Microsoft is in the final stages of updating its Office suite of productivity software. After a series of delays, the new Office 2007 system is due to ship early next year, and some business components may be ready at the end of 2006. We examined the latest round of beta updates to highlight the newest features in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. From now on, most changes before the final release are supposed to be on the surface.
The Ribbon, uncut
The ribbon design topping the screens of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access moves features to the forefront and banishes the previous drop-down menus. Here, Word's Ribbon tabs include Home, Insert, Page Layout and other tools.
Clip the Ribbon
Some beta testers of the in-progress Office 2007 software complained that the Ribbon was too big. Now, you can double-click any tab and make the Ribbon vanish so that there's more screen space for your document. Click a tab once, and the Ribbon reappears.
Ready for inspection
What if you had to raise the prices in a sales proposal? Using Word 2003, you might not realise that your document kept a record of the original figures -- and a technically adept client might find them. The Document Inspector within Word 2007 beta 2 scrutinises hidden text and revisions to prevent you from leaving bread crumbs of edits for unintended viewers.
Plenty of options
The Office 2007 Start menu hooks you up with plenty of options to fit your work style, such as specifying how Word proofs your text and how Excel manages calculations.
Build your own toolbar
We found the choices for customising the interfaces of the Office 2007 beta applications far easier than those in Office 2003. The Options window's Customize selections let you make specific settings for toolbar commands and keyboard shortcuts.
A question of trust
From Options, you can open the new Trust Center window to set security settings for macros, ActiveX scripts and blocked content. It's probably a good idea to examine and select these options before you start working.
Don't keep words to yourself
The Publish option within Word allows you to publish your work as a blog post and to create a synchronised document work space to share a file with other users.
Blog within Word
When you choose to publish a blog entry, Word opens a new blog composition window with just three tabs for managing the post, as well as for inserting links, images and charts, although we didn't see a way to add movies or MP3 files. Word 2007 beta also walks you through uploading to your account at Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, TypePad and others.
Conditionally yours
Conditional formatting within Excel 2007 beta 2 is designed so that you can highlight spreadsheet data and quickly ask Excel to color in trends, such as the 10 highest values in a numeric list.
Teamwork
In addition to letting you restrict access to your workbook, the Review tab within Excel 2007 provides specific options for sharing your spreadsheet with other people and tracking changes.
What's that function?
We had a hard time finding old functions we'd memorised from Excel 2003. Here, we finally worked out that we could convert a numeric column to currency simply by selecting the Numbers section on the Ribbon's Home tab.
Chart styling
We wish we could preview a chart before creating it. Still, Excel does let you preview styles to an existing chart by hovering over them.
Have the time?
If you work with people all over the map, Outlook now lets you pick which time zones fellow meeting attendees are in so that you won't miss each other--or schedule a meeting at midnight by mistake.
Hover craft
You can hover over the gallery of styles within PowerPoint to preview dozens of styles before making any changes, and you can browse online for additional designs.
Picture pages
A new Photo Album option on PowerPoint 2007 beta's Insert tab lets you adjust the brightness of pictures and even turn colour images to black and white as you add them to a presentation.
Continuing the dialogue
Although you can find most functions within the new graphical Ribbon atop each screen, some of the features listed there open dialogue boxes for managing documents in depth, such as slide show settings. You can test-drive these applications by visiting microsoft.com/office/preview.
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.