Product Description

Microsoft Office 2007 Upgrade Microsoft Office Standard 2007 is the essential software suite for homes and small businesses that enables you to quickly and easily create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and manage e-mail. The latest release features a new streamlined user interface that exposes commonly used and familiar commands, enhanced graphics and formatting capabilities that enable you to create high-quality documents, new time management tools to help manage your schedule, and more reliability and security such as an improved junk e-mail filter to reduce spam e-mail. With these enhancements, Office Standard 2007 makes it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done at home or work. What's included in Office Standard 2007 Excel 2007 Outlook 2007 PowerPoint 2007 Word 2007 Create High-Quality Documents Office Standard 2007 simplifies the way home and small business users work with documents. The redesigned, results-oriented user inte

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #240 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 021-07668
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .55 pounds

Features

• Upgrade version designed for those computers with Windows server 2003 or later and Windows XP SP2 and later
• Includes the 2007 versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook
• Create high-quality documents and presentations, build powerful spreadsheets, and manage your e-mail messages, calendar, and contacts
• Offers improved menus and tools; enhanced graphics and formatting capabilities; new time and communication management tools; and more reliability and security
• Features the Ribbon, a new device that presents commands organized into a set of tabs, instead of traditional menus and toolbars

Amazon.com
Microsoft Office Standard 2007 Upgrade offers the core Microsoft Office applications, but significantly updated for faster, better results. Comprised of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, this software suite empowers you to create high-quality documents and presentations, build powerful spreadsheets, and manage your e-mail messages, calendar, and contacts. With improved menus and tools, enhanced graphics and formatting capabilities, new time and communication management tools, and more reliability and security, Office Standard 2007 makes it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done at home or at work.

The new look and feel of the 2007 Microsoft Office system automatically displays the menus and toolbars you need when you need them. View larger.

Office Excel 2007 makes it easy to analyze data. View larger.

Including charts in Office PowerPoint 2007 is easy. View larger.

Tasks are easy to follow up on because they are included on the new To-Do Bar and within Outlook reminders. You can also drag tasks onto your calendar. View larger.

This update version of the software is intended for use by those computers which have the following operating systems: Windows server 2003 or later, and Windows XP SP2 or later.

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

Improved User Interface
The Office Standard 2007 user interface makes it easier for people to use Office applications. The streamlined screen layout and dynamic results-oriented galleries let you spend more time focused on your work and less time trying to get the application to do what you need. As a result, the Office Standard 2007 interface can help deliver great looking documents, high-impact presentations, effective spreadsheets, and powerful desktop database applications.

The Ribbon
Office Standard 2007 features the Ribbon, a new device that presents commands organized into a set of tabs, instead of traditional menus and toolbars. The tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications. For example, in Word, the tabs group commands for activities such as inserting objects like pictures and tables, doing page layout, working with references, doing mailings, and reviewing. For added convenience, the Home tab provides easy access to the most frequently used commands. Excel has a similar set of tabs that make sense for spreadsheet work including tabs for working with formulas, managing data, and reviewing. These tabs make it simple to access features because they organize the commands in a way that corresponds directly to the tasks you perform in the application you're using.

The Microsoft Office Button
Many of the most valuable features in previous versions of Office were not about the document authoring experience and instead focused on all the things you can do with a document: share it, protect it, print it, publish it, and send it. Although this focus had its advantages, previous releases lacked a single central location where a user could see all of these capabilities in one place. Office Standard 2007's new interface, however, brings together the capabilities of the Office system into a single entry point: the Microsoft Office button. This button allows for two major advantages. First, it helps users find these valuable features. Second, it simplifies the authoring process by allowing the Ribbon to focus on creating great documents.

Contextual Tabs
Office Standard 2007 features contextual tabs which bring important and appropriate command options to the user