Product Description

May be installed on up to three non-commercial home computers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 79G-00007
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .65 pounds

Features

• Essential software suite for home computer users makes it a pleasure to complete schoolwork and other tasks
• Includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote
• Intuitive user interface that exposes commonly used commands; updated graphics and formatting galleries help you to easily produce high-quality documents
• Work with confidence and security thanks to the improved automatic Document Recovery tool and the Document Inspector tool, which removes personally identifiable information from your document
• Enhanced Help system includes online tutorials with step-by-step instructions; includes OneNote, a digital notebook that helps you gather, organize, and search many types of information in one place

Amazon.com
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 is the essential software suite for home computer users and includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote. This system enables you to quickly and easily create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and organize your notes and information in one place, making it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done.

The new streamlined workspace and easy-to-browse tabs make program features easier to find and use. View larger.

Insert graphics and charts such as these into your documents to make them more appealing. View larger.

Use the new diagram and improved charting tools to create rich and stunning visuals and charts. View larger.

Quick and easy-to-use table styles help your tables look great and consistent across Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. View larger.

The Document Inspector helps find and remove potentially sensitive "hidden" information from your documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. View larger.

Office OneNote 2007 enables you to gather, organize, and search almost any type of information. The powerful search tool is shown here, with results highlighted in yellow. View larger.

This updated version features a new streamlined user interface that exposes commonly used commands, enhanced graphics, and formatting capabilities that let you create high-quality documents, plus a powerful note and information organization tool, and more reliability and security with the document inspector tool and improved automatic document recovery. With these enhancements, Home and Student 2007 makes it a pleasure to complete schoolwork and other tasks at home.

Which edition of Office is right for you? View a comparison of Microsoft Office 2007 editions.

Create High-Quality Documents
Home and Student 2007 gives you access to updated graphics, formatting galleries, and an intuitive user interface that exposes commonly used commands. These features enable you to easily produce high-quality documents that will make you proud. Improved picture, charting, and graphics tools help you produce better-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations more quickly, while a large library of standard charts, quick formatting tools, and SmartArt diagrams make it easy to include rich and stunning visuals and charts. The results-oriented user interface makes it easier for you to find and use product features so you can enhance your documents according to your specifications. More stable bullets and numbers, SmartArt diagrams, and graphics and charting galleries provide you with a wealth of other formatting choices. Meanwhile, document themes help ensure a consistent appearance among the documents you create in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to make working across the programs you use most more convenient. PowerPoint also features context-sensitive tabs and easy-to-use galleries that make it simple for you to include tables and other graphics in your documents.

Enhanced Reliability and Security Features
With an improved automatic Document Recovery tool and the new Document Inspector tool for removing personally identifiable information from your documents, Home and Student 2007 helps you work with more confidence and security. Thanks to these two features, you'll never have to worry about losing documents after a system failure or exposing your personal identification information or unwanted comments to others before sharing your documents.

Formatting galleries make it easier to find and apply formatting changes. View larger.

User-Friendly Operation
Packed with innovative features and improvements, Home and Student 2007 has a streamlined interface and an enhanced Help system, including online tutorials with step-by-step instructions, so you can quickly learn the product and find the answers to your questions. In addition, command tabs on the results-oriented Ribbon reveal commonly used commands that previously appeared only in lengthy drop-down menus. The Help system also offers a smooth transition between the Help menu in the Microsoft Office system and Help on the Internet (when connected). Larger, more informative ScreenTips provide help concerning commands, and the command tabs themselves are context-sensitive, changing automatically depending upon the task that you are trying to complete, so you won't waste time figuring out the appropriate command. When you need more guidance, online tutorials provide step-by-step instructions for common tasks.

Organize Notes and Information
Home and Student 2007 includes OneNote, a digital notebook that helps you gather, organize, and search many types of information in one place. This means you can consolidate typed text, images, audio and video recordings, digital handwritten notes, Web clippings, and more on the same page. OneNote also provides flexible note-taking tools to help you organize information the way you want. Categorize important projects or information in a way that makes sense to you, using an easy-to-use layout of notebooks, sections, and pages. Type or organize content anywhere on the page and track important items with customizable note tags. To help keep you on track, the powerful Instant Search feature helps you to find information you are looking for quickly. With it you can even search handwritten notes, the text in images and scanned documents, and spoken words in audio recordings.

Preview Changes and Spot Trends
Home and Student 2007 saves you time by making it easier to format your Office documents with Live Preview. This tool lets you quickly preview proposed changes to your document while you're working on it without having to repeatedly search through layers of menus. Taking a look at your proposed formatting before committing to it lets you experiment without risk and can help minimize future edits. Excel features highly visual conditional formatting with new data bars, more colorful gradients, and icons that you can use to format data based on specific rules, so you can more easily identify key data trends, which can help you study and prepare written papers or reports.

Create and Save Custom Slide Layouts
PowerPoint lets you create presentations with ease using prebuilt and user-defined custom slide layouts. With the custom layout feature you can quickly create the precise layout you envision without being bound by one of the prepackaged, standard layouts. You can then save your custom layout for use in future presentations.

