Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007

...come across a version of Microsoft Office over the years. I remember installing Office 4.3 back in the 90’s from 32 floppy disks. Then came Office 95 which was launched to coincide with Windows 95. This version was fairly buggy in my opinion and was quickly followed by Office 97 which was possibly the most popular version of the office suite to date. Microsoft continued to release a new version every 2 to 3 years with the arrival of Office 2000 and ...
...the first one is the Microsoft Office2007 software itself, the other is Office Communicator 2007 which I have not installed and will not be discussed in this review.

To install the software, insert the main Office disk into your DVD drive and let it start up automatically. At the beginning of the installation, you will need to provide the 25 digit serial number to confirm that you are using a legitimate copy of the software. After ... more

Introduction

The chances are that anyone using a Windows based PC has come across a version of Microsoft Office over the years. I remember installing Office 4.3 back in the 90’s from 32 floppy disks. Then came Office 95 which was launched to coincide with Windows 95. This version was fairly buggy in my opinion and was quickly followed by Office 97 which was possibly the most popular version of the office suite to date. Microsoft continued to release a new version every 2 to 3 years with the arrival of Office 2000 and then Office XP in 2002. The next version, Office 2003 was released almost immediately after. This seemed a strange decision as Office XP seemed to behave perfectly well to me. There then followed a four year gap to Office 2007 which is currently the latest version of the suite. This version saw the most radical changes since the transition from Office 4.3 to Office 95. We will go into the details shortly.

Price

Working for an educational establishment, I was able to pick up an original version of this software for the great price of £15 under our campus agreement. If you are not a student or a member of staff at a college or university, you will be paying around the £100 mark for this software.

Installation

The software comes on two DVD disks, the first one is the Microsoft Office2007 software itself, the other is Office Communicator 2007 which I have not installed and will not be discussed in this review.

To install the software, insert the main Office disk into your DVD drive and let it start up automatically. At the beginning of the installation, you will need to provide the 25 digit serial number to confirm that you are using a legitimate copy of the software. After you have done this, sit back for around 10 minutes depending on the speed of your machine and let the computer do the rest.

Once the installation has finished, you will need to activate the software with the Microsoft online servers within the first 60 days of use to complete the registration. Failure to do this will mean that you can now only view documents and will be unable to create new ones.

The Office Suite

Microsoft Office 2007 is a collection of programs (this is the correct spelling for a computer program) which serve to aid users in their day to day business operation. Many of these programs will be familiar to frequent computer users but some of the lesser known programs will still be a mystery to a lot of users. I am not intending to write a full review on each program as this review would be unbearably long and boring. It is intended to give an insight into all of the programs that make up the suite.

Word

Microsoft Word has now been the industry standard word processor for over a decade, since the demise of WordPerfect in the mid 90’s Word has been left pretty much unchallenged for this crown.

If you have used any of the previous versions of Word then you are in for a real surprise with the 2007 offering. This now looks completely different to its predecessors, buttons have now moved from their normal positions in the tool bar and instead are on panels supposedly grouped together with other items of similar functionality. For example, if you want to spell check your document, the ABC icon is no longer visible on the main screen and it is not really obvious where you will find it. After a few seconds of rummaging around the menus, you’ll eventually find it under the review heading.

All these visual changes in my opinion are unnecessary and only serve to confuse the user. As someone who still uses Office 2003 at work, it is a nightmare trying to find something that is easy to do in 2003. In fact, I have been using Word 2007 at home now for 18 months and still cannot get used to it. I can type a standard document but a lot of the more advanced features are beyond me.

What I do like about Word 2007 is that you can now save your document as a PDF file without the need for a dedicated PDF writer installed on your PC. This is great for emailing documents that you do not want people to have the ability to change.
It is worth noticing that the standard file extension for Word 2007 is now docx as opposed to doc. This means that any file with a docx extension will not open in a previous version of Word. If you need to do this (and you will if you are circulating a document to multiple recipients) you will need to force Word to save the file as a Word 97-2003 .doc file.

Excel

Excel 2007 is a spreadsheet application which allows the analysis and manipulation of numerical data. As with Word, the interface for Excel has had a drastic rework from the earlier versions. Strangely though, in my opinion, this change has made Excel easier to use as now, things like graphs and pictorial representation of the data has its own enhanced section and some of the things you can now do look just as professional as a proper reports package such as Crystal. There is now more emphasis on third party data with connections to other systems like Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server meaning you can seamlessly interact with data from these heavy duty database applications. If number crunching is your thing then you can’t fail to be impressed with Excel 2007, it really is a massive step forward from anything that we have seen before.

As with Word, Excel now uses a new file format, namely xlsx. To produce spreadsheets in a format readable by Excel 97-2003 you will need to manually select this format when saving the document.

Access

Now, as someone who has developed software over the years, I’ve often found myself using Microsoft Access a lot. Access has always been the one Office application that has had problems being backward compatible with previous versions. Whereas Word and Excel would quite happily open in older versions, you have to implicitly tell access which version you want your database to be compatible with. This can lead to all kinds of problems when you want to share the database with other users who all have different versions of Access.

The Access interface has stayed pretty consistent for the past 15 years but Access 2007 presents the user with perhaps the biggest change in the entire office suite this time around.

Key operations such as table, query, form, report and module design are no longer the main focus of the interface. In my opinion this is a bizarre decision from Microsoft as without using these operations, there is no database, end of story. In their wisdom, Microsoft has decided to hide this content under the Create menu. When you finally get to this menu, things start to look familiar again and anyone familiar with Access should now be able to start work in earnest.

The main enhancement in Access 2007 is its close links with Microsoft SQL server. In previous versions, it was possible to make this link via something called an ODBC link. Access 2007 now makes it easier to connect to third party databases.

