Microsoft Office 2007


Microsoft Office 2007 is a version of Microsoft Office, a family of office suites and productivity software for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007, the same respective release dates of Windows Vista. It was preceded by Office 2003 and succeeded by Office 2010.
Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars. Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. The new formats are intended to facilitate the sharing of information between programs, improve security, reduce the size of documents, and enable new recovery scenarios.
Office 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, or a later version of Windows; it is the last version of Microsoft Office to run on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is Office SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports Excel Services, a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.
With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.
Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite, as Windows Speech Recognition was integrated into Windows Vista. Windows XP users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.
According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed.
Mainstream support for Office 2007 ended on October 9, 2012, and extended support ended on October 10, 2017.

Development

The first beta of Microsoft Office 2007, referred to as Beta-1 in emails sent to a small number of testers, was released on November 16, 2005. The Beta-1 Technical Refresh was released to testers on March 13, 2006. The Technical Refresh fixed issues in installing with Windows Vista build 5308.
Microsoft revealed the ribbon on March 9, 2006 at CeBIT in Germany.
Office 2007 Beta 2 was announced by Bill Gates at WinHEC 2006, and was initially released to the public at no cost from Microsoft's web site. However, because of an unprecedented number of downloads, a fee of $1.50 was introduced for each product downloaded after August 2, 2006. The beta was updated on September 14, 2006 in Beta 2 Technical Refresh. It included an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality.
The beta versions continued to function in a reduced functionality mode after February 1, 2007. If users downloaded the Technical Refresh to update Beta 2, then users could use its full functionality until March 31, 2007 for client products and May 15, 2007 for server products. The Beta program ended on November 8, 2006, when Microsoft declared the product "Released to Manufacturing" and started manufacturing the final product. After RTM, the availability of the beta download ended.
Office 2007 was released to volume licensing customers on November 30, 2006, and to the general public on January 30, 2007. Mainstream support ended on October 9, 2012. Extended support ended on October 10, 2017.

Service packs

Since the initial release of Microsoft Office 2007, three service packs containing updates as well as additional features have been released. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Packs are cumulative, so previous Service Packs are not a prerequisite for installation.
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 was released on December 11, 2007. Official documentation claims that SP1 is not simply a rollup of publicly released patches, but that it also contains fixes for a total of 481 issues throughout the entire Office suite. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 was released on April 28, 2009. It added improved support for ODF, XPS and PDF standards, and included several bug fixes. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 was released on October 25, 2011.

Editions

Programs and FeaturesBasicHome and StudentStandardSmall BusinessProfessionalProfessional PlusEnterpriseUltimate
Licensing schemeOEMRetail and OEMRetail and volumeRetail, OEM and volumeRetail and OEMVolumeVolumeRetail
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
Outlook
Publisher
Access
InfoPath
Communicator
Groove
OneNote
Project
SharePoint Designer
Visio
Office Customization Tool 1
Upgrade MSRP$239.95$279.95$329.95$539.95
Full MSRP$149.95$399.95$449.95$499.95$679.95

Volume licensing

Eligible employees of companies with volume license agreements for Microsoft Office receive additional tools, including enterprise content management, electronic forms, Information Rights Management capabilities and copies for use on a home computer.

New features

User interface

The new user interface, officially known as Fluent User Interface, has been implemented in the core Microsoft Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and in the item inspector used to create or edit individual items in Outlook. These applications have been selected for the UI overhaul because they center around document authoring. The rest of the applications in the suite changed to the new UI in subsequent versions. The default font used in this edition is Calibri. Original prototypes of the new user interface were revealed at MIX 2008 in Las Vegas.

Office button

The Office 2007 button, located on the top-left of the window, replaces the File menu and provides access to functionality common across all Office applications, including opening, saving, printing, and sharing a file. It can also close the application. Users can also choose color schemes for the interface. A notable accessibility improvement is that the Office button follows Fitts's law.

Ribbon

The ribbon, a panel that houses a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organizes commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The ribbon is present in Microsoft Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Access 2007 and some Outlook 2007 windows. The ribbon is not user customizable in Office 2007. Each application has a different set of tabs that exposes functions that the application offers. For example, while Excel has a tab for the graphing capabilities, Word does not; instead it has tabs to control the formatting of a text document. Within each tab, various related options may be grouped together. The ribbon is designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible with fewer mouse clicks as compared to the menu-based UI used prior to Office 2007. Moving the mouse scroll wheel while on any of the tabs on the ribbon cycles—through the tabs. The ribbon can be minimized by double clicking the active section's title, such as the Home text in the picture below. Office 2007 does not natively support removing, modifying or replacing ribbon. Third party add-ins, however, can bring menus and toolbars back to Office 2007 or customize the ribbon commands. Add-ins that restore menus and toolbars include Classic Menu for Office, ToolbarToggle, and Ubitmenu. Others like RibbonCustomizer enable the customization of ribbons. Office 2010 does allow user customization of the ribbon out of the box.

