I use Microsoft Word a lot. I’ve used one version or another for many years now. With it, I’ve written countless short stories and a few novel attempts (some better than others; one soon to be published). I’ve written letters to relatives, publishers and friends. I’ve designed business cards. I’ve created party invitations. I’ve produced a weekly society newsletter complete with images, headlines and articles. I’ve got bored through school homework, university coursework and eventually my masters project. I’ve typed up presentation notes and revision guides. I’ve sorted out mail merges, meeting agendas and project documentation for companies I’ve done various temp work for. Now, I use it pretty much daily for work. I’m even using Word to write this review.
Needless to say, I was pretty familiar with the older versions of Microsoft Word. Last autumn, I started a new job and, with the position, came a shiny new computer with shiny new software. That included the most recent version of Office: Microsoft Office 2007.
My first reaction when I opened up the new version of Word was a mixture of panic and confusion. Where were my menus? If you’ve used Microsoft products a while there are some things you come to expect, like a file menu up in the top left. That’s gone.
Office 2007 came with a complete overhaul of the user interface. Apparently the reasoning behind this was that when Microsoft did customer feedback sessions, they had loads of people saying, “It would be great if Office had this feature,” about features that were already in there. So they came to the conclusion that they needed to make it easier for people to see what features were in the program and use them. They spent a fortune on user testing and design work to create a new tab-based interface to surface capabilities that were previously hidden.
From what I’ve seen, there are two basic reactions to the
new layout. Those people who don’t know much about Word and who’ve only ever used basic features seem to really like the new interface. Suddenly they can see all sorts of things they didn’t know existed before. Those of us who knew the old version really well go, “But I know where everything was before,” and get confused hunting for features that we previously had shortcuts to. I was definitely one of the latter. And then there’s my mum, who’s self-diagnosed Icon Blind who can’t get over the fact the menu button doesn’t have “file” written on it anymore.
It took me surprisingly little time to get over my confusion. The new interface really is straightforward and it took me only a handful of days to get as comfortable with the 2007 version as I had been with my old one.
Instead of a list of menus along the top of the screen, you see tabs. These tabs are labelled with things like “Home,” “Insert” and “Page Layout.” Within each of these tabs is a selection of different areas. For example, in the home tab, the sections are Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles and Editing. Within each of these sections are buttons and controls. So, within Font, you’ll see a drop down menu for changing the font of the text, buttons for changing the size, the familiar buttons for making text bold, italic, underlined and so on.
It’s pretty easy to work out where to go to use various features or change settings. For example, if I want to insert a picture into a document, I go to the insert tab and click the button labelled “picture” (which has a picture of a... well, a picture) in the illustrations section. Each of the buttons has an image and a text label. The icons mean that it’s possible to get a very quick feel for where things are. But, if you’re like my mum, you’ve still got the text to read. Because everything’s displayed there in the tabs, you don’t have to dig down through menu after menu trying to figure out where to change settings.
When you start doing more things in your documents, more tabs can appear. If I insert a table into a document, a pair of tabs labelled “Table Tools” will appear with controls of design and layout. Similarly, if I insert a picture, I’ll get a tab full of controls for formatting it. Word presents you with the features when they become relevant, but not until then, so you’re not drowning in buttons that you don’t want.
As with older versions of Word, this is an excellent program for creating documents of all sorts. As a word processing tool, it’s second to none. I have tried Open Office, Star Office, Works, Google Apps and Lyx for document processing at one time or another (sometimes because I thought I’d try a cheaper option, sometimes because they were installed on university computers, once because I was applying for a job at Google). The only one of those others I would consider using again would be Lyx, which is a LaTeX editor and so potentially useful if you want to do very precise things with layouts and formulae. For anything else, give me Word!
As well as documents with straightforward text, Word has a lot of capabilities. You can include tables with formulae run on the entries. You can insert images and charts. You can add header and footers to documents – for example if you wanted to have your name on every page. You can include the date, automatically calculated. You can add a table of contents that you can update with a click of a button if chapters move onto new pages. You can handle citations and references. You can bookmark parts of the document or set hyperlinks to jump between different sections. You can set up mail merges to add names and address to letters and envelopes from a database. You can run spelling and grammar checks. You can use a thesaurus to check for synonyms of words or even translate sections into other languages. You can track changes to see who’s altered what in a group document or compare different versions. You can even write macros in Visual Basic if you want to run code inside a document.
Sound like a lot? It is. And that’s just a set of examples. There are reasons why Word is such a well-known program for document processing. It’s not just for typing up straight-forward text files anymore.
