Product Review:

Microsoft Office 2007 Professional

When you hear someone mention Microsoft Office you immediately know what program suite they are talking about. Almost everyone who has used a windows pc at one point or another has used some version of office. I was currently using Microsoft Office 2003. This version of office seems to have made more improvements than any other upgrade in the suites life. So the question is should you upgrade if your running 2003?

The first step is getting past the learning curve. People had told me that this version of Office was so different it would take awhile to get used to it. I agree it’s different, but it’s different in such as smart way that learning the new interface is really easy. Microsoft calls it the Ribbon interface. It gives you quick access to things that in previous versions would have you going through countless windows to find. Microsoft Outlook get’s built-in indexing a RSS feeds, which is a feature that should have been there a while ago.

Another really interesting feature is that Microsoft has gone to an XML based document format. Which from what I have read makes getting a macro virus a thing of the past. One thing that Microsoft really did right is made it easy to share files among versions. If you give someone a file that you created from the new XML based format, as soon as they open it in Office 2003, it will prompt them to download a conversion package that will enable them to open it. It’s a pretty big file size but it’s worth it.

I can’t say enough about how much I like the new interface. It makes using this program easier. Everything is placed in such a way that is very intuitive. Depending on which version of Office you get, each one comes with different sets of applications. Even if you get the basic version you’re still getting the programs most users will use which is Word, Excel and Outlook.

Let’s take a look at each of the programs. Microsoft Word is still the program you have used in the past. But with the new interface it makes things much clearer. One feature that people have wanted for years is now there and that is a live word count. It’s one of those things that make you wonder why it was not implemented sooner. Microsoft Excel has really cool new graphics for doing charts. Plus the amount of rows available now has been bumped up to one million. So if you need a very large database Microsoft has you covered there as well. For Outlook I already talked about some of the new features. Everything again is improved with the addition of the ribbon interface. Finnally there is powerpoint. They have added something called SmartArt diagramming which allows you to easily make high impact diagrams.

Overall I think Microsoft has really done an amazing job with this suite. Even if you have 2003 this would be a worthy update. With its new interface and slick graphics you would be hard pressed to find a better office suite.

8.5 out of 10