Contextual Tabs

Some tabs, called Contextual Tabs, appear only when certain objects are selected. Contextual Tabs expose functionality specific only to the object with focus. For example, selecting a picture brings up the Pictures tab, which presents options for dealing with the picture. Similarly, focusing on a table exposes table-related options in a specific tab. Contextual Tabs remain hidden except when an applicable object is selected.

Live Preview

Microsoft Office 2007 also introduces a feature called Live Preview, which temporarily applies formatting on the focused text or object when any formatting button is moused-over. The temporary formatting is removed when the mouse pointer is moved from the button. This allows users to have a preview of how the option would affect the appearance of the object, without actually applying it.

Mini Toolbar

The new Mini Toolbar is a small toolbar with basic formatting commands that appears within the document editing area, much like a context menu. When the mouse selects part of the text, Mini Toolbar appears close to selected text. It remains semi-transparent until the mouse pointer is hovered on it, to avoid obstructing what is underneath. Mini Toolbar can also be made to appear by right-clicking in the editing area or via key on keyboard, in which case it appears near the cursor, above or below the traditional context menu. Mini Toolbar is not customizable in Office 2007, but can be turned off.

Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access toolbar sits in the title bar and serves as a repository of most used functions, such as save, undo/redo and print. It is customizable, although this feature is limited, compared to toolbars in previous Office versions. Any command available in the entire Office application can be added to the Quick Access toolbar, including commands not available on the ribbon as well as macros. Keyboard shortcuts for any of the commands on the toolbar are also fully customizable, similar to previous Office versions.

Other UI features

SmartArt, found under the Insert tab in the ribbon in PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook, is a new group of editable and formatted diagrams. There are 115 preset SmartArt graphics layout templates in categories such as list, process, cycle, and hierarchy. When an instance of a SmartArt is inserted, a Text Pane appears next to it to guide the user through entering text in the hierarchical levels. Each SmartArt graphic, based on its design, maps the text outline, automatically resized for best fit, onto the graphic. There are a number of "quick styles" for each graphic that apply largely different 3D effects to the graphic, and the graphic's shapes and text can be formatted through shape styles and WordArt styles. In addition, SmartArt graphics change their colors, fonts, and effects to match the document's theme.

File formats

Office Open XML

Microsoft Office 2007 introduced a new file format, called Office Open XML, as the default file format. Such files are saved using an extra X letter in their extension. However, it can still save documents in the old format, which is compatible with previous versions. Alternatively, Microsoft has made available a free add-on known as the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack that lets Office 2000, XP, and 2003 open, edit, and save documents created under the newer 2007 format.
Office Open XML is based on XML and uses the ZIP file container. According to Microsoft, documents created in this format are up to 75% smaller than the same documents saved with previous Microsoft Office file formats, owing to the ZIP data compression.
Files containing macros are saved with an extra M letter in their extension instead.

PDF

Initially, Microsoft promised to support exporting to Portable Document Format in Office 2007. However, due to legal objections from Adobe Systems, Office 2007 originally did not offer PDF support out of the box, but rather as a separate free download. However, starting with Service Pack 2, Office allows users to natively export PDF files.

XPS

Office 2007 documents can also be exported as XPS documents. This is part of Service Pack 2 and prior to that, was available as a free plug-in in a separate download.

OpenDocument

Microsoft backs an open-source effort to support OpenDocument in Office 2007, as well as earlier versions, through a converter add-in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and also a command-line utility. As of 2008, the project supports conversion between ODF and Office Open XML file formats for all three applications. According to ODF Alliance this support falls short and substantial improvements are still needed for interoperability in real-world situations.
Third-party plugins able to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format are available as a separate download.
Office 2007 Service Pack 2 adds native support for the OpenDocument Format. The ODF Alliance has released test results on ODF support of Office 2007 SP2, concluding that Office ODF support, both SP2 and other add-ons, have "serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the marketplace, especially governments, is demanding". Particularly, SP2 has no support for encrypted ODF files and has limited interoperability with other ODF spreadsheet implementations.
The ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument standard specifies encryption of files, which is based on sha1, Blowfish, and RFC 2898.
Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 does not support reading and writing encrypted ODF files. Users are presented with a message: “cannot use password protection using the ODF format.”
The ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument standard has no spreadsheet formula language included in the standard specification. Office 2007 SP2 uses the spreadsheet formula language specified in the ISO/IEC 29500 Office Open XML open standard when creating ODF documents. According to the ODF Alliance report "ODF spreadsheets created in Excel 2007 SP2 do not in fact conform to ODF 1.1 because Excel 2007 incorrectly encodes formulas with cell addresses. Section 8.3.1 of ODF 1.1 says that addresses in formulas "start with a ""." In Excel 2007 cell addresses were not enclosed with the necessary square brackets." The ISO/IEC 26300 specification states that the semantics and the syntax depends on the used namespace, which is implementation dependent, leaving the syntax implementation defined as well.
Microsoft stated that they consider adding support for an official ODF formula language, once a future version of the ISO/IEC 26300 standard specification includes one.
Microsoft's ODF spreadsheet support in SP2 is not fully inter-operable with other implementations of OpenDocument, such as the IBM Symphony, which use the non-standardized OpenOffice.org 2.x formula language, and OpenOffice.org 3.x, which uses a draft of OpenFormula. The company had previously reportedly stated that "where ODF 1.1 is ambiguous or incomplete, the Office implementation can be guided by current practice in OpenOffice.org, mainly, and other implementations including KOffice and AbiWord. Peter Amstein and the Microsoft Office team are reluctant to make liberal use of extension mechanisms, even though provided in ODF 1.1. They want to avoid all appearance of an embrace-extend attempt."
The EU investigated Microsoft Office OpenDocument Format support to see if it provided consumers greater choice.

