Microsoft Office 2007 Review

I just attended the launch event for Microsoft Office 2007 here in Cleveland this Wednesday, and one of the great things about attending this event is the fact that Microsoft was nice enough to provide me with a free copy of Office 2007 Pro Plus. I have been looking forward to using the final version (I had played with some early Beta versions) for a while, and I expect this latest incarnation of MS Office to be well received by the public, especially because of some of the larger and sweeping changes throughout the office suite. You can obtain a 60-day trial via that link above if interested.

Let me start by admitting that I do not use ALL of the Microsoft Office Suite products on a regular basis. My usage patterns concentrate on Excel and Word in particular - these are daily-use applications for me, and Excel is an absolute requirement in my daily life. So, that is what I focused on in my examination of Office 2007, although I did check out the latest features in Access, Publisher, Powerpoint, and Outlook too - just to a lesser degree.

The 30-second review
I will immediately migrate to using Excel 2007, since there are HUGE improvements to the application that I have long wanted. Aside from Excel, the Office 2007 upgrade is certainly an incremental step forward and its new user-interface menus/contextual-options "ribbons" substantially increase usability. But, aside from the improvements to Excel, I personally did not see any drop-dead "must have" features, though it's plenty "OK" overall.

Office Suite-Wide New Features

• Live Previews - this enables you to see (in your DOC/XLS/PPT files you are working with) the effects of a menu-item-action as you hover over that item, and before really applying it to your selection. This is wonderful for all users, as it should save a lot of unnecessary "undo" operations and re-trying yet another menu-item/option to obtain the desired results.
• Themes - a sort of collection of styles. This is certainly welcome. I still need to see if the applications can export such collections of formats for use in another spreadsheet or document - I planned to test that, but didn't get around to it yet.
• Charting now is a common Feature / Component throughout Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. This means you no longer need to revert to the creating-application to edit/format a chart that is embedded inside a document or presentation.
• Removing "hidden info" in files. Many people are unaware that when they currently save Word documents and other Office files, that there may be some leftover data in the files even after you thought you edited-out or deleted such information (this data is otherwise visible to anyone else that knows how to access it - like, just opening a Word document with Notepad to reveal "deleted" data that is really just invisible in Word, but not gone completely) . There are now ways to "scrub" the files before sending, so all of that potentially confidential information is removed before sending a file to someone else. It's a bit crazy to even have to worry about this, but it really does exist as a problem in earlier versions of Office.
• PDF/XPS (XML Paper Specification) from apps - via a free downloadable plugin. I find it whacky that you have to download it, but I think the reasoning had to do with Adobe threatening to sue or something.
• "Ribbons" as the interface in Word, Excel, Access, Outlook (partial), and PowerPoint. I like them - and, I think they are a HUGE timesaver. They took nearly no time to get used to.
• The graphics and artwork throughout the Office 2007 user interface generally look really sharp and professional and consistent.
• Shared dictionary abilities - yes, Word and Excel, etc. share some global dictionary settings like when you instruct the dictionary to learn new words.
• Surprise: Microsoft is really pushing SharePoint 2007 with Office 2007. Many of the new features target SharePoint.

New Excel 2007 Features

• HUGE IMPROVEMENTS! I am absolutely thrilled with the improvements to Excel 2007. If you rely heavily on spreadsheets in your day to day operations, you will certainly appreciate the improvements. Excel is finally automatically performing common steps I always needed to do manually otherwise - especially with tables of data (which, in my opinion are the number one reason for using Excel).
• The new "Format as Tables" ability simply rocks! Excel 2007 finally understands what the user is trying to accomplish with data tables, and makes logical decisions about extending the functionality of your rows and columns of data. This includes automatic auto-filtering of the data in tables (finally)! Constrained columns, total rows, and calculated columns that know to repeat formulas in each row, etc. It is finally a spreadsheet of my dreams (well, not 100%, but heck of a lot closer - my dreams have it nearing the point of higher pseudo-intelligence).
• A data-connections manager in Excel. For those users that are pulling data in from places like SQL-Server and other disparate data-stores, this is a very welcome addition. Multiple data-sources per sheet, and easy to manage. I have only begun to tap into this, but I'm already thinking that Excel 2007 may just be my application front-end for some "dream apps" I have in store.
• Conditional Formatting - powerful! Just as with "themes" in the apps, I still need to see if it can export such formats for use in another spreadsheet, since I would often have a "standard theme" or look/feel I would like in all my spreadsheets (and docs, etc). Regardless, the user interface for conditional formatting is quite nice.
• Huge capacity increases if you need it - rows/columns, etc. And, for me, most importantly is cell-formatting option increases - more colors, etc. Excel always sucked for limiting you to a handful of colors when you have an awesome graphics machine at your disposal... yes, you now have the ability to use 16 million colors! This is very useful in data visualization and condition-representation and recognition.
• Pivot tables - interface is much better, and should make it easier for the typical user to understand and manipulate pivot tables.
• Page-Layout view (see how it'll be printed before printing) - this was an area of functionality that always needed help in earlier versions. I am really glad this got some attention in Excel 2007!
  

New Word 2007 Features

• Themes are one of the biggest for me, allowing simpler re-use of a common look/feel throughout documents.
• Not much else really grabs me and makes me think I must use Word 2007.
• Mainly it is the "ribbons" UI focus, and some enhanced pre-designed formats, SharePoint sharing, etc., that standout - all of which are "nice to have" but not requirements for me.

