Terra Extraneus

Microsoft Office 2007 will be a “big, bold” leap forward from Office 2003. A significantly different look and feel will make the upgrade essential for most offices, but users may need some training to get comfortable with it.

Office 2007 remains on track for release at the end of the year, Microsoft said this week. It will be the first update to Office in more than four years. Microsoft also is racing to finish Windows Vista, the newest version of the PC operating platform since Windows XP in 2001. Although Microsoft would like to release Vista at the same time as Office 2007, all it is promising is that Vista will be released during 2007.

Office, of course, is Microsoft’s suite of productivity products, including, depending on which suite you buy, Word (word processing), Outlook (email and other tools), Excel (spreadsheet), Access (database), Publisher (page design) and PowerPoint (presentation). Although each of those programs can be purchased separately, many customers, especially business users, go for the package.

Microsoft intended to update Office in 2005, but the project has been pushed twice. Microsoft execs said this week the January 2007 release date remains firm.

One source estimates that about 40% of business desktops use Office 2003, and another 30% use Office 2000. That leaves 30% who don’t use Office at all, and another 30% who never made the last upgrade. But Office 2007 will include major changes to the package, and I speculate that at least half of business users and many home users will make the leap during 2007, 2008 and 2009.

What changes? The change getting the biggest attention is the replacement of toolbars and drop-down menus with the new “ribbon.” Rather than try to explain it, take a look. Here’s Microsoft’s preview of the Office 2007 ribbon. Here’s a 14-slide slideshow PC Magazine put together.

Purpose of the new look and feel is to make it easier for users to find and use the ever-growing arsenal of bells and whistles that Office offers. As Microsoft explains:

As we’ve added more and more features and functionality to the applications, it has become more challenging for people to find the software capabilities. For example, Word 1.0 had about 100 commands, and by using the menus you could see everything you could do. In comparison, Office Word 2007 has more than 1,500 commands. One of the things the new menus and toolbars do is help make those commands easier to find.

To make the myriad of tools and commands more functional, Office 2007 will use “contextual tabs.” Office already has a version of that, with different menu options grayed out when they are not applicable to what you are doing. Now the set of commands across the top of the screen will continually change to match whatever you are doing on screen.

Office 2007 also introduces “Galleries.” I think Galleries may turn out to be one of Office’s most popular new features. A “gallery” is just a “template” – but Galleries will automatically apply what you are doing to templates and cause various template options to appear on screen, so the user can just “pick and click,” without the need for detailed formatting instructions. If, for example, you want to put a footer on the page, you will just pick a footer from the Gallery, rather than type instructions into a footer menu box.

Michael J. Miller of PC Magazine has been using the Office 2007 beta for a while. He writes that the changes are “big” and “bold,” so much so that he wonders how much training will be required to make the switch.

The most obvious change in Office 2007 from Office 2003 is in the user interface. The new “ribbon UI” replaced the menu system that Microsoft has used since Office 95 … This is a much bolder look, with subsections that change depending on what you are doing. Beta 2 updates the graphics a bit and restores some of the keyboard shortcuts. I still think the change in UI is so big that it may well cause a training issue in some companies. … The more I use the “ribbon,” the more I like it, particularly in Word.

If you want to be an early adopter, Bill Gates announced this week that the beta version of Office 2007 is now available to the public for download. If you don’t want to download or install anything just yet, in June Microsoft will start offering an online “test drive.”

Among other Office 2007 features/changes:

• Improved security and spam filtering.

• Word, Excel and PowerPoint files will be created and stored in XML format, a step toward making the current file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) obsolete. That will make it possible to open the same file with Office, Excel or PowerPoint. (Old files will still be viewable in the new programs, and new files will be viewable in older versions of the programs).

• The XML format and a built-in zip function will reduce file size by as much as 50% or more. That will ease the strain on hard drive capacity, as well as broadband requirements when sending files by email attachment. The zip/unzip process will be “invisible” and automatic.

• Word gets a blogging tool, enabling a user to write a blog post in Word and post it directly to a blog.

• PowerPoint gets better (and much needed) graphic tools.

• Search functions will be more accessible and more inherent to the Office experience (as Microsoft tries to keep up with Google).

System requirements? You have two concerns: your hardware and your version of Windows. So far as the hardware goes, if you’re running Office 2003 now, you will be able to run Office 2007. If you are running Office XP or Office 2000, then it’s not such a sure thing. Specifically, Office 2007 minimum requirements include a 500 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, and a DVD drive. A 1 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM will be necessary to run Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager. Regarding Windows, Office 2007 will require at least Windows XP, although it is designed for optimum performance with Windows Vista.

Here’s Microsoft’s page on system requirements.

How much will it cost? That depends on what you want. Office 2007 will be sold in 7 different suites, from Office Basic, which will only be available as a pre-installed product, to Office Professional Plus and Office Enterprise. The first level above Basic is Office Home and Student, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint – but not Outlook. Home and Student will go for $149. Office Standard edition, which includes Outlook, will sell for $399 new or $239 upgrade.

If you do much email, then you probably need Outlook. Interestingly, the Basic version will include Word, Excel and Outlook. For many of us, that’s all we really care about. Rather than spend $239 or $399 for Office Standard, it may be a smarter move to just buy a new computer in 2007 that has Office Basic pre-installed.

Here’s a comparison of the 7 different Office suites.

Here is more info on pricing.