Office 2007 Review

I've been running the final code for Microsoft Office 2007 for a little while now, and I'm very impressed. In fact, everyone that has seen the work that I've turned out has been impressed. Sure, the new "ribbon" UI takes a little getting used to (my wife still isn't over it), but it makes finding features much easier now that most of them aren't buried in menus.

The biggest changes have come to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The new version makes creating professional-looking documents incredibly easy. To give you an example, this picture is a slide from my Market Research project that my group is presenting tonight.

This presentation took very little time to prepare. The data was collected by paper survey, dumped into Excel, and then used the built-in functions to create Excel graphs. Those looked great on their own. Then it was literally a cut and paste operation into the PowerPoint slides.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. All three Office programs have built-in graphic themes that can be applied to your work. The themes are essentially painted with the new SmartArt engine behind the Office programs, basically vector art with some nice polish. However, the real power comes in by the fact that the font packages and color packages for all of the graphic themes are interchangeable and customizable. With literally a couple of clicks, you can take a "basic" theme and customize the look.

The wild thing was what happened when I took a chart from Excel (with one basic theme) and pasted it into PowerPoint. It immediately picked up the local theme settings and conformed itself to the style of the presentation I'd already created. Knocked out a few background elements and viola ... you've got a gorgeous presentation.

My only concern is that once more people adopt the new Office, this level of polish will become baseline, and suddenly my "magical" PowerPoint abilities will have to really step up to the plate. But until then, the new Office makes me look like a million bucks.