Microsoft Office 2007 Is Coming!
The newest version of Office has been out a while. There are more programs
included in the standard suite, there's greater integration between programs
and there's an entirely new look to Office.
The design concept of drop-down menus has gone away. They've been
replaced by The Ribbon. The Ribbon (shown below for Excel) is a combination
of icons and drop-down icons representing various software functions
organized by task. In the Data tab, you can immediately see import data
functions (including import directly from SQL Server 2005) as well as
sorting and filtering functions that used to be hidden.
Almost all of the functions shown are available in Office 2003 (or Office
97 for many!) but they are so little used because no one seems to know they
exist let alone how to find them.
The Formulas tab is an
excellent example of how Microsoft has taken little-known and little-used
features and brought them into the light.
To the left you can see the Formulas tab has been activated. The function
wizard is available of course, but there are grouped drop-down icons that
allow you to look for a formula or function you need with just one click.
That's a real improvement over searching for formulas using Clippy.
If you'd like to take a test drive you can do it without downloading the
entire Beta version (it's over a gigabyte if you download everything!) You
can download a viewer program and interact with the various Office programs
using Microsoft's server.
Go to
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx and sign in
to take a look and go through the tutorials.