So what's all the fuss about? We asked three reviewers to make a close and critical examination of the various applications included in Microsoft Office 2007 -- Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, OneNote, Publisher, Groove, and InfoPath -- and report back on the pros and cons of the new suite. Their reports, impressions, and opinions follow -- along with an image gallery showing what the new applications will look like.
The final verdict? That it really all depends on what you will need from your day-to-day applications in the era of Vista, connectivity, and Web 2.0, and whether you can adjust to the new or prefer to stick with the old.
With Word 2007, Microsoft has made the broadest and probably the most constructive set of changes to Word -- and Office -- since tear-off toolbars came along. Word is one of the most widely-used pieces of consumer software ever devised, so it's inevitable that the sheer depth and breadth of the changes made to Word are going to spawn at least as many opponents as adherents.
Longtime users and people who are fond of bending and shaping Office to fit their work habits may be deeply frustrated, because some of the things they did before are simply no longer possible in the same forms. At the same time -- and this cannot be dismissed out of hand -- Word has introduced some genuinely useful new ways of doing things. If you're a new user, or you go to the program as if it were a completely new creation from the ground up, you may like what you see, and find some of your old work habits were worth abandoning after all.
  Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery. |
Coping With The Menu
The single biggest change, as you've probably heard by now, is the new menu system. The old drop-down menus and toolbars are now gone; in their place is the "ribbon," a tab-like interface with all the most commonly-used commands placed right up front. The keyboard equivalents are available as well -- press the Alt key and all of the ribbon items are marked with their corresponding Alt key commands. The Alt commands are markedly different from what they were in 2003, but their Ctrl equivalents are still the same (Ctrl-F for Find and Replace, for instance).
The ribbon also changes with context: if you click on an image, for instance, a "Format" tab appears in the ribbon, and a context indicator appears above the ribbon. Switching focus to something else resets the tab. If you don't like seeing the whole ribbon all the time, you can set it to automatically minimize to something that resembles the old drop-down menu bar by double-clicking on it. The whole idea is to present the user with no more than there absolutely has to be at any given time, and in that sense the ribbon works beautifully.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
