Microsoft wants Word 2007 to put more features at your fingertips, without making you grope for them the way previous iterations of the application did. Word 2003, for example, featured 300 menu items and 31 toolbars. Brandished atop each screen within Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, the tabbed layout of the Ribbon of icons surfaces tools according to the task at hand.
Quick Access
You can find basic functions, such as opening, saving and printing files, through the Quick Access Toolbar accessible via the Windows logo in the upper-left corner of the screen.
Add Quick Toolbar
If you're among the 2 percent of Word devotees that Microsoft considers power users, then you might want to right-click your mouse on a chosen feature to add it to the Quick Access menu. Here, we've added the Paste Special function.
Zoom in
We're delighted that the magnification slider bar in the lower-right corner of Word's interface lets you instantly enlarge a document up to 500 percent or shrink it down to 10 percent.
Bottom edge
Another nice use of the bottom edge of the interface, especially for writers and students, is its display of a running word count.
Extra view
The View tab clusters options for viewing your document in myriad ways, such as adding gridlines, a ruler and thumbnails of all your pages.
Mini Toolbar
A floating Mini Toolbar appears near your mouse to anticipate formatting changes you might make. You can also bring up the Mini Toolbar and commonly used functions by right-clicking the mouse.
Image tweaks
The Office 2007 system makes playing with images extremely intuitive. The Ribbon's Format tab provides features found in basic image editing applications. You can preview changes, such as this 3D rotation, by mousing over a tool before you choose to apply it to an image.
Rotate image
We added a bevelled effect to an image with two clicks, and then rotated it by clicking and holding down on the picture's attached green circle.
Classic
Although there is no way to revert to the Classic mode of Word 2003's dialogue boxes, you can hide the dynamic Ribbon by clicking Ctrl-F1.
Alt badge
The applications within Office 2007 support the same Alt-keyboard shortcuts as in the past. To jog your memory, hit the Alt key to mark functions with a badge displaying the letter or number needed to press in conjunction with the Alt key. We find this handy, although it may bewilder those who accidentally hit the Alt key -- and the badges are too tiny for people with vision problems.
Newsletters
You can create attractive page layouts with a few clicks through Word's graphical Galleries -- especially helpful if your work demands making custom presentations, such as newsletters. Unfortunately, we expect some users to find the Galleries confusing.
Protect documents
Word 2007 beta 2 allows you to set access levels to a document and to mark it as final when you need to lock in changes.
Footnotes
When a tabbed section of features on the Ribbon includes an arrow in its lower-right corner, you can click it to call up a floating menu of features.
References
From the References tab you can add citations and a bibliography in styles from APA to Turabian, although we couldn't find an option for adding abstracts of research studies.
Table Authorities
Legal professionals can add a Table of Authorites from the References tab.
Resize to compress tabs
Resizing a document window compresses the Ribbon's tabs to save screen space.
Shrink
If you shrink a document window down to 250 pixels across, all the functions of the Ribbon disappear to conserve space.
Copyright © 1995-2009 CBS Interactive Limited. All rights reserved
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive Limited. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive Limited.