Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2

Following the trend of recent Microsoft software releases, Office 2007 has a

completely redesigned UI. Things like menus, toolbars and the ever-present

task-pane from Office 2003 have given way to a new approach of context-sensitive

workspaces. Applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint have live previews of

the changes (like fonts and colors) you're about to make before you make them.

There are tons of 'quick styles' that you can apply to slides, tables, text

paragraphs and the like; enabling you to change fonts, sizes, spacing, alignment

and colors of these items in just one click. Since just a listing of the new

features and changes to old ones through the suite will take up a few tens of

pages, we're taking up the more critical ones that may not meet the eye in

this review.

'X' files



All your Office documents now get an 'x' at the end of the file extension:
DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and so on. Access databases are strangely 'ACCDB'. This

also signifies that these files are not directly compatible with Office 2003 and

below. The company says that converters are on the way that will let users use

the new files from versions 2000 onwards. These 'X' files are smaller by

about half compared to their Office 2003 counterparts; and the reason is simple:

they are actually compressed ZIP files. You can actually open these files

(manually or programmatically), and make changes to individual elements.

Properties and text content are present as tags in XML files while pictures are

as separate PNG files in the ZIP file. You could use this technology to have

plug-ins in your DMS that would clean up or add elements to documents for

various purposes.

New SKUs



The Office 2007 suite is slated to be released in eight different SKUs as well
as independent products. The SKUs are: Basic, Home and Student, Standard, Small

Business, Professional, Professional Plus and Enterprise. There is also an 'Ultimate'

edition that has everything Office 2007 has to offer. The difference between

each is not only in pricing, but also in the components that each of them will

contain. The Standard edition will contain only Word, Excel, PowerPoint and

Outlook. The Small Business edition adds the Business Contact Manager For

Outlook and Publisher to the Standard SKU. The Home and Student edition does not

feature Outlook but has OneNote instead over the Standard. The difference

between the Professional and Professional Plus SKUs is in their availability

too: Professional Plus is available only through Volume Licensing while

Professional is available through retail channels as well. Both these editions

contain Access, Publisher and InfoPath over Standard. The Enterprise SKU

includes everything in Professional Plus as well as Groove and Communicator.

Word 2007



Word is perhaps the most widely used component of the Office suite, along with
Excel. Most users of the new Office would probably decide their entire

evaluation with the product suite based on their experience with this one

component. And working with Word has certainly become much more easier and

intuitive. It will take you a couple of days as an existing Word user to find

all your favorite menus and shortcuts given that they have mostly been all

re-arranged. The default font and line spacing has undergone a change-it is

now a new font called 'Calibri' at 11 points-and you will instantly notice

the neater on-screen display of your documents as well as your print outs.

However, this does not take effect automatically for old (2003/XP) documents as

they use 'Times New Roman' as the default font. Even everyday tasks like

inserting and working with tables, artwork and the like. There is a new thing in

Word called the 'SmartArt', which is a new way to do your flowcharts and

diagrams where it intelligently colors, arranges and lets you edit these

diagrams. SmartArt also features its own values editor that lets you enter the

labels and data values for the diagrams independently. Cross references and

links, citations and bibliography, tables of figures and indexes, formulae, and

page themes have also become easier to do from single click items in the ribbon.

Smart Art in Word is a cool way to add diagrams, figures and flow charts to your documents

Managing your MailMerge documents and data is much easier with Word 2007 with

the new 'Mailings' tab in the ribbon. Each level of the mail-merge process

is available as separate ribbon segments - for instance, all the tasks that

you need to start off using mail merge with this document are classified under

'Start Mail Merge'. You can preview the results, find recipients using an

on-ribbon search facility, add greetings and text blocks and so on using just

the ribbon.

The ability to manage multiple reviewers for a document is also more

intuitive with its own tab: 'Review'. From here you can look at the actions

and comments of particular reviewers and work with them. Then, you can compare

multiple versions of the same document and merge changes from different authors.

Access 2007



The default interface for Access in 2003 was a blank screen that was boring even
to database programmers. The 2007 edition has a much more visual interface, with

content from Office Online featured in the previously blank workspace. Now, you

can create tables out of other sources: ODBC databases, HTML files, SharePoint

Lists and Outlook folders (contacts, email, tasks, ...) just to name a few. A

handy database documenter can help you document all the fields in the database

which you can further print or save as different kinds of files (Word, HTML,

PDF, XML, etc). And, remember all those warnings we get when opening a database,

saying it could contain harmful content and should we really open it and so

forth?

The 'Instant Search' feature in Outlook 2007 finds messages across mail folders quickly and more efficiently

That's all a thing of the past now. The database opens in a 'restricted

mode' with a ribbon on top with an 'Enable content' button to let you

enable whatever Access judged harmful.

Excel 2007



Pivot tables has been one of the best things that happened to Excel. If you've
used it before, then you'll remember that there's a wizard that takes you

through the process for creating it. You had to run it from the Data menu. In

the new Excel, it's moved to the Insert menu, and you straightaway get a

single dialog, after which you drag-drop items onto the familiar four squares on

a task pane that opens up.

