| Microsoft Office Word 2007 is a sophisticated word processing program that helps you quickly and efficiently author and format all the business and personal documents you are ever likely to need. You can use Word to: Create professional-looking documents that incorporate impressive graphics such as charts and diagrams. Give documents a consistent look by applying styles and themes that control the font, size, color, and effects of text and the page background. Store and reuse ready-made content and formatted elements such as cover pages and sidebars. Create personalized e-mail messages and mailings to multiple recipients without repetitive typing. Make information in long documents accessible by compiling tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Safeguard your documents by controlling who can make changes and the types of changes that may be made, removing personal information, and applying a digital signature.
The 2007 release of Word represents an extensive overhaul and update from previous versions. You'll notice some obvious changes as soon as you start the program, because the top of the program window has a completely new look, described in Chapter 1, "Exploring Word 2007." But the improvements go way beyond changes in appearance. Throughout this book, we include discussions of each new feature that is likely to be useful to you and how and when to use it. Tip Included in the back of this book is a four-color poster provided for your reference. This convenient guide points out some of the best new features of the redesigned Office user interface and includes tips to get you started. You will learn about these features and many more while working through this book.
New Features Because there are so many new features in this version of Word, we don't identify them with a special margin icon as we did in previous versions of this book. We do, however, list them here. If you're upgrading to Word 2007 from a previous version, you're probably most interested in the differences between the old and new versions and how they will affect you, as well as how to find out about them in the quickest possible way. The sections below list new features you will want to be aware of, depending on the version of Word you are upgrading from. To quickly locate information about these features, see the Index at the back of this book. If You Are Upgrading from Word 2003 If you have been using Word 2003, you will soon realize that Word 2007 is not just an incremental upgrade to what seemed like a pretty comprehensive set of features and tools. In addition to introducing a more efficient approach to working with documents, Word 2007 includes a long list of new and improved features, including the following: The Ribbon. No more hunting through menus, submenus, and dialog boxes. This new interface organizes all the commands most people use most often, making them quickly accessible from tabs at the top of the program window. Live preview. See the effect of a formatting option before you apply it. Building blocks. Think AutoText on steroids! Predefined building blocks include sets of matching cover pages, quote boxes, sidebars, and headers and footers. Style sets and document themes. Quickly change the look of a document by applying a different style set or theme, previewing its effect before making a selection. SmartArt graphics. Use this awesome new diagramming tool to create sophisticated diagrams with 3-D shapes, transparency, drop shadows, and other effects. Improved charting. Enter data in a linked Microsoft Office Excel worksheet and watch as your data is instantly plotted in the chart type of your choosing. Document cleanup. Have Word check for and remove comments, hidden text, and personal information stored as properties before you declare a document final. New file format. The new Microsoft Office Open XML Formats reduce file size and help avoid loss of data.
If You Are Upgrading from Word 2002 In addition to the features listed in the previous section, if you're upgrading from Word 2002 (part of the Microsoft Office XP system), you'll want to take note of the following new features that were introduced in Word 2003: Reading Layout view. View and easily read a document on the screen without needing to print it, and use buttons on the Reading Mode Markup toolbar to make comments, highlights, and revisions. Thumbnails. Get an overview of a document by displaying small images of its pages. Smart Tags. Flag items such as names and addresses, and then display a menu of options for performing common tasks with that type of information. Research service. Locate supporting information in references stored on your computer or on the Internet. Handwriting support. On a Tablet PC, write your comments in Word documents by hand. Insertion and deletion colors. When tracking changes and comments in a document, easily distinguish between insertions and deletions and between the changes made by different reviewers. Balloon control. Independently display or hide revision balloons and comment balloons. Editing and formatting control. Specify whether and how a document can be modified. Shared workspaces. Send a file as an attachment and automatically create a workspace on a collaboration site built with Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies. XML capabilities. Save a Word document as an XML file. Document summaries. Extract the key points of the document. Readability statistics. Display statistics that help you gauge the reading level of the document.
If You Are Upgrading from Word 2000 If you are upgrading from Word 2000, you've got a lot of catching up to do, but this upgrade will definitely be worth the effort. In addition to the features listed in the previous sections, the following features and tools, which were added in Word 2002, will be new to you: Styles And Formatting task pane. Work with paragraph styles and character formatting in an entire document from a single task pane. Create, view, select, apply, and clear formatting from text. Reveal Formatting task pane. Display the formatting attributes of a text selection. Improved collaboration. Use the improved Reviewing toolbar when collaborating on documents with colleagues. Improved table and list formatting. Easily copy, format, and sort tables, and create lists with complex paragraph structures. Improved security interface. Access security options on a single tab in the Options dialog box. Information protection. Remove personal information stored as file properties and names associated with comments or tracked changes.
Let's Get Started! We've been working with Word since its debut, and each version has offered something that made daily document creation a little easier. But this is the first version in a while that has actually had us smiling and even elicited the occasional "Wow!" We look forward to showing you around Microsoft Office Word 2007. |
