Software developers continue to bring new product to the market despite existing users still not being fully aware of what they have and Microsoft office is no exception.

It was rumoured not so long ago that Microsoft conducted a survey and, the resulting top ten wish list of features in word were already included in the software!

How true this is I don’t know but from my experience it is very easy to understand this happening as users generally take quite a while to learn a new piece of software, so lets have a look at some of the new features of Office 2007.

The latest version of Microsoft© Office, Microsoft© Office 2007, is now available containing 2007 versions of familiar programs like Microsoft© Word, Microsoft© Excel and Microsoft© PowerPoint.

The user interface has changed in these new versions and the familiar menu bar and toolbars of old have been replaced with tabs containing groups of icons.

So why would anyone want to learn a new version of a program that they were perfectly familiar with and that did exactly what they wanted it to anyway?

Office 2007 is easier to use. In Office 2007 there is now an icon for everything a user may want to do (e.g. change the page orientation to landscape), these icons are collected together in groups and there are several groups of icons on each tab. The icons that are most frequently used are on the first tab which makes Word, Excel and PowerPoint easier to use.

When a user wants to do something in a document, instead of going to the menu bar and then finding the command that will have the desired result (which could often take several clicks of the mouse – e.g. changing a cell to accounting format in Excel) most common operations can now be carried with a single click.

Office 2007 is more fun to use. For example, to try out a different font simply highlight the text to be changed, go to the Fonts drop down box and put the cursor over a font. The text will be displayed in the font that the mouse is currently pointing at.

Don’t like that font? Carry on pointing at different fonts until a suitable one is found and then click it to change the text permanently to that font. The same can be done with text size and colour, and Word 2007 contains some great colour-themed document templates too.

Office 2007 documents can be saved as PDF. Download and install the Office 2007 Add-in “Microsoft© Save as PDF or XPS” and Office 2007 documents (i.e. Excel 2007 spreadsheets, Word 2007 documents and PowerPoint 2007 presentations) can then be saved in PDF format.

If a computer user can’t open an Office 2007 document because he or she doesn’t have Office 2007 installed on their computer they will probably have Adobe Reader installed on their computer which can be used to view PDF documents.

Office 2007 is more secure. When an Office 2007 document is password protected the encryption method used is more secure and harder to crack than the encryption method used in previous versions of Microsoft Office.

For all these reasons and more, we wouldn’t use anything else other than Microsoft© Office 2007.

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