Microsoft Office Standard 2007 review

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 30 Jan 2007

Service and support

Boxed editions of Microsoft Office 2007 include a decent, 174-page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact technical support by toll-free phone number for free between 8am and 6pm. Beyond that, paid telephone and email support costs a painfully high £40 (ex. VAT) per incident. It could take up to a business day to receive an email response.

Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. That said, we especially like the Command Reference Guides for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which walk you through where commands have moved since Office 2003. You can also pose questions to the large community of Microsoft Office users via free support forums and chats. And the included Microsoft Office Diagnostics installation is designed to detect and repair problems if something goes haywire.

Conclusion

Should you upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007? It depends on how you work. If you're style-conscious and want to play with new document templates, then Office 2007 should please you. Outlook outshines its predecessors if you need to lean on it daily to manage meetings and tasks. At the same time, if you already use few of the features of Office 2003 or earlier and are getting along well, then there's little need to spend hundreds of pounds on the new software.

The radical new interface of Office 2007 applications is here to stay, and it's likely to spawn some copycats. For a software package with so many layers of features, it makes sense to cluster functions within icons and tabs rather than a mixture of menu boxes. At the same time, we think that some users will find the dynamic tabs and galleries more distracting than useful. We anticipate that some makers of rival Office software will capitalise on Office 2007's steep learning curve and try to attract users with the relative simplicity of applications with pull-down menu interfaces that look and feel more like Office 2003 and earlier.

Because Microsoft has opened some of the Office 2007 source code to developers, prepare to see all sorts of add-ins — such as additional interface tabs — from third-party developers. At this point, however, Microsoft hasn't created a gallery on its Web site to help you find such extras. Office 2007 doesn't approach the simplicity of upstart Web-based alternatives, but it better serves up a host of features, and it's much less bloated than in the past.

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