Broader Distribution of Your Documents
Home and Student 2007's features aren't limited to the work you do at home; they extend to broader distribution of your documents and presentations. New support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) file formats helps ensure increased distribution and sharing of your documents with users on any platform. This is particularly ideal for either sharing documents with friends and families, or for presenting information and assignments in a computer-integrated class.

From the Manufacturer
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 offers familiar programs with essential tools to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The suite contains the following Microsoft Office programs: Word 2007; Excel 2007; PowerPoint 2007; OneNote 2007.

What's New?
The 2007 edition of this product includes many new features and benefits, including the ability to create great-looking documents faster. New graphics and visual galleries help you create more dynamic documents and presentations.

In addition, the suite enables you to find commands and help with ease. An improved user interface and help system make it easy to find the tools you need to get things done. Another key improvement is that you can now work more securely and confidently. An improved Document Inspector and automatic document recovery help to protect your work.

Familiar Programs, New Features
One of the many reasons to upgrade to the 2007 version of this suite is that you can format, present, communicate, gather, and organize your information in more dynamic ways with new versions of familiar Microsoft Office programs. Here's a preview of what each of these programs has to offer:

OneNote 2007
Gather nearly any type of information in one place and easily find the content you need.

Word 2007

• Create great-looking documents with enhanced bullets, text effects, and visual galleries.
• Access frequently used commands more easily with an improved user interface.

• Create eye-catching charts using 3-D, soft shadowing, and transparency.
• Organize and analyze data with new tools such as Conditional Formatting for sorting and visualizing information.

• Create dynamic presentations faster with new themes, layouts, and styles.
• Add visual impact with new charts, SmartArt diagrams, and tables and quickly preview changes.

Customer Reviews

Major upgrade for Office
While Office 2003 offered a refreshed look and some improvements in functionality, the basic structure remained the same. While veteran users were able to easily navigate the familiar menus, it had become increasingly difficult to locate some features (for instance, in Word, would you find "insert new rows" to a table in the "insert" or "table" menu?).

With Office 2007, Microsoft offers the "ribbon", a new and more intuitive way to access features that we used to find in the menus. While the features are basically the same, they are now grouped together according to when and how you would normally use them. These groupings are accessed by clicking on tabs, which are organized in the order you'd use them. The best way to get a better understanding of this change is to check out the screenshots, or download a free trial version of Office from Microsoft. While Office 2007 was released at the same time as Vista, you do not need Vista in order to run it. The program ran fine on my Windows XP laptop, which only had 512 MB of RAM, and it runs even better on my Vista laptop with 2 GB of RAM.

As for which version of Office to buy, this is the third time I've opted for the Home and Student version (which has had other names in previous releases, but is still being sold for $149). I need Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and this is the most cost-effective way to get those programs. I was disappointed that Microsoft dropped Outlook from the Home and Student version. In order to continue to use Outlook, I installed Outlook 2003 and haven't had any problems.

Instead of Outlook, you get OneNote, a program that uses notebooks and tabs to save and organize all sorts of files and documents. I haven't had much time to play with OneNote yet, but the more I use it, the more impressed I am with it. It looks like one of those programs that you can personalize to meet your own needs and not have to fight with it to get it to do what you want.

This is a significant upgrade and should allow all users, new and experienced, to work more efficiently and quickly.

Avoid it if you can
I will make this as short as I can. I am a long time user (~10yrs) of MS Office, many versions of both Word and Excel. When I started having some compatibility issues with my old version, I decided to upgrade. My advice to you is, at all costs, avoid upgrading if you can. If you can choose a different product (non-Office), do it.
In Word especially, all the old interfaces have been completely redone, from the menus available right to the way help is (dis)organized. Many of the old usability features, such as templates (for letters), how you interact with colors/fonts/etc., and how you print, preview, and perform simple functions, are gone or changed.
Microsoft apparently believes that manuals are a thing of the past, so finding out where my old options are, if they still exist, has been a chore of figuring out which of the dozens of help topics are actually relevant, and if they will help me (which they typically haven't).
Even in Excel there have been interface and usability changes that have made it difficult for me to work with it, given my long history with previous versions.
My only caveat is that brand new users may find it easier to work with than old ones, but again, the poor help system would hinder even that, I would think.
Best of luck.

Power users: don't buy this software!
Sure, this release has lots of "improvements". I'll focus on Excel. The biggest potential improvement is that the row and column maximums have been opened up.

Beyond that, I've encountered nothing but problems.
* Once a document is saved in the new .xlsx format, Excel would not save back to the older .xls format. Instead, it just hung.
* The software refused to change the limits on a date x-axis of my charts. Instead it blithly reset the values back to the original values.
* It is SLOW. Clicking on a curve in a chart could take 10-20 seconds to respond.
* Occasionally, Excel would just crash for no obvious reason. The up side is that it would restart with opening the same workbooks.

Also, as usual, I have been unable to find a place on the Microsoft web site to report such troubles. All I've been able to find are FAQs that answer queries unrelated to the problems I've had.

Maybe you can work with that. I gave up and am just hoping that my new laptop is still functioning by the time that Microsoft gets around to noticing such glitches and releasing a service pack. Maybe next year?