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Review: A Comprehensive Look At Microsoft Office 2007: Page 4 of 20

Another genuinely useful new feature is "Live Preview," which allows people to see the results of a given action in real-time, such as changing the formatting of a table. Not everything works with Live Preview, though, so it's not always immediately obvious what will render with it and what won't. One element that uses Live Preview is "SmartArt" -- pre-designed graphics that are used to convey information, such as hierarchy charts or Venn diagrams. When you insert a SmartArt object, any changes are reflected in real time. In the past I've resorted to a third-party program to design such things, but Word 2007 drastically cuts down on the need to do this, and the results are attractive and useful.

Earlier versions of Word introduced styles for paragraphs; Word 2007 takes the idea a step further with document themes, a collection of font, color and layout choices that can be applied to a document instantly. This is another Live Preview function, so you can open up the Theme browser (Word 2007 comes packaged with about 20) and see the results of applying a particular theme to the whole document by simply hovering the mouse over your choice.

The under-the-hood changes to Word are also intriguing. Microsoft's new .DOCX document format treats each document as a .ZIP archive containing multiple files: an XML file for the document itself, copies of attached objects, and so on. The format's compressed, so it takes less space than its binary predecessors, and you can always unpack it manually by renaming the .DOCX file extension to .ZIP and using any ZIP-compatible archiving tool (including the archive wizard in Explorer). Older Word files can be edited as is, but Word also has a built-in compatibility checker to alert you if a file might pose a conversion problem before you convert it.

Word 2003 had blogging functions available through an add-on, but they're now native to 2007 and have been refined a great deal. Said feature is essentially a version of the standalone Microsoft Live Writer application, so it also works as an impromptu generator for clean HTML. Most popular blogging services are directly supported -- Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, TypePad, plus any blogging system that supports a number of popular discoverability protocols.



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