Metadata

In Office 2007, Microsoft introduced the Document Inspector, an integral metadata removal tool that strips Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents of information such as author name and comments and other "metadata".

User assistance system

In Microsoft Office 2007, the Office Assistants were eliminated in favour of a new online help system. One of its features is the extensive use of Super Tooltips, which explain in about one paragraph what each function performs. Some of them also use diagrams or pictures. These appear and disappear like normal tooltips, and replace normal tooltips in many areas. The Help content also directly integrates searching and viewing Office Online articles.

Collaboration features

SharePoint

Microsoft Office 2007 includes features geared towards collaboration and data sharing. As such, Microsoft Office 2007 features server components for applications such as Excel, which work in conjunction with SharePoint Services, to provide a collaboration platform. SharePoint works with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which is used to host a SharePoint site, and uses IIS and ASP.NET 2.0. Excel server exposes Excel Services, which allows any worksheet to be created, edited and maintained via web browsers. It features Excel Web Access, the client-side component which is used to render the worksheet on a browser, Excel Calculation Service which is the server side component which populates the worksheet with data and perform calculations, and Excel Web Services that extends Excel functionalities into individual web services. SharePoint can also be used to host Word documents for collaborative editing, by sharing a document. SharePoint can also be used to hold PowerPoint slides in a Slide Library, from which the slides can be used as a formatting template. It also notifies users of a slide automatically in case the source slide is modified. Also by using SharePoint, PowerPoint can manage shared review of presentations. Any SharePoint hosted document can be accessed from the application which created the document or from other applications such as a browser or Microsoft Office Outlook.

Groove

Microsoft Office 2007 also includes Groove, which brings collaborative features to a peer-to-peer paradigm. Groove can host documents, including presentations, workbooks and others, created in Microsoft Office 2007 application in a shared workspace, which can then be used in collaborative editing of documents. Groove can also be used in managing workspace sessions, including access control of the workspace. To collaborate on one or more documents, a Workspace must be created, and then those who are to work on it must be invited. Any file shared on the workspace are automatically shared among all participants. The application also provides real-time messaging, including one-to-one as well as group messaging, and presence features, as well as monitoring workspace activities with alerts, which are raised when pre-defined set of activities are detected. Groove also provides features for conflict resolution for conflicting edits. Schedules for a collaboration can also be decided by using a built-in shared calendar, which can also be used to keep track of the progress of a project. However, the calendar is not compatible with Microsoft Outlook.

Themes and Quick Styles

Microsoft Office 2007 places more emphasis on Document Themes and Quick Styles. The Document Theme defines the colors, fonts and graphic effects for a document. Almost everything that can be inserted into a document is automatically styled to match the overall document theme creating a consistent document design. The new Office Theme file format is shared between Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook email messages. Similar themes are also available for data reports in Access and Project or shapes in Visio.
Quick Styles are galleries with a range of styles based on the current theme. There are quick styles galleries for text, tables, charts, SmartArt, WordArt and more. The style range goes from simple/light to more graphical/darker.

Application-specific changes

Word

Microsoft Office Outlook can also include an optional Business Contact Manager which allows management of business contacts and their sales and marketing activities. Phone calls, e-mails, appointments, notes and other business metrics can be managed for each contact. It can also keep a track of billable time for each contact on the Outlook Calendar. Based on these data, a consolidated report view can be generated by Microsoft Office Outlook with Business Contact Manager. The data can be further analyzed using Microsoft Office Excel. This data can also be shared using SharePoint Services.

