Microsoft Office 2007 is an award-winning suite of productivity apps from Microsoft Corporation. Originally released in early 2007, together with the retail availability of Windows Vista OS, it immediately managed to attract large attention from worldwide Windows OS users who wanted a unified way of creating, managing and collaborating with their digital productivity apps. With new versions of famous Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications, Office 2007 managed to retain the position of the world’s most used suite for management of home or workplace documents.
Utilizing the latest document processing techniques, this release of Office introduced to the public the brand-new graphical design called Fluent User Interface that was focused on switching the tool showcase from the simple menu bars to the more visually attractive “ribbons”.
By the end of its lifecycle, the Office 2007 suite could be purchased in eight configurations, ranging from the entry-level Basic tier (which included Word, Excel, Outlook and viewer-only version of PowerPoint), to the fully-featured Enterprise and Ultimate tiers.
According to several surveys, many businesses worldwide have elected not to upgrade their daily operations from Office to newer versions, showcasing the incredible leap in performance and usability that this productivity suite has managed to provide to its users.
New Features in Office 2007
After the success of Office 2003, designers at Microsoft Corp. decided to drastically improve the visual design of all of their Office apps. The final result came not only in the implementation of Fluent User Interface design but in many other changes such as adoption of the standardized Office button (utilized for most common file management and printing tools), contextual tabs (which appeared only when office apps detected selection of certain document elements), Live Preview of selected formatting styles, new mini toolbar, quick access toolbar, and others.
Functionality of the updated versions of core and extended Office 2007 apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, Communicator, Groove, OneNote, Project and SharePoint Designer) with the adoption of the new file formats (Office Open XML), PDF, XPS and support for OpenOffice document file format (ODF).
The most widely used Office application Microsoft Word received notable upgrades in Office. Its default font was switched from “Times New Roman” to “Calibri”, and many other features enabled users to take better control over their documents. This includes the adoption of simpler style sheet management, integrated word counter in a status bar, new contextual spell checker, translation tooltips (for select languages only), automated citation generator, redesigned mathematical equations, better document comparison tool, new document viewer options, and much more.
Microsoft Excel was also dramatically upgraded, with support for expanded document size (1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns in a single worksheet, with 32,767 characters in a single cell). The app also received support for conditional formatting, multithreaded calculations, importing data from external sources, new page layout tools, new filters, new charts engine, and features such as User Defined Functions (UDF), CUBE functions, Formula Autocomplete, and others.
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