Review: Office 2007 a Worthy Successor

In this undated handout photo provided by Microsoft, a screen from Microsoft Powerpoint, part of the Office 2007 suite of programs, is shown. (AP Photo/Microsoft) (AP)

-- With each update to its Office suite, Microsoft Corp. has piled on features aimed at boosting users' productivity and goosing sales of the world's most widely used collection of programs for handling documents, spreadsheets, e-mail and presentations.

Office 2007 for Windows-based PCs, launched Tuesday alongside the company's new Windows Vista operating system, is no different, except for one feature that makes it vastly easier to figure out what these programs have to offer.

Most of the suite's applications _ Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access _ have done away with the old, familiar menus and toolbars. In their place is the Ribbon _ a horizontal strip of screen real estate populated with tabs and icons grouped by function.

Want to add clip art to a Word document? Just click on the "Insert" tab and choose the "Clip Art" icon, which, incidentally, is hard to miss. Creating a complex formula in Excel? Click on "Formulas" and pick your poison _ all broken down by type.

It's also dynamic: When handling a photo in Word, the Ribbon presents the tools suitable for that task. No more clicking on the "View" menu, choosing "Toolbars" and then figuring out which of the tiny icons might be of use.

The Ribbon ranks among the most significant improvements to Office to date. It's not the first software to break out of the "File," "Edit," and "View" mold, but it's the most convincing alternative I've seen. Other programs will surely follow suit.

The Ribbon isn't customizable and can't be repositioned, though it can be minimized. There's no option to switch back to "classic" view, and it isn't universal _ the old menus and toolbars can be found in parts of Outlook, for instance.

It took me a few weeks to get used to it, but after trying out Office 2007 for a couple months, the Ribbon has revealed features of the suite that I didn't know existed.

The Ribbon isn't the only enhancement. In many of the programs, when text is selected, a faint "Mini Toolbar" appears above it. Hover the mouse pointer over the toolbar, and you can change the formatting of the selected text. For those easily annoyed, it can be switched off.

Office 2007 also stores documents in a new format _ one more compact and safer than before. Colleagues who haven't upgraded must download a free converter program to open the files. You also can save files in the older formats with Office 2007 _ important because the converter isn't available yet for Apple Inc.'s Macintosh computers.

There's also a new way of adding graphics magic to your documents _ once everyone upgrades. "SmartArt" allows you to easily insert graphics that can be easily edited and repositioned. If the typed-in text doesn't fit, it automatically shrinks the size of the font so that it does.

As with previous version of the suite, Microsoft is offering a special rate for students and teachers _ $149 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the note-organizing program OneNote. The Standard edition, which has the first three plus the Outlook e-mail client, is $399 ($239 if you're upgrading from a previous version since Office 2000 or Works 6.0).