Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft Office Standard 2007 is the essential software suite for homes and small businesses that enables you to quickly and easily create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and manage e-mail. The latest release features a new streamlined user interface that exposes commonly used and familiar commands, enhanced graphics and formatting capabilities that enable you to create high-quality documents, new time management tools to help manage your schedule, and more reliability and security such as an improved junk e-mail filter to reduce spam e-mail. With these enhancements, Office Standard 2007 makes it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done at home or work.

What's included in Office Standard 2007

• Excel 2007
• Outlook 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• Word 2007

Create High-Quality Documents
Office Standard 2007 simplifies the way home and small business users work with documents. The redesigned, results-oriented user interface helps you quickly and easily create high-quality documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Enhanced graphics and formatting capabilities help make your user experience more enjoyable and productive.

• New! Results-oriented user interface makes it easier to find and use the product features you use most to get the results you want.
• Improved! Enhanced formatting capabilities make it easier to consistently format documents.
• New! Text effects and diagram and graphics galleries give you the ability to preview and format items.
• Improved! Document Themes create a consistent appearance across Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.
• New! Save as Portable Document Format (PDF) or an XML Paper Specification (XPS) file option gives you the ability to share your documents, spreadsheets and presentations with people who may not have Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

New Results-Oriented User Interface
The richer, redesigned user interface reflects an overall effort by Microsoft to deliver a more user-driven product. Rather than rethinking the product from a feature-oriented viewpoint, Microsoft focused Office Home and Student 2007 on the user’s results-oriented perspective. The end product delivers one of the most significant makeovers in the history of the Microsoft Office system. The new user interface is more intuitive and offers more easily accessible features. It’s less about commands and more about results. At the same time, although the look is very new, its evolution from previous versions of the Microsoft Office system will make it feel extremely familiar.

Figure 1: Office Word 2007 task-based user interface

The new results-oriented interface significantly simplifies how you author documents by:

• Making the experience more predictable, with less-complicated features and less guesswork.
• Maximizing your workspace and being less intrusive by not popping up images and dialog boxes on top of your work.
• Putting a majority of the most commonly used commands on the first tab so you don’t have to dig for commands in lengthy drop-down menus.

Improved Advanced Formatting
With the addition of more consistent numbering, bullet, and table features in Office Home and Student 2007, you won’t have to waste time formatting and reformatting your Office Word 2007 documents. Office Home and Student 2007 simplifies document formatting by:

• Making it possible for you to create and apply Quick Styles for text and tables with a single click.
• Providing previews of your formatting changes.
• Maintaining formatting across Microsoft Office system programs when you copy text or tables from one program to another.
• Providing more consistent and stable bullet and number formatting.

Figure 2: Table formats in Office Word 2007

SmartArt Diagramming and Enhanced Charting Capabilities
The new SmartArt™ diagramming and enhanced charting capabilities in Office Home and Student 2007 applications make it easy to create great-looking diagrams and charts. Just choose the chart type, the layout, and the format from visual galleries of predefined options. Or take a bulleted list and convert it to a compelling diagram with just a couple of clicks. You can also reuse content by saving your favorite charts as chart templates. In addition, the SmartArt graphics capabilities have been enhanced so you can easily use professional effects such as shading, reflections, glow, transparency, and other 3-D effects.

Figure 3: Charting tools in Office Excel 2007

Improved Templates and New Fonts
New and improved out-of-the-box templates in Office Home and Student 2007 enable you to create professional-looking documents more quickly and easily. You can either get started with the templates that are included in the product or search the preformatted templates available at Microsoft Office Online. In addition, Office Home and Student 2007 includes new and improved fonts that make on-screen reading easier.

Figure 4: Slide templates and color gallery in Office PowerPoint 2007

Improved Document Themes
Document Themes is an improvement that helps you maintain a consistent look among your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. This predictability means that when you copy tables and objects between programs, the items maintain their appearance. As a result, working simultaneously with different programs becomes more consistent and less frustrating.

Figure 5: Quick Styles in Office Word 2007

New Live Preview and Galleries
Everyone wants to create the highest-quality documents possible in the shortest amount of time. Accomplishing this often requires experimenting with different styles and formats. Office Home and Student 2007 enables you to quickly preview proposed changes to your document. With Live Preview when in one of the galleries, you can actually view formatting choices right inside your document while you’re working on it, without having to repeatedly search through drop-down menus. By test-driving your proposed formatting, you can save time and experiment more easily. The end result is a quickly created document that looks the way you want it to look. These galleries can be found in Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, and Office PowerPoint 2007.

Save as PDF or XPS
Ensure broader distribution of your documents and presentations. New support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) file formats helps ensure broader distribution of your documents with others.* Now you can post your documents on the Internet or share them with others, knowing that users can view them regardless of the type of computer or programs they are using.

Figure 6: Word Art Gallery in Office PowerPoint 2007

New Custom Slide Layouts
The new Custom Slide Layouts feature in Office PowerPoint 2007 frees you from confining prepackaged layouts. Now you can quickly create and save information-rich layouts with multiple charts, tables, and text. You can then save these layouts as templates for future presentations.

Work with Enhanced Reliability and Security Features
Office Home and Student 2007 offers new and improved features such as automatic document recovery and Document Inspector that give you peace of mind by automatically recovering documents after a system failure and giving you the option to remove personally identifiable information from your documents before you share them with others. Digital Signature verifies that no one has altered or edited your document since you created it.

Improved Document Recovery Tool
The automatic document recovery tool in Office Home and Student 2007 helps protect your documents if your system suddenly fails. If a Microsoft Office system program encounters a problem or stops responding, you can now close the program in a controlled manner. The files you had open are analyzed for errors, and whenever possible, recovered. You can then view any repairs that were made to the files.

New Digital Signature
Office Home and Student 2007 helps you create a digital signature that lets others know that your document has not been modified since you created it. Simply add a signature line to each Word document. This line will require a digital signature for any of your documents that are edited by others. People reading digitally signed documents can easily verify that your document has not changed since it was signed.

New Document Inspector
The Office Home and Student 2007 Document Inspector provides an easy and efficient way to help protect your personal information. This tool automatically searches your documents for comments, revisions, tracked changes, headers and footers, and hidden text. You can delete your choice of personal information in a matter of seconds. When you distribute your documents, you can be confident that no unwanted personally identifiable or other information is accidentally included.

Figure 7: Document Inspector in Office Word 2007

Find Commands and Help More Easily
Office Home and Student 2007 offers an improved user interface that makes document creation easier, faster, and more intuitive. The new design emphasizes user efficiency and feature discoverability to help you quickly find relevant answers to your questions. Tutorials and templates help you get started and understand more about the software’s capabilities.

New Command Tabs
Most people use only a small percentage of the commands available in Microsoft Office system programs. With the new results-oriented interface in Office Home and Student 2007, you can learn more about the capabilities of the Microsoft Office system through command tabs, which replace the previous drop-down menus. Commonly used commands, once buried, are now available at your fingertips. You get access to the right tools when you need them, so you learn more and get the results you want.

Figure 8: Design command tab in Office PowerPoint 2007

Certain sets of commands are relevant only when editing objects of a particular type. These sets are known as contextual command tabs. The tabs change automatically depending upon the task that you are trying to complete.

Improved Tutorials
An improved Getting Started experience in Office Home and Student 2007 significantly reduces the learning curve for new users. Tutorials offer step-by-step instructions for using your Microsoft Office system software. The new Getting Started experience brings to the surface additional Help options, such as Office Online integration.

Enhanced ScreenTips
Office Home and Student 2007 offers larger, more informative ScreenTips than were available in previous releases of the Microsoft Office system. ScreenTips provide quick access to information about a command directly from the command’s location. By popping up when you rest your mouse pointer on any command, a ScreenTip often gives you enough information about a feature to enable you to use it immediately without further assistance. This capability gives you easy access to all of the functionality of the Microsoft Office system interface. As a result, you can save time and become more productive.

Figure 9: SmartArt ScreenTip in Office PowerPoint 2007

Improved Office Outlook 2007 Junk E-Mail Filter
Junk e-mail is time-consuming, annoying, and potentially dangerous for home and small business users. To address the flood of junk e-mail, Office Outlook 2007 offers an enhanced junk e-mail filter that helps reduce the amount of spam sent to Inboxes and better protects your computer against viruses sent through e-mail. This enhanced security feature applies to both e-mail messages and their attachments.

Figure 10: Junk e-mail filter in Office Outlook 2007

New Anti-Phishing Tools
Office Outlook 2007 provides new enhancements that help protect personal information by alerting home and small business users to potentially fraudulent e-mail messages sent to their inboxes. Fraudelent e-mail communications, known as “phishing,” attempt to trick you into providing bank, credit card, or other personal information. To provide more security, Office Outlook 2007 displays suspected phishing e-mail messages in plain text (no HTML or images), disables the hyperlinks, and provides a warning alert across the top of the message.

2007 Microsoft Office System Suites