Archive of posts tagged Office 2007

Reason #1 why I like Office 2007: The Ribbon

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The Ribbon is a bold move from Microsoft, but I believe it’s the right one. As I mentioned in a previous post, your first encounter with the new User Interface might be a rough one, as it IS different from the menu system.At very first sight, you might think there still is a menu in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as you still see “menu-like” words at the top, e.g. “View” or “Insert” or “Page Layout”. But when you click on them, they don’t open a menu, but the icons change at the top, giving you immediate access to the features you need the most.As an example, clicking “Insert” in Word 2007 will give you one-click access to the most common elements you are likely to insert in a document. Instead of going through a series of menu options to insert a Picture from your hard disk, you simply click the Picture icon.

Need to add the Page Number to your document? Simply click Page Number and you can immediately choose between some most common ways of formatting the page number. It really makes doing the most common things in Word, Excel and PowerPoint a lot easier and faster to find.

Bill Gates said during a keynote at PDC 05 that 9 out of 10 features that people request for the next version of Office… are already in the product. People just had difficulties finding them. A lot of the features were buried in submenus, obscure dialog boxes or task pane windows. The Ruler in Office 2007 makes finding a feature a lot easier, at least for most of the thing you’d like to do. It’s pretty well organized, and you find most items where you expect them to be.

I’ve been using the Ruler for about a month now, and I hate it when I have to go back to a menu-driven system. Yes, it does take some time to learn a new way of working, but it very quickly pays out: you can focus more on the document you’re creating or editing, instead of trying to find out how something works.

It’s not perfect, and some strange decisions were taken (why do I need to go to “View” to get to Macros?), but overall, this will improve your productivity.

Where is the ***-command?

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I’ll be talking about the Ribbon in Office 2007 in one of my next posts, as it is probably the most obvious and annoying changes… at first. In fact, I really like the bold move of the Microsoft Office team to get rid of the menu structure, but there is a steep learning curve.
When you first start using Office 2007 products, it really feels nice: the Ribbon feels intuitive, and you can quickly get started to create your document. But within minutes, you might feel lost: you are looking for a specific command and you simply can’t find it. The traditional menu structure no longer exists and what seemed trivial at first, now becomes a source of frustration and maybe even anger: the Ribbon does not seem to contain the command you’re looking for and the more you search for it, the more unreasonable the whole Ribbon idea seems.
Luckily there are quite a few ways to find what your looking for:

  • First of all, there is the Help. Help information in the Microsoft Office products have been constantly improved over the last couple of versions, and this release is no exception. If you don’t find a command, click the Help button at the right hand side (or press F1).
    Type what you are looking for, and in a lot of cases, the answer will be in the first couple of results.
    Example: You want to find the Help > About screen in Microsoft Word 2007. It does not seem be be anywhere in the Ribbon. Press F1, type “help about” and the first result gives you instructions on how to “Get the version number for your Office program and information about your computer”. (In this case, it’s not really in the Ribbon, but in the Microsoft Office Button > Word Options > Resources)
  • On the Office website, there are real cool interactive guides to quickly find your command: The guide opens with a familiar Office 2003 menu. Just click the menu or command you are looking for, and the tool will tell (and show!) you where it is in Office 2007. There’s a Word, Excel and PowerPoint version.
  • Finally, there is a lot of other Ribbon information available on the Office website. You can find a series of Workbooks with a mapping between the “old” Office 2003 menu structure and the new Ribbon in the Ribbon Mapping Workbooks for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

After about 2 weeks of using the new Office Ribbon, I really have learned to like it. It was a challenge to begin with, but I clearly think learning how to use the new Ribbon pays out. I can do quite a few common (and not so common) tasks in Office 2007 a lot faster than in 2003. Try it. You’ll be surprised.