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Microsoft Office 2007: versions and functionalities overview

Author: Date: 10.04.2007

Microsoft Office 2007 in business

Microsoft is positioning Office 2007 as a suite of desktop and server software that helps essentially improve individual work productivity, simplify the processes and corporate content management, as well as improve the quality of business analysis within an organization.

Creation of professional documents is done using a kit graphic controls in SmartArt Graphics. The Document Inspector feature in Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 is able finding and deleting unwanted comments, personal data, hidden text and other data from a document.

In Office Outlook 2007 you can effectively set priorities based on time and tasks. The new panel of scheduled tasks gives a general idea of daily priorities, including email messages flagged for execution monitoring, scheduled appointments, tasks related to Office OneNote 2007, Office Project 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services. Data can be found with the instant search feature based on keywords throughout all the Outlook 2007 including attachments. You can also define search criteria, e.g. data, source, color categories, importance of an email message and others. The optical character recognition in Office OneNote 2007 allows finding handwritten notes, inscriptions on images or words pronounced in audio and video recordings.

Immediate contact with an employee of the organization who has the required knowledge and skills is possible through search in the knowledge network Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Using it, you can acquire information on the position of a specific employee in the organization, which allows building a more effective communication over the network. In the web sections of the network, to communicate on social matters there is information on organizations, user communities, and email addresses to provide more relevant search results through the "My host" area in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Office Groove 2007 helps improve the agility and effectiveness of work inside a consolidated work environment. Office Groove 2007 consolidates team members, tools, files and information in one place. Deployed together, Office Groove 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a common cooperation environment that helps groups and organizations work together and share data.

Project management starting with the launch to a completion is most effective when run in Office Project Server 2007. It provides a more transparent work execution schedule, tools to improve the decision-making quality and help arrange an absentee management system, which allows administrators and managers for easier planning, monitoring and estimating the project cost efficiency.

Storage on a server and concurrent use of Office Excel 2007 spreadsheets via Internet with HTML provides their strict control due to use of document management tools and audit.

Provides simplicity of acquisition, archiving and reuse of common knowledge with the use of Wikis and network logs which now offer improved support in Windows SharePoint Services. The new Office 2007 allows for using Office Word 2007 to create messages in network logs with images, complex formatting, and spellchecking. Besides, you can quickly publish messages in many shared network logs services.

Document flow automation with the option of checking and approving documents is possible with Office SharePoint Server 2007, which includes external templates for better understanding as to which content a certain document relates to.

Process optimization on the base of forms is provided due to new server forms called InfoPath Forms Services which allow for creation of multifunctional dynamic forms for groups and organizations to collect and reuse data, as well as exchange and manage data.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has introduced an additional control over the corporate data storage, archiving and audit policies, which allows adhering modern requirements on data storage and their compliance to regulations. Office SharePoint Server 2007 simplifies creation of intelligent toolbars for corporate management which contain the main key performance indicators (KPI) from Office Excel 2007 books and reports generated by Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Determination, selection and management of the most important projects is possible with Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007.

The slides libraries in Office PowerPoint 2007 simplify storage and sharing slides in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also update slides and synchronize them with respective Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations.

Besides the documents you can find any needed information using new search tools in Office SharePoint Server 2007, which will let index and acquire data related to colleagues and partners, as well as data from business applications and reports on SharePoint web sites.

Moving to the description of some basic parameters in Microsoft Office 2007 which are common to all the releases, I'd like to stress it that additional details may come up in each specific versions.

Structural innovations in Microsoft Office 2007

Starting with the creation of the wittingly more complex Office 2007 suite, Microsoft developers pursued the objective to provide new features for more convenient and fast acquisition of required results. Therefore, the major four objectives for the development were formulated: simplify search and use of features, reduce the congested inconsistent look and feel of the interface, simplify detection of features needed to the user and help in creating well-formed documents.

