Microsoft Office 2007

For feature #1, I’m going to be talking about the Ribbon: the revolutionary new UI that will, for the most part, be replacing menus and toolbars throughout the Office 2007 suite.

With the new Ribbon, commands such as Paste and Find are now categorized into tabs and further categorized into groups. (Click here for a screenshot of what the Ribbon looks like in Microsoft Word.)

To sum it up in four words: I really like it. It feels more natural to use than complex dialog boxes, and already I’ve discovered a some cool features that were previously unknown to me. That may be because they are indeed new features, or maybe because those features which are now prominently featured on the Ribbon were scattered across and hidden deep within the Office 2003 UI.

On the other hand, there are other features that I have trouble finding right away; however, Microsoft does include help documentation that includes a list of the old Office 2003 commands and their new Ribbon locations, which is really nice.

So although the Ribbon will help us find new features, I think it’s also going to take a while to re-find the features we’re already familiar with.

Though using the Ribbon is a little different at first, you easily get used to it. Soon we’ll probably wonder how we lived without it.

I’ll be posting screenshots of what the Ribbon looks like in the various Office 2007 applications soon!

I downloaded the Office 2007 beta last week and have been running it alongside my Office 2003 installation. I’ve actually been using Office 2007 instead of Office 2003 whenever possible (except for Outlook, since the 2007 and 2003 versions can’t co-exist on the same system for some reason).

I’ve also been finding lots of cool new features; so I decided it would be neat to do a post series about the new features in Office 2007.

So keep an eye out: the first post in the series will be coming soon!