New Access 2007 Features

I RARELY use Access, but I may consider playing with it a bit more to see if it can handle some of my smaller development requirements - though, I will focus more on Excel at first. It does offer these improvements:

• Enhanced sorting/filtering capabilities.
• Layout view allows design changes while you browse data (it's about time given that many other tools have had this ability for many years).
• Split-forms: this is some newly updated master-detail forms improvement / feature. It looks interesting, but I have not played with it in detail yet.
• Multi-valued fields - does just what it sounds like it would, allowing you to store multiple values in one field. I find this interesting, and I wonder how they are storing the multiple values in one field - my guess is it's using MSDE's / SQL's XML datatype to do it, and XQuery to parse the data as it goes in/out of field. This is handy for when data-normalization would otherwise get out of control.
• Shading alternate rows in a grid is easy now (so it says). About time. That should be a feature of all grid components in my view.
• Some report grouping abilities improvements have been implemented. I don't often use Access for reporting, though many do. Just to see how it compares to reporting solutions I use, I do intent to try Access 2007 reporting features out when I get a chance.

New Powerpoint 2007 features

• Smart Art - rather interesting way to convert lists/bullets into graphical representations in a presentation, though I won't likely use the feature.
• In general, I don't use PowerPoint much, so I don't really have any opinion one way or the other about the rest of the Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 functionality. It's a presentation application, and I am personally annoyed by all the powerpoint presentations I've seen over the years :)

New Outlook 2007 Features

I'm not sure I'll use Outlook 2007, since I rarely use Outlook any more to begin with. There are some new features that may be of use to you though, especially in a corporate Email environment. These include:

• Finally, if I understand what the video I reviewed claims, you can search all the Outlook data at once (supposedly), and it is fast (from pre-indexing Outlook data behind the scenes all the time). What I didn't see demo'd was searching in sub-folders (which did not work in earlier versions and was vary lame). I hope Outlook 2007 at least does that correctly.
• There is a new focus on the ability to "color anything", and it is helpful to see things color-coded - like Email categories, task categories, calendaring, etc. It looks nice and all. Though, I very seriously doubt I will migrate to it any time soon.

New Publisher 2007 Features

I rarely use Publisher, as I consider it a much too limited for any real publishing and layout requirements. Sure, Publisher 2007 has incrementally improved and even implemented some features that attempt to make it more of a pre-press type of tool, but quite honestly if you plan to go to press with any significant content, get Adobe InDesign CS2 instead - that application is amazingly powerful by comparison, and can handle doing entire large books and more with ease. If your budget is constrained and you own Office already, I guess Publisher is worth a try first.

Other new Office 2007 Products

The next two product "reviews" are only from what I could see on the video-CD Microsoft gave me at the launch-event. This CD was by the way LAME AS HECK, since only 95MB of a 700MB CD is used, and it includes "video" of screen captures and NetMeeting sessions that were recorded over SLOW connections and display in terribly low-res and poor quality. They could have at least created some GOOD higher-res quality videos to distribute to attendees.

New Project 2007 Features

Though not included in our free download, there is a lame video of the new features I watched. And, to give you a feeling of why I see Microsoft Project 2007 as in incremental update, they tout the "multiple undo" as one big new feature. That should give you a feel for how little has changed. Sure, some new formatting and graphical polish exist, some new features that are perhaps useful exist, but overall it's still MS Project, and they didn't even carry the new Ribbon-interface through to it from what I could tell.

In the past, I used Microsoft Project quite a bit and was rather well versed in project management using the tool. And, I think the last version I really used much was Project 98. Looking at the new version, so little has changed in the past 10 years that I feel quite comfortable I could jump right into using Project 2007 and be immediately productive. This is a good thing in that my skills are still up-to-date, but it also demonstrates how little the fundamentals of project-management software have changed.

New Visio 2007 Features

Microsoft Visio 2007 was also not included in my free software, but the MS video CD touts it as being as precise as a CADD system, and a full-featured drawing tool; in fact, they seem to want it to be a do-all for diagramming and drawing and more.

I don't know. I have used Visio since way, way back before Microsoft even owned Visio. I generally always HATED Visio and found it to be anything but intuitive, and quite restrictive in that it prevented me from using it in the way I wanted too.

It certainly has potential for a process-visualization engine, but it seems overly complex and bloated to me. This tool has become a "catch-all" for data and process visualization, diagramming, and so much more. Yes, it can do some cool stuff, but it also seems to take a rather in-depth knowledge and understanding of all its features to even be somewhat productive with it.

Regardless of my own lack of need for this tool, some of the new Microsoft Visio 2007 features include:

• "auto-connect shapes" on a page - though it's rather limited to shapes immediately next to each other, it does speed some diagramming and flow-linking operations.
• Data-visualization is their big push with Visio 2007, and is has the ability to show external data in various graphical formats including "pivoting" data. Nifty and all, but what value does this offer over Excel aside from pretty pictures/shapes to accompany what matters most - the data/values?
• Data-linking to external data, and drag database record to shape(s) automatically. What that does I don't know, but it was mentioned. heh.
• Reverse the direction of a line (arrow) -- ooohh boy! About time, but this is a "feature"?

Well, that covers my brief overview of Microsoft Office 2007 New Features and such. As I dive deeper into each of the components of the office suite, and further exploit new capabilities of each, I will return here with additional thoughts, tips, and techniques.