Likewise, the many tips found on Web sites and in books and manuals will be out of date. That could make for a serious setback in terms of training and productivity, at least in the short term.
If collaboration and file sharing are on your mind, SharePoint Server and its integration with Office 2007 are impressive. That's the reason to upgrade. SharePoint installation is strictly for experienced IT pros; this is not a program a small or midsize business should install on its own. Once installed, however, the ability to create dynamic sites -- and for users to benefit from these tools and create their own My Site pages -- is extraordinary. Users can be trained to work with shared libraries, calendars, and other content in very little time. That's where the payback lies.
For more up-close views of Office 2007, see our accompanying Visual Tour.
Richard Ericson is the reviews editor for The Office Letter, a weekly newsletter devoted to Microsoft Office tips and tricks.
