Microsoft Office Standard 2007 review

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 30 Jan 2007

Features

Many of the changes to Office 2007 feel skin deep. By that, we mean that there's a strong emphasis on making documents, spreadsheets and presentations easier on the eyes. You can adjust the brightness of images, for instance, and add 3D effects such as drop shadows and glows to pictures and charts. And many of the features that might appear new are simply easier to stumble upon in the new interface. The useful Document Inspector provides old and new ways to clean up hidden metadata in files. But don't expect too many brand-new features.

Word 2007 offers some basic tools that you'd otherwise look for in desktop publishing programs such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign. A host of new templates as well as preformatted styles and SmartArt diagrams let you dress up reports, flyers and so on with images and charts. However, you can't precisely control the placement of design elements on the page as you can with professional DTP software. And for wordsmiths who just work with plain old text, there's little need to upgrade. There's a new method of comparing document drafts side by side, but you still can't post a password-protected file to the Web without having Groove or server tools. At the same time, academic researchers should appreciate the Review tab's handy pull-down menus of footnotes, citations and tables of content. And Word's new blogging abilities might be handy, but even its cleaned-up HTML is far more cluttered than we'd like.

We find that the Ribbon layout in Excel improves its usefulness for working with complex spreadsheets. For instance, scientists and other researchers can access all the formulas in handy pull-down menus. You can make deeper data sorts and work with as many as a million rows. It's easier to find the Conditional Formatting for drawing heat maps or adding icons in order to display data patterns. Plus, along with the other glossier graphics throughout Office, Excel charts get a facelift.

You'll probably want to upgrade to PowerPoint 2007 if you frequently depend upon professional-looking slide shows to help close a deal. The new template themes are more attractive and less flat-looking than those of the past, although there's little new in the way of managing multimedia content.

Among the four core applications in Office Standard, Outlook 2007 provides the most practical improvements. To start, it lets you drag tasks and email messages to the calendar — a long-awaited feature that makes scheduling simpler. The new To-Do Bar's task and calendar overview and the ability to flag an email for follow up at a specific time are terrific for time management. Outlook's built-in RSS reader is useful if you manage lots of news feeds, but we were disappointed that it matches up only with RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7 and not other browsers. We also wish there were a simpler way of organising email messages than in nested folders and Search Folders. Tagging messages by subject might be nice, as Gmail allows. The new Instant Search — which lets you troll through email messages, calendar entries, to-do items and contacts — improves upon Outlook 2003's clunky lookups. Plus, Outlook's new protection against junk mail and phishing scams disables suspicious links. But Outlook 2007 uses Word 2007's HTML standards rather than those of Internet Explorer 7, which could make some of your newsletters look lopsided when compared with their appearance in Outlook 2003.

When sending email attachments from Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the Outlook composition window opens with all of its formatting options. Integration has improved throughout the applications, but it's not fully there yet. For instance, we like that you can tinker with a chart's appearance within Word and PowerPoint while managing the connected data in Excel at the same time. You can click through a preview of a PowerPoint slide show attached to an Outlook email message. But why can't you get a quick, split-pane view of two applications at once at any other time?

We're disappointed at the current lack of integration with Web-based services. If you don't want to buy Groove to collaborate with other Groove users, and you're not using Office on a shared office server, then you'll have to turn to a third-party service, such as Zoho Writer, Google Docs & Spreadsheets or ThinkFree to upload and collaborate on documents without having to email them around. We had hoped to see such capabilities added, perhaps in the form of tie-ins to Microsoft's Windows Live or Office Live.

Every application saves work in the new, Office Open XML formats (see our video). Look for an X in the new document extension: DOCX replaces DOC, XLSX replaces XLS, and so forth. The 2007 documents, presentations and spreadsheets squeeze more data into fewer kilobytes than their predecessors did. If a file becomes corrupted, you should be able to recover its contents better than in the past because the files store text, images, macros and other elements separately.

Note that when you open older Office files with the 2007 applications, you'll work in the Compatibility Mode with fewer features until you convert files to the new format. And as with the release of Office 1997, you can't open a file with the new extension right away when using earlier versions of the programs. What if you have the new software but need to share work with people who have not upgraded? The 2007 applications let you save backward-compatible files, but not by default. Those who are running Word 2003 or 2000 and need to open a Word 2007 DOCX file have to download a one-time Compatibility Pack.

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