Conditional formatting is another useful tool in Excel that quickly shows you

everything that's different. Here you can setup rules for data that are above

or below a certain value, are duplicates, contain a certain value and so on. To

quickly differentiate between the different values and the normal ones, you can

setup colors, icons or graded scales that appear and change automatically. The

nearest you can have to this in Excel 2003 is to use macros or cell formulae to

have a similar effect. But you can have only one condition setup for a

particular cell at a time. On the 'Home' ribbon, you have a 'Format as

Table' option. Select a range of cells and click on this option to have Excel

treat that range as a separate table. Later, when scrolling around, if you click

inside a cell of such a table, the column or row headings automatically transfer

onto the grid headings as long as that table is visible and you have atleast one

cell of that table selected.

The Formula ribbon is new to Excel where you find all the formula related

features including cell range name managers and tools to trace out how a certain

calculation proceeds ('Trace Precedents' and 'Trace Dependants'). Also,

some amount of tuning can be done in formulae since Excel can now use your

column headers as range specifiers. For instance, if a column is called 'Cost

Price', and you need a total of the first ten columns under it, you can now

say 'SUM(InventoryTable)' instead of 'SUM(C1:C44)' and then

wonder what's in that range. If you're not sure how you ended up at a

particular value, use the 'Evaluate Formula' option (the 'fx' icon in

Formulas>Formula Auditing) to debug the progress through the calculation.

And, we now have 'Watch Windows' in Excel too, that programmers would be

familiar with. Here, you can setup ranges of cells (in any worksheet and

workbook) to keep track of while you're changing values. This can avoid a lot

of scrolling through different workbooks and sheets.

InfoPath and Publisher 2007



In earlier times, you needed InfoPath on all your systems to be able to view the
forms you created with it. Now, you can centrally deploy the Forms Server 2007

(not yet available) and serve InfoPath forms through that over a Web browser

interface. InfoPath itself appears to be unchanged, it still looks like its 2003

ancestor with the same UI. Publisher 2007 currently has a few bugs in that when

you create or import a document and then apply a template to it, the data

disappears into an 'Extra Text' task pane and you have to retrieve it from

there, and redo your formatting! Otherwise, it is again the same UI as the 2003

version.

Outlook 2007



The e-mail and calendaring client has become a little larger in the features it
offers. Now, it has RSS integration and a revamped tasks pane where everything

(calendar appointments, To-Dos are listed together). Outlook's calendar now

also carries forward event deadlines if they are not completed in the earlier

indicated time. This is better than the 2003's philosophy of marking them

undone and ignoring them after the deadline is past. RSS subscriptions can be

pulled in from what IE is using (if you have IE 7) or from the one in Vista (if

you are using Vista's Sidebar and the RSS Feeds widget in that). You can

subject these RSS feeds to regular rules for processing, forwarding or delivery.

Outlook 2007 is just as friendly as before, with integrated “Instant Search”.

But for Instant Search to work you need to download an update to Windows Desktop

Search from the Microsoft website. Once installed though, searching through your

e-mail is easier than before-it searches as you type and shows e-mail from all

your folders in one list with the search terms highlighted in yellow.

Access now features a way to automatically collect data using e-mail. A simple wizard gets you started

PowerPoint 2007



Again the theme application bug exists, but you can use the Quick Style panels
to change your slide layouts, themes and designs very quickly. If you have an

old set of slides that you need to freshen in a hurry, this is very useful for

you. Working with Slide Masters is a pain, because all the text disappears

behind any graphics (in the editing mode, but they appear fine when playing the

slide show) that are on the slide master with no apparent way to make them

visible without hiding all the graphics on the master. This was done very easily

before, where you could switch to the master view, make your changes and have it

easily reflect across your slides.

If you have more than one monitor attached, you can use the 'Show Presenter

View' option to view the presentation as it would be during the show, on the

other monitor while you make your edits. You can also start your slideshows from

any slide with two predefined points (beginning of the file or current slide).

Add Ins



There are a lot of useful add-ins in Office 2007. Some of them you might never
get to see if you didn't know you could turn them on. To do so, you need to

right click on the ribbon, select the 'Customize quick access toolbar'

(quick access toolbar is what the ribbon is called). Here, click on the 'Add

Ins' item on the left side menu. While the list here currently only shows you

what add-ins are loaded and in use and so forth (without actually letting you

turn something on or off), the 'Manage Add Ins' item at the bottom of that

screen gives you access to a lot more options, through a dozen more screens.

Quite a lot of these at present are not as intuitive as the Office component

(Word, Excel and so forth) that you have opened up. But then again, these

options would only be used by a power user and the usability of these screens

for such a user is not a problem. One useful add-in that automatically turns on

is the 'Bluetooth' which shows a nice little drop down allowing the user to

send a document from any Office client (Word, Excel, etc) product to a Bluetooth

device in range in a single click.

Bottom Line: For a product suite that has such a lot of changes across

the spectrum (right from the UI to the way users work to the file formats to say

the least) the Beta 2 is a very stable and usable product.

Sujay V Sarma