Most of the capabilities of Word 2007 were there in older versions, but there are a couple of new features which I think are worth highlighting. One is style preview. In the home tab, there are options to change the style of the text, which can change size, colour, spacing and more on a selection of text. If you move your mouse over these options, the text you currently have selected will show that style. When you move your mouse away, things go back to the way they were before. This means you don’t have to select different options to decide which is best. Just by hovering over them, you get a glimpse of how things would look. You can add your own styles to the options here as well.
Another feature I like is the ability to compress pictures. When I designed the newsletter for a student society, I tended to include loads of images. Some of these could be quite big pictures. Normally, when you change the size of a picture in Word, it just changes the size on the page, not the number of pixels in the image. This means you can get some very large files. If I wanted to get the files as small as possible, I would have to work out the size I wanted the image to be, edit it in an image editor to shrink the picture and then insert it into Word. Now, I can insert a picture, change the size and then compress it. This makes things incredibly quicker but still prevents my hard drive getting full.
On the subject of file size, it’s worth noting that 2007 Office documents take up less space than older versions. The documents are now saved as Open XML format. If you’re not at all technical, that probably doesn’t mean much to you. Basically, it means that the files take up less space on the computer and that they can be opened in other programs. So if I write a document in Word, I can send it to other people and they can read it in different programs.
Word is an extensible program. This means that software writers can create tools that sit on top of Office and add to the capabilities. One I’ve seen is Community Clips, which is a tool for recording your screen to enable people to create demos. In one of my temp jobs, I saw a tool built on Office to display chemical structures for compounds. I don’t know how many add-ons there are, but I would guess several hundred. They will vary in capabilities, cost and quality.
There are also links to other Microsoft products. At work, we have SharePoint Server, which I’ve written about in another review. This is, among other things, a great collaboration and document management tool. You can access quite a lot of SharePoint’s features from within Word. I can create a SharePoint document workspace to collaborate on a document, add users to that site and monitor activities all from within Word. I can set document metadata, start SharePoint workflows, carry out workflow tasks, save to a document library and more from within Office.
You’ve probably got the idea by now that I think this is a fantastic product. I explained that I started using this product for work, but I also have a home computer. Among other things, I use my home computer for writing novels, stories and Ciao reviews. I was using an older version of Office on that computer and Office 2007 on my work computer. I came to prefer the interface of Office 2007 to such an extent that it was really annoying me that I had to keep switching back to the old version on my home computer.
So I went and bought a copy of Office for my home computer.
There are various options when buying Office. You can buy some of the individual programs on their own, or you can buy Office suites which combined several of the products. The cheapest is Office Home and Student, which comes with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. The most expensive is Office Ultimate, which comes with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Groove, Publisher and InfoPath.
The program comes with an excellent help file and online help. This is searchable and has a clear contents menu. You can also access help on specific topics from within certain parts of the program. For example, if I have the fonts menu open and click for help from there, I will be taken straight to topics to do with fonts.
There are loads of online guides and demos available. If you go to YouTube and do a search, you will find videos of how to do various cool features. There are also blogs, guides, forums and so on to give you whatever information you're looking for.
I've not had any problems with this program. I've not had it crash or break. This install was smooth sailing. In short, it's run exactly as well as I could have hoped.
Word is more expensive than some of the other document processing programs out there but my view is that it’s worth every penny of that additional cost. If my home computer blows up and I need to get a new one, Office will be the first program I will get to put on it.
If you want to do any sort of document editing, give Word a try. You won’t regret it.
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Office Word 2007 helps people create professional-looking documents by presenting a ... more
comprehensive set of writing tools in a new user interface. Rich review, commenting, and comparison capabilities help you quickly gather and manage feedback from
Postage & Packaging: Free Delivery Availability: 3-7 days
Microsoft Office Word 2007 is a powerful authoring program that gives you the ability to ... more
create and share documents by combining a comprehensive set of writing tools with an easy-to-use interface. Microsoft Office Word 2007 helps information workers cr...
Postage & Packaging: £3.25 Availability: Next Day Delivery
Advantages: slick, feature packed Disadvantages: expensive, especially if all you use a word processor for is typing a few lettters
ukratcatcher 30.06.2007 (30.06.2007)
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Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: somewhat helpful
Review of Microsoft Office Word 2007
Advantages: slick, feature packed Disadvantages: expensive, especially if all you use a word processor for is typing a few lettters
ukratcatcher 30.06.2007 (30.06.2007)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: somewhat helpful
Review of Microsoft Office Word 2007
Advantages: New User Interface increases productivity, fresh look Disadvantages: Not Worth the Money to Upgrade from 2003, not compatible with 2003 version
Jun 2nd, 2009
exceptional by (19%):
very helpful by (81%):
