External add-ons from Microsoft let you save directly to PDF or the new XPS (XML Paper Specification) portable-document formats. And as far as I can tell, Word 2007 requires no more memory or CPU than Word 2003 did; it ran snappily enough on a 512MB Windows XP test machine and didn't give me any noticeable performance problems even when dealing with a document heavy with images or other objects.
In the end, I'm of two minds. I'm not happy that 2007 represents such a radical departure from the old ways, especially for someone who's spent so much time customizing Word over the years. I also can't ignore the fact that not having a whole clutter of toolbars and command options staring me in the face keeps my mind off Word itself, and back on the work I can do with it. That by itself is a huge step in the right direction for Word, and possibly for software as a whole.
--Serdar YagulalpExcel has long been known for its computational might, but in Excel 2007, the focus is on making the software, and the results of your calculations, easier to understand.
No doubt the first thing you'll notice is the revised interface. As with Word, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Excel's new interface overhaul is designed to put more features at your fingertips, bringing commands that were buried three levels down in dialog boxes and menus up front to the ribbon interface. Like its siblings, drop-down galleries and quick preview help you can see your formatting changes immediately, and the wide variety of designer-quality formatting options give your charts and tables a very professional look. That's to be expected -- many of the Excel improvements Microsoft touts have to do with visualizing your data.
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On the other hand, some features have been annoyingly shuttled off to the side. For example, to use the macro recorder, you have to explicitly turn on the Developer tab, something I had to probe the Help system to figure out.
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