Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Ever since I got a sneak preview of Office 2007 at last year's Microsoft Product Development Conference I've been curious about getting my hands on the beta. With the proliferation of beta 2 I decided to load it and use it, particularly since I have some other writing assignments pertaining to the products.

You may be in a similar situation; in your office maybe you're the person who tries out the new versions to evaluate them or you're just an early adopter. So what can you expect if you bite the bullet and install beta 2?

Like any beta there is a disclaimer about using it on your primary system. But if you are a sole practitioner and don't want to create and configure a "test system," what are your options? Since I need to keep my laptop ship-shape for training and demos, I decided to put beta 2 on my desktop and see what happened.

I also opted to buy the installation discs for the modest delivery charge of $9.95. I noted that the disc version was significantly larger than the download version, and I always have more confidence with a set of discs.

During installation I had some good news and bad news.

The good news was that I was able to maintain my old versions of most of the Office 2003 programs and continue to run them.

The bad news was that Outlook 2007 was the exception and needed to replace Outlook 2003 entirely. There was no turning back.

The main new features are to be found in the main programs; Word, Excel and PowerPoint have the new Ribbon and galleries of quick format items for tables, charts and the new SmartArt diagrams.

Figure 1029

You will certainly want to experiment with these in depth, and eventually save your own formatted objects. Also, check out the Themes that can be applied to quickly recolor and standardize pages or slides in these programs.

Before you get too perplexed by the Ribbon, look in the lower right of the window for the three main programs. Here you will find the ability to zoom in and out and change page views (Normal and Print Preview in Word, Slide Sorter in PowerPoint and so on).

If you need to get going quickly, remember the right-click option which will still take you into your familiar dialog boxes if necessary and bypass some of the Ribbon features.

To work with the galleries for tables and charts, simply select one of these objects and experiment with the contextual popup menus that will show up in the Ribbon.

As a PowerPoint fan, I particularly like the new SmartArt diagrams, which can be animated in terms of their entrance item by item in PowerPoint. (Use Custom Animation and give the entire SmartArt item an Entrance Animation — then use the Effect Objects for the entrance animation to break up the appearance of the object element by element by selecting the SmartArt animation tab).

Figure 1030

In Excel the new chart feature is something to concentrate on. (By the way Excel takes over for MS Graph, so all charting is based on an Excel spreadsheet as a datasheet in Word and PowerPoint). The special effects, including Bevel and Glow, that can be applied to chart, table, and SmartArt objects will probably become one of the main reasons to upgrade to office 2007.

In Excel you should also check out the new Pivot Table and Pivot Table Chart tool. While the original wizard still asks the perplexing question (is this really the data to include?), a "yes" response gets you much more intuitive and "filterable" interface to reorganize your data.

Figure 1031

Watch out for Outlook

Outlook is another story. There is no new Ribbon in Outlook, but the interface is more colorful and very slide. There is a cool To Do bar that you can pop out to immediately see your daily or weekly tasks and appointments — similar to Outlook Today.

Figure 1032

I encountered my only real issues using Outlook.

First, when I began sending and receiving email, the incoming email was blank! There was nothing in the messages except the subject.

This turned out to be related to my AVG anti-virus software which needed to be re-set not to certify my email. I wonder what happens to users of notorious Norton and McAfee?

I also needed to reinstall Outlook when it abruptly decided it needed to be designated as my default email client, even though its Options indicated that it already was exactly that.

A dialog box kept popping up telling me that Outlook would not work with email until I put my installation disc back in and repaired my Office 2007 installation.

Consequently I keep those discs handy as I continue working with the beta. There's a lot more to try out and I will keep you posted.

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