Chapter 1: Overview of the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Overview

Any separation between business information and the software that’s used to create and manage it has become harder and harder to see. Although people still conduct business over the phone, in meetings-even at a health club or a restaurant-these kinds of person-to-person encounters lead to electronic documents that detail the products, ideas, and data that companies, their employees, and their customers exchange. And for millions of workers in home offices, small businesses, or large organizations around the globe, with jobs in fields such as administration, architecture, consulting, education, finance, health care, law, marketing, real estate, sales-you name it-this means working with the programs that make up the Microsoft Office system.

The 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system provides many new and updated features: graphics capabilities such as three-dimensional effects for charts and diagrams; the To-Do bar in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007; data visualization capabilities in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 that highlight trends in data series; text building blocks in Microsoft Office Word 2007 that let you identify standard pieces of content, such as the text for a disclaimer or a company description, that can be inserted consistently from document to document whenever they are required. You’ll learn about advances such as these and many others throughout the course of this book.

Microsoft has also changed in radical ways the user interface for several of the 2007 Office system programs. These changes may take some getting used to for experienced Microsoft Office users. It’s hard to imagine creating or printing a document without opening the File menu or using a toolbar button, but that’s what’s in store. Of course, the changes to the user interface are intended to make your use of the applications easier, your work with them more effective. Microsoft designed the changes so that you can focus more on the results you want rather than on figuring out how to achieve them. The 2007 Office release programs PowerPoint, Excel, and Word have a new file format as well.

The format is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), and although the change in the file format might not affect how you do your work in Microsoft Office, it very likely will affect the kind of work that you and others do and the type of information you work with. XML is often used to transfer data between computer systems and applications, for example. One effect you’ll probably see as a result of the wider use of XML in 2007 Office system applications is the ability to work more easily with data stored in back-end systems.

For more information about XML and how it is used in the 2007 Office system, see Chapter 32, “Office Open XML Essentials.”

In this overview of the 2007 Office system, you’ll see examples of the new user interface. (Chapter 2, “The 2007 Office System User Interface: What’s Changed, What’s the Same,” covers this topic in detail.) This chapter also provides a brief description of the change in file formats and highlights features, applications, and technologies that have been added in this release of the Office system. To start, however, we’ll look briefly at some of the context that informed Microsoft’s design of the 2007 Office system-context that Microsoft believes also informs your use of the Microsoft Office system programs.