Also new: the Compatibility checker, which notifies you of what features won't be supported if you save the file in an earlier PowerPoint version (97 through 2003). The new Inspect Document tool removes properties you may not want your audience to have access to, such as author information, comments, revisions, watermarks, and hidden text.
The one feature omitted in 2007 is the content wizard; it allowed you to quickly create a presentation for a variety of situations, such as presenting bad news. It was a good guide for organizing your thoughts. It will be sorely missed.
--Rick ScottIn some ways, Access has always been the odd kid brother in the Office clique. It was a little more complicated than its competitors (sometimes unnecessarily so); and when programs like FileMaker (probably its single largest competitor) started making serious strides in terms of power and functionality, Access started to look like an also-ran. Access 2007 features the new ribbon interface and some tremendously useful new ways to manage the way data is entered and procured, but it's still strongly oriented toward developers rather than end-users.
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If you're not converting an existing Access database, one of the best ways to get working with the program immediately is to use one of the included database templates (there's a repository of templates available online from Microsoft as well ). One common complaint about earlier versions of Access was the lack of templates for common database applications, and that's been at least partly addressed here. Among the templates available on the release of the product will be an asset-tracking list, a contacts database, a to-do list or a business account ledger, and they're all malleable -- you can use them as-is or customize them completely. The breadth of available templates isn't that great, but I'm hoping that'll change after Access is formally released.
More Consistent Interface
Access 2007 uses the ribbon interface pretty consistently, as it does with Word and (to a lesser degree) Outlook. It's a welcome change, since it removes that much more clutter from the interface and makes it easier to focus on the task at hand, whether it's data entry or editing the underlying schema.
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Also, much of the way data is entered and managed has been moved closer to the way another Office cousin -- Excel -- behaves: You can jump in and start throwing data at it in a fairly freeform fashion, and normalize it later. Columns can be added to a table on the fly, and columns that are built on a value list can have list values edited interactively without having to switch to the Design view. If you're a stickler for having your data entered clean, though, you can always use Access's more rigid data-entry models.
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