Excel

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is new addition to the Office suite, replacing discontinued FrontPage for users of SharePoint. People who don't use SharePoint can use Microsoft Expression Web

SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows sharing and collaborative editing of Office 2007 documents. It allows central storage of documents and management of Office documents, throughout the enterprise. These documents can be accessed either by the applications which created them, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, or a web browser. Documents can also be managed through pre-defined policies that let users create and publish shared content, through a SharePoint site.
SharePoint Server allows searching of all Office documents which are being managed by it, centrally, thereby making data more accessible. It also provides access control for documents. Specialized server components can plug into the SharePoint Server to extend the functionality of the server, such as Excel Services exposing data analysis services for Excel services. Data from other data sources can also be merged with Office data.
SharePoint also lets users personalize the SharePoint sites, filtering content they are interested in. SharePoint documents can also be locally cached by clients for offline editing; the changes are later merged.

Forms Server 2007

Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 allows InfoPath forms to be accessed and filled out using any browser, including mobile phone browsers. Forms Server 2007 also supports using a database or other data source as the back-end for the form. Additionally, it allows centralized deployment and management of forms. Forms Server 2007 hosted forms also support data validation and conditional formatting, as does their InfoPath counterpart. It also supports advanced controls like Repeating section and Repeating table. However, some InfoPath controls cannot be used if it must be hosted on a Forms server.

Groove Server 2007

Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 is for centrally managing all deployments of Microsoft Office Groove 2007 in the enterprise. It enables using Active Directory for Groove user accounts, and create Groove Domains, with individual policy settings. It allows Groove workspaces to be hosted at the server, and the files in the workspaces made available for collaborative editing via the Groove client. It also includes the Groove Server Data Bridge component to allow communication between data stored at both Groove clients and servers and external applications.

Project Server 2007

Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 allows one to centrally manage and coordinate projects. It allows budget and resource tracking, and activity plan management. The project data and reports can also be further analyzed using Cube Building Service. The project management data can be accessed from a browser as well.

Project Portfolio Server 2007

Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 allows creation of a project portfolio, including workflows, hosted centrally, so that the information is available throughout the enterprise, even from a browser. It also aids in centralized data aggregation regarding the project planning and execution, and in visualizing and analyzing the data to optimize the project plan. It can also support multiple portfolios per project, to track different aspects of it. It also includes reporting tools to create consolidated reports out of the project data.

PerformancePoint Server 2007

Microsoft PerformancePoint Server allows users to monitor, analyze, and plan their business as well as drive alignment, accountability, and actionable insight across the entire organization. It includes features for scorecards, dashboards, reporting, analytics, budgeting and forecasting, among others.

Removed features

The following Office 2003 features were removed in Office 2007:

Ribbons

Even though the ribbon can be hidden, PC World wrote that the new "ribbon" interface crowds the Office work area, especially for notebook users. Others have called its large icons distracting. Essentially, the GUI-type interface of the ribbon contrasts sharply with the older menus that were organized according to the typical functions undertaken in paper-based offices: for instance, the old "File" menu dealt with opening, naming, saving, and printing a file, and the old "Edit" menu dealt with making changes to the content of the file. As a result, users who were more familiar with the logic of the old menus would be somewhat frustrated with the new, more visually oriented ribbon. PC World has stated that upgrading to Office 2007 presents dangers to certain data, such as templates, macros, and mail messages. The ribbon cannot be moved from the top to the side of the page, as floating toolbars could be.
Some users with experience using previous versions of Microsoft Office have complained about having to find features in the ribbon. Others state that having learnt to use the new interface, it has improved the speed with which "professional-looking" documents can be created. Microsoft has released a series of small programs, help sheets, videos and add-ins to help users learn the new interface more quickly.

Patenting controversy

Microsoft contractor Mike Gunderloy left Microsoft partially over his disagreement with the company's "sweeping land grab" including its attempt to patent the ribbon interface. He says "Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans." He says that by leaving Microsoft, he is “no longer contributing to the eventual death of programming.”

Office Open XML

The new XML-based document file format in Microsoft Office 2007 is incompatible with previous versions of Microsoft Office unless an add-on is installed for the older version.
The Microsoft Word 2007 equation editor, which uses a form of MathML called Office MathML, is also incompatible with that of Microsoft Word 2003 and previous versions. Upon converting Microsoft Word 2007.docx files to.doc files, equations are rendered as graphics. On June 6, 2007, Inera Inc. revealed that Science and Nature refused to accept manuscripts prepared in Microsoft Word 2007.docx format; subsequently Inera Inc. informed Microsoft that Microsoft Word 2007's file format impairs usability for scholarly publishing. Nature still does not support Office Open XML format; Science however, accepts this format but discourages its use.

Bibliographies

The new Word 2007 features for bibliographies only support a small number of fixed citation styles. Using XSLT, new styles can be added. Some extra styles, such as the standard Association for Computing Machinery publication format, are made freely available by third parties.