There is undoubtedly a steep learning curve to using Access, loosely speaking it’s a form of programming at a very high level and this fact puts a lot of people off using it. As Access is very particular about versioning, I have also installed Access 2003 on my PC so that I cover all bases. This is the only Office program where I have had the need to install two different versions.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is one of my pet hates. I have lost count of the number of times that I have had to sit through slide after slide of constant drivel. In my opinion, PowerPoint is responsible for allowing presenters up and down the country to produce the same unoriginal presentations, if you’ve sat through one PowerPoint presentation, you’ve sat through them all!!. PowerPoint 2007 is actually very similar in layout to PowerPoint 2003. The menu items along the top are much more obvious than those in Word and because of this, the navigation is simple. As a limited user of PowerPoint, the only real noticeable difference from earlier versions is the inclusion of SmartArt. SmartArt basically allows you to group images together on a slide. This could actually be accomplished by creating the images individually but SmartArt does seem to do this in a much more efficient way.

To summarise, PowerPoint 2007 seems to have very few changes in it since PowerPoint 2003. If your main reason for upgrading to this version of Office is for PowerPoint then I would advise you not to bother as you will not be getting anything extra that you cannot already do.

Outlook

If you have a business email client on your office PC, the chances are that it will be Outlook (not to be confused with Outlook Express that used to get installed with Internet Explorer prior to Windows Vista). Outlook is an excellent piece of software for organising your appointments and task list as well as being the home for your email. As with PowerPoint, the 2007 version of Outlook offers very little in terms of enhancements from previous versions. I don’t really see this as a bad point though as I don’t think it actually needs enhancing. I find that Outlook gives me everything I need from an organiser/email client.

When you create appointments with Outlook, you are able to set reminders that will pop up a set time before the event, you then get the chance to dismiss this reminder so that it will never appear again or you can snooze it for a user defined duration. If you have a busy lifestyle this really is a godsend as it almost seamlessly manages your schedule and warns you if you double book. If you use Outlook in a business environment, you can even share calendars with your colleagues but as this requires Microsoft Exchange Server, it is not really a function the home user can make use of. If you use a web based mail provider such as hotmail or googlemail, you can still make use of Outlook although I would say that web based mail is best left on the web where you can retrieve it from anywhere. Once mail is downloaded into Outlook, then it is only available on that one computer.

Groove

Microsoft Groove 2007 is a new product in the Office suite. It is mainly aimed at business users who share a specific job role. With Groove you can share files, hold discussions and/or meetings in the form of a chat room style scenario. As I only use Office 2007 at home, I have never had any use for this software although, I can see its use and it would be a very valuable tool for our department which is based over several sites.

Infopath

Infopath is an electronic form designer. These forms can then be published either in infopath itself or via a web browser. This is a very powerful tool for capturing any data an organisation deems necessary. Data is captured in the industry standard XML format meaning that it can be analysed in almost any data driven application on the market today. Of course, Microsoft really want you to do this analysis in either Excel or Access so there are automatic integration options with these programs. I have dabbled with Infopath for a short time and whilst it is a very good way of capturing data for the everyday user, as an IT professional I prefer to write my own systems for performing this task as it gives me more control and scope to do exactly what I need.

Publisher

I have always seen Microsoft Publisher as a nice application for the home user. If you want to make invites for a party, thank you cards for Granny or a calendar filled with your kids photos, you won’t find a better application than this. There are however, a million and one other things you can do with publisher if you have the time and patience to sit and play around with it such as actually producing a professional looking flyer or newspaper.

Publisher 2007 actually feels completely different to the rest of the office suite. Just as you have got used to the new menu structure and the zones, Publisher goes back to the traditional menu approach which leaves you asking the question ‘What exactly has changed from the previous version’. This is a very valid question as I am still struggling to spot any differences. Even the file extensions still appear to be compatible with previous versions, again leaving me to question whether this is actually Publisher 2003, just with a new name. Saying that however, this is still a fun package to use and one that I always have a mess around with at Christmas time for example, just to see if I can come up with the perfect Christmas card although I always fail miserably due to my lack of creativity rather than any problem with the software.

Alternatives

Obviously at over £100 not everyone is going to want to pay for Microsoft Office, so what are the alternatives? Well you will be pleased to know that there is a very good competitor on the market called Open Office by Sun Microsystems (http://www.openoffice.org/). Open Office is a free alternative and contains most of the applications that Microsoft Office does (Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database, Presentations and Graphics), it is also Microsoft Office compatible which means that if someone sends you a document created in Microsoft Office, then it will open perfectly in Open Office. With over 100,000,000 downloads worldwide, Open Office is probably more popular than the Microsoft version and with the current cutbacks that companies are making, a lot of them are now turning to Open Office as there corporate software suite.

Verdict

There is no denying the quality of Microsoft Office 2007 but is it worth buying. The simple answer is yes, the more in-depth answer will depend on your own personal taste and requirements. Office 2007 represents a massive change from anything that you have seen before in the Office family and this change may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Some users will like it due to its intuitive grouping of functions whereas others will hate it as things have moved off the main toolbar and they are not always easy to find. The new document extensions will also catch a lot of people out. I have received so many emails with docx files attached but because we do not use Word 2007 at work I cannot open them. In my opinion, Microsoft have tried to be too clever with this change and it is going to annoy a lot of people now they have to keep remembering to change file formats.

There is a lot of software in this version that I will hardly use, if at all. For the home user, Microsoft Office 2007 Standard Edition will be a better choice, this contains all of the core applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) but doesn’t include the more specialised ones. Obviously, if you can get this software as part of a student or faculty agreement like I did then it becomes an absolute bargain.
 

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