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Review: A Comprehensive Look At Microsoft Office 2007: Page 8 of 20

Despite all that's new, many things haven't changed. Apart from expanding the size of the formula bar (it grows as your formula grows), there's not much to help you write formulas. The ribbon bar contains icons that segregate formulas (date and time, financial, logical, etc.) but there's no new help to explain the intricacies of some functions.

Even so, it's likely that many of the features you've always wanted but never knew Excel had will finally surface, thanks to the new interface.

--Rick ScottWhile Word 2007 is a pretty radical departure from earlier versions of Word, Outlook 2007 is more of an incremental step. My guess is that Outlook simply didn't benefit from having its entire interface scrapped; instead, selected parts of the program were reworked with the new interface model. It's consistent enough with the old version not to be a huge distraction, and the changes are mostly subtle and positive.



Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery.

The main interface in Outlook 2007 is almost unchanged: unlike applications such as Word and Excel, the tear-off toolbars and menu bars of 2003 are still there. The new Office "ribbon" interface appears when you open or edit a message, but the toolbars remain in the program's main view -- possibly because there's never been the plethora of toolbar clutter in Outlook that there has been in other Office programs. Migrating mail files from older versions of Outlook (that is, if you're not installing on top of an existing copy of Outlook) has also been made slightly easier. If you click on Data File Management | Data Files in the File menu and point to the PST file you want to use, it's set as the default, and 2003-edition PST files can work as-is.


Microsoft Office 2007


•  Introduction

•  Word 2007

•  Excel 2007


•  Outlook 2007

•  PowerPoint 2007

•  Access 2007

•  OneNote 2007

•  Publisher 2007

•  Productivity Apps


•  Image Gallery

Aside from the ribbon, the most obvious new addition is the "To-Do Bar," a pane that usually appears on the right-hand side of the screen and which displays a condensed view of the current month's appointments and outstanding tasks. I liked it and left it on, but reduced its size to make it a little less obtrusive; you can change which elements and how much of each are displayed. The To-Do Bar and the Mail pane on the left are both selectively collapsible: You can flatten them down to a stub and pop them out on demand. This leaves you that much more room to work without having to turn the panes completely on or off. Appointments e-mailed to others are sent as attachments in the broadly-supported open-standard iCalendar format; everything from Lotus Notes to Google Calendar uses it.