In the end, Microsoft Office 2007 acquired redeveloped menus and toolbars, plus a number of new features convenient for faster task execution.

Based on my not so vast experience with Office 2007, I can say that the new menu and toolbars albeit have turned brighter and more intuitive, handling them conveniently is possible only with a mouse, and keyboard "jumps" via Alt, without hotkeys, have turned at least more complicated. So, what made Microsoft undertake such a serious move reworking the customary interface?

First of all, that is attributed to the addition of many new features into applications, which made it more difficult for users to find the program functions. For example, Microsoft Word 1.0 contained merely 100 commands and you could access all of them via the menu. Whereas Office Word 2007 contains over 1500 commands. The issue of quickly finding commands is merely one of the problems solved with the new user interface.

The new menus and toolbars included into the Microsoft Office UI have been implemented in programs like Office Access 2007, Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, and Office Word 2007, they all offer a new look and feel. The interface of Office Outlook 2007 has also been partly reworked. The look and feel of these applications has been made more rational, new technologies have been introduced which allow for selection of potential results to preview, collect and select with a mouse click rather than using complex dialog windows.

It is interesting to note that the user interface is extensible, with the feature-set accessible to third-party developers. Developers can add more tabs, contextual inserts and galleries, as well as integrate their commands into existing tabs.

Microsoft Office Open XML Format

The emergence of new file formats in Office 2007 may seem to be resulting in increased complexity and more misunderstanding. But that is a forced measure taken in connection with the migration of Microsoft Office to the open XML file standard that provides a more prompt creation and assembly of documents, accelerated data exchange. At the same time, the new formats provide a simplified path of exchanging data among Office 2007 applications and corporate business applications.

The new suite of XML office formats is based on the open industrial XML standard and the ZIP archiving technology freely available.

Among the pluses of new XML formats are compact sizes of the resultant file – due to automatic compression, the document may be by up to 75% smaller than the original. Besides, due to the modular scheme of data storage data recovery in case of a failure is facilitated. Documents turn less vulnerable and more secure because the embedded code of OLE objects like those of Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is stored in a separate section. The specifics of the file format allows providing a simpler and more direct access to the integrated data, e.g. tables, graphs, and document metadata. At the same time, if necessary a document can be distributed confidentially. Another plus is that after installation of an additional update there appears an inverse compatibility among the applications of Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003.

The basic structure of all the XML formats in Office 2007 is based on the five key elements – the starting part (highest in the hierarchy), the XML part (files and folders in the XML content), the non-XML part (e.g., images or OLE objects), the linking part (which defines the interaction and hierarchy of other parts), as well as the ZIP archive that consolidates all the elements in a single file.

For example, if you come across an XML-file having the *.docx extension, that is, created in Office Word 2007, you can easily view its contents with a regular archiver.

Despite the unusual 4-character code, the file extensions in Microsoft Office 2007 are based on the names of previous-generation applications, with some variations with macros or without. New file formats have been introduced in Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, and Microsoft Office Word 2007. For details of the new file types in Microsoft Office 2007, look into the below table.

In practice, it turns out that new formats that emerged in Office Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 can be opened in older applications like Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint of versions 2000, XP or 2003, but to do that you would need to install Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. At the same time, files of the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 formats, provided there is Windows operating system installed and starting with Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, can be saved in new Word 2007, Excel 2007, or PowerPoint 2007 formats.

The last thing for today is the operating system requirements to install and work Office 2007. Some erroneously think that Windows Vista is a must. In fact, Microsoft Office 2007 installs and runs fine at Microsoft Windows XP SP2, no worse than in Windows Vista environment. In our test lab, we have successfully experimented with Office 2007 installation for both types of operating systems.

That's all for today. The introductory course has been complete, and then it makes sense talking about specific examples of the suite's versions, system requirements, installation procedure and the product activations, using specific Office 2007 applications.

We welcome your comments and suggestions as to which details of Office 2007 you are interested most. Further progress of this subject is solely dependent on your suggestions.

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