What does the new Office look like?

Along with Windows Vista, this week also saw the launch of Microsoft productivity suite: Office 2007. However, unlike Vista which had a rather noisy launch, the Office suite witnessed a subdued roll-out. Ironically though, it is various Office apps that a large number of computer users worldwide use, while the OS is used only to boot and run the system. Office also forms a very substantial part of Microsoft���s earnings.

The Office too has come after four years. The last one was Office 2003. Office 2007 marks a major overhaul. The leading minus is the classic interface of programs like Word and Excel that one has memorised over the years.

In total there are eight editions for Office System 2007. The pricing of these starts from Rs 6000/- onwards. The Office Pro Professional will be retailing approximately at Rs 17,000 and Office Standard at Rs 14,000. Here's looking into all that's new with Office 2007.

Word: Gone are the gray drop-down menus and dialogue boxes. The new version of the word comes with a fat band or ribbon. It replaces the Taskbars and graphically display the features which change as the user clicks on different Menu bars. A click on the Insert Tab and the Ribbon transforms to lists all commands related to the clipboard, fonts, paragraphs, styles, and editing.

The Ribbon is context-sensitive. Users will find new tabs appearing, for example while inserting a picture into a Word document. Click on a picture in a document, and the Ribbon changes to present icons and commands related to picture editing. To help the existing Word users find commands, Microsoft has an online Interactive Word 2003 to Word 2007 Command Reference Guide.

There���s a new feature called Live Preview that lets users preview changes such as fonts or colour changes that will appear before actually applying the changes to the document. Another new feature is the Word's ability to create a page and then directly publish it to a blog. Word themes -- which set colours, fonts and effects -- reside in the Page Layout ribbon and use Live Preview. The themes help users jazz up their document with one mouse click.

Office 2007 takes Word online. If a user highlights a word in a document while pressing the ALT key, Word will search the Web to find references, definitions, and more. Also, if he is using one of the six major blog services, he can create, publish, and update blog entries directly from Word by typing in his account name and password.

For those using something else, they can do the same things, just will have to give a little more information like blog feed format and URL. Pressing Publish from the Office button menu sends document to a blog, a Website, or a document server.

Excel: After almost a decade, the spreadsheet size: 65,536 rows and 256 columns ��� has gone wider, if the user wants. Excel 2007 increases these limits to offer 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. Excel now accommodates lengthier text values in cells, allows formulas with more layers, and divides calculations among multiple processors in dual-core CPUs (if the users have them) to perform complex calculations faster.

The new Excel makes it easier to track numbers and column categories, especially in those large spreadsheets. Also, no more memorising of headers, for, as the user scrolls down to a new page, Excel repeats the header name again at the top of the screen so that there is no mixing of columns.

Users can also visualize different ways of representing their data and decide what looks best, say a pie or a flow chart. Just like the Live Preview in Word Pull-down Style Galleries lets users preview fonts, colour themes, chart styles and images before actually applying the changes to the spreadsheet to flag their key data points.

One of the most useful, but also the most complicated, feature for most Conditional Formatting has become easier to use. The feature lets users add formatting to values that meet certain criteria. Suppose a user creates a conditional formatting rule such as display all salaries above Rs 10,000 with a red background, Excel will automatically apply it to all the cells specified.

Excel 2007 also adds more features to Conditional Formatting: data bars and icon sets. Data bars permit users to add a shaded bar behind every cell they identify. Icon sets add different icons next to various numbers.

PowerPoint: PowerPoint 2007 gets new themes ��� pre-designed layouts that according to reviews have improve markedly vis-��-vis PowerPoint 2003's Templates. Themes include preset colour choices to help users create neat presentations. Since themes and colour selections are also available in Word and Excel, users can apply a consistent look across all their Office 2007 documents.

Also new (available in Word and Excel too) is SmartArt, a drawing tool for creating graphics that show relationships, for example, organizational charts cycles etc. Users can add SmartArt elements to a presentation and change their style with a mere few clicks.

There are several non-design improvements as well. Tables have become easier to manipulate and style; similarly, moving data between Excel and PowerPoint, complete with formatting, has also become simpler.

Presentation file can now have subsets of itself that can miss some slides, making it easier for users to create variants of a presentation for different scenarios. Dual-monitor support has also improved, allowing users to blank out the presentation display temporarily in case they need to do something on their laptop that they don't want the audience to see.

Outlook: Unlike Word, Excel and Power Point, the changes in Office Outlook 2007 look minimal. Other than the new Ribbon and some interface enhancements, the programme is much like its predecessor. There are interface enhancements in the programme's message, compose, and other windows.

The new Ribbon interface appears in Outlook 2007 on opening a message or composing mail, and when a user opens a calendar or task entry. This new look replaces the toolbars at the top of the screen with a set of tabbed categories of functions. There's a Ghost menu that appears when a user highlights an item. This menu allows him to make on-the-fly format changes.

There's a To-Do Bar, which provides a snapshot of calendar appointments for the day and quick summary of the most pressing tasks. Outlook 2007 allows users to preview attachments -- image, text, and other files -- via a thumbnail before opening them.