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Simplify, simplify, simplify. The challenge for Microsoft in revamping Office was to better organize all the options available without negatively impacting productivity. For new users that's a particularly important goal, since the menus and toolbars in current versions may appear to be a mishmash.
The overriding design goal for the new user interface, Microsoft says, is to make it easier for users "to find and use the full range of features these applications provide" while preserving "an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so they can spend more time and energy focused on their work." The redesign makes most Office 2007 applications look completely fresh, clean, and new -- and more colorful. From Ribbons that offer clearly labeled buttons to thumbnail previews of most graphic features, the applications bear only a slight resemblance to their former selves.
You'll probably get used to the new interface within a few hours; whether you like it, however, is a different story. New users will benefit most, since they won't have to change existing habits. For advanced and power users, the adjustment may be a bit more disconcerting, at least initially.
We've put the Technical Refresh of Office 2007 Beta 2 through its paces, exploring new features, both Office-wide and in specific apps, and taking a particularly close look at the new SharePoint Server 2007. We expect only a few changes (to root out the last bugs and performance bottlenecks) before the final version ships later this year (to business) and early next year (to consumers).
A new look, starring the Ribbon
In Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and most areas of Outlook, the menus and toolbars of previous versions are history. In their place is the Ribbon, a tabbed, horizontal bar divided into groups of icons and buttons organized by task. The Home Ribbon in Word contains groups related to the Clipboard (cut, copy, paste, and for some odd reason, the Format Painter), Fonts (font style and size, plus formatting characteristics such as bold, italic, and subscript), Paragraph (for bullets, indenting text, sorting paragraphs, alignment, line spacing, and shading), Styles (displayed as a thumbnail gallery), plus Editing (find, replace, and text/object selection).
The Home Ribbon covers about 90 percent of everything you'll need for simple text editing -- the remaining features are dispersed throughout the interface: spell check is on the Review tab, while headers and footers have been moved to the Insert tab (from the View menu in earlier versions). The core formatting features appear on yet another pop-up menu when you select text.
If you want to add a little more spice to a document, the Insert Ribbon has groups for creating and inserting tables, images, links, and special text (one group for boxes, WordArt, and drop caps, another for equations and symbols). Other Ribbons are provided for controlling page layouts, performing reviews, and defining the current view.
Excel's Ribbons are similar: Home (for worksheet editing, formatting, and sorting tasks), Insert (to add charts and graphs, hyperlinks, and headers/footers), Page Layout (for controlling cell size, gridlines, and backgrounds), Formulas (including a new Name Manager for handling named ranges), Data (for import/export, removing duplicates, and grouping data), Review (for comments and data protection), and View (freezing panes, adding page breaks, and more).
At the bottom of some groups is a tiny arrow button that, when clicked, opens a familiar dialog box. Most dialog boxes are unchanged from previous versions of Office -- still dull gray, but at least the options are where you expect them to be.
These "standard" Ribbons are supplemented with contextual ribbons that appear when you're working with a particular object -- a table in Word, an Excel chart, a diagram in PowerPoint -- then disappear when you click away from that object.
Microsoft says the Ribbon doesn't occupy more space than the standard toolbars of previous versions, though it feels larger. Fortunately, Ribbons can be hidden (Ctrl + F1 is the secret toggle), giving you more document workspace.
The Ribbons can't be customized from within the Office application. Microsoft's Office UI guru, Jensen Harris, says they're XML-based, and that the company is working with third-party developers who are building ribbon-editing utilities for customizing the interface. None have been announced yet.
Instead, Jensen suggests, users who want a customized look can add icons to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), a button strip that can be docked above or below the Ribbon. Right-clicking on the QAT, or from several other dialog boxes, lets you add buttons, such as the Spell Check missing from the Home Ribbon. Keyboard shortcut enthusiasts can press the Alt key to see small boxes that represent the available shortcuts for the current Ribbon plus all buttons on the QAT.
We found that the new interface made some tasks in Office 2007 harder to complete than in previous versions. With no menu, and depending on what you're doing, it can take a greater number of mouse clicks or keyboard tapping to perform simple tasks, such as switching between two open Excel workbooks -- another reason you may soon find yourself with a crowded QAT.
Galleries provide visual shortcuts to many formatting tasks in Office 2007 applications, from applying styles in Word and choosing chart styles in Excel to applying a fresh design to a SmartArt illustration (more on SmartArt below) in PowerPoint. Select a range of text in Word, for example, and you can quickly apply a style by picking it from the Style Gallery: Hover over the gallery and your selection will change so you can preview its effect; move away without clicking and your selection is unchanged.
You aren't restricted to gallery defaults; you can easily add an element to the gallery, and Office will create a preview image. For example, we created red text in a 16-point font for a heading, and we were able to quickly add it to the Style Gallery; Word displayed text in that style as a button in the gallery.
Of all the features in Office 2007, graphics have received the greatest (and most interesting) improvement. Apps within the suite now feature a classier, more professional look, with new 3D effects, shadows and glows, as well as more surface textures, good-looking color schemes, and new ways to add emphasis.
There are more ways to see how your work will look. A new Live Preview feature helps you preview choices -- for instance, in Word you can hover over a font name and Word will change your selection to that font. Click the font and the change is made; move your mouse away and Word returns to the original formatting. In Excel, you can change the look of a graph the same way. In fact, charts are dramatically better looking in Office 2007, and PowerPoint users now get the full benefit of Excel's new formatting power when incorporating charts -- say goodbye to the adequate but dull MSGraph charts of old.
What's missing, what's better
Some features have been radically changed since Office 2003 -- or have disappeared completely. The ability to add a favorite folder to the My Places bar is no longer found in the File Save and File Open dialog boxes. Instead, you navigate to the folder, right-click on a blank spot in the My Places bar and choose Add from the pop-up menu. Other My Places features remain unchanged: For example, yo