If the changes in Windows Vista make you shrug, then you’ll be interested to know that the new version of Microsoft’s Office 2007 is the biggest rethinking of the way the productivity suite looks to users in the past 20 years.
For power users of Office, that could make you cry for a few weeks. Microsoft has fiddled with a lot of those interfaces and tasks, like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, that you’ve memorized for years. There is no “classic” interface on programs like Word in the new Office suite, and you’ll have to get used to something new.
I like many of these changes, but users could have a love-hate reaction based on their feelings about relearning programs that they had mastered. You can still use keyboard commands, like CRTL-X for cutting. But you won’t find those functions in precisely the same locations anymore. You can get Office 2007 for either Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Microsoft decided it had to do something about “feature creep,” the tendency to add features to the products until they were labeled “bloatware.” The original Word had 150 commands. By 2003, the last version of Word, it had grown to 1,500. The obscure feature that I learned while writing my last book was the “index” command that would allow you to highlight a word and then automatically put it into an index for the book.
Here’s a rundown of some of the key changes:
Word: In the new version, there is a new “ribbon,” or a wider command strip at the top of Word that has a bunch of icons and menus for the functions that people use 90 percent of the time, such as “paste,” “copy” and “cut.” On the ribbon are “tabs” that you can select such as “home” that present a wider choice of related tasks you can get to quickly. Click on the insert tab and the ribbon transforms so that it lists icons for everything you might want to insert into a page, from pictures to clip art. There’s a button for counting the number of words in a document on the ribbon now under the review tab. A contextual spell checker will now catch errors related to homonyms, like “roam” or “Rome.”
If you hover over any icon or menu with the mouse cursor, a “help” window will open. It will explain the function and show a little graphic of how it works. When you’re inserting a picture, you now see a window appear that gives you different layout options on where to center the picture on the page. If you want the photo on the left, you click on that image and Word automatically formats the page for you. These features are already in the product, but now you don’t need to memorize the commands to make it happen. If you click on a picture in a document, the ribbon changes to present icons and commands related to picture editing.
One other feature is Word’s ability to create a page and then directly publish it to a blog in the exact way that you’ve laid it out. Even if your blogging tool, such as the WordPress tool we use, isn’t made by Microsoft, Word should be smart enough to format it in the right way so it will appear the same way on the actual blog post.
With the Excel spreadsheet, now you can have an easier time tracking the numbers and column categories in a large spreadsheet. Before, you had to memorize a particular header as you looked down a long list of numbers. Now, if you scroll down to a new page, Excel will repeat the header name again for you at the top of the screen so you won’t mix up columns so easily. Excel allows you to visualize different ways of representing data so you can decide whether a pie chart looks best. You can more easily apply colors and graphics to the spreadsheet so that it can flag you for key data points, such as a store failing to meet its sales quota.
With the PowerPoint presentation software, most users did little more than create bullet points with text for every slide. Now if you right click on a bullet, you get a selection of more artistic “smart art” images that you can use instead. If you select a particular kind of image to go with your text, you have the option of making the whole theme of the presentation consistent with the art style of the image. You can easily apply that theme to all of your text, numbers, charts and pictures.
With Outlook, there are some productivity improvements for using calendars and e-mail. Now you can send e-mails in Adobe’s popular PDF file format, which can accommodate large documents with a lot of art. You can color-code tasks on the calendar and glance quickly at a list of tasks you’ve assigned to complete on a day. If you don’t finish them, they can show up on your next day’s tasks. You configure the right side of your computer screen, dubbed the Sidebar, to show the next few appointments in a reminder window at all times of the day.
The biggest time saver is that searches through your contacts don’t move like molasses anymore, assuming your machine has enough memory to meet Vista’s added requirements. And it can search your whole machine the way add-ons such as Google Desktop do now.
We’ll see how many people howl over the changes. Microsoft has conducted thousands of hours of “usability” studies, monitored two billion sessions with the permission of trial users, and it kept data on 6,500 different questions for which it wanted answers. It conducted tests where it tracked where people looked while using the programs and for how long.
Coleman says that users can get up to speed on the changes quickly, even if they grumble at first. And users who once used 20 to 30 features in a week with Word might now use 60 or 70.
Prices vary from $149 for the student version (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and note-taking program OneNote included) to $680 for the ultimate version. You can buy the subprograms a la carte or buy them together for $399 in the Microsoft Office Standard version. If you’re upgrading, the fees are lower.
I still don’t like those prices, but I like these changes. The world might collectively suffer a month of catastrophic productivity loss that could wreak havoc on our lives in many invisible ways. But Microsoft says we’ll all bounce back happier and even more addicted, or enslaved, to our computers.
Contact Dean Takahashi at dtakahashi@mercurynews.com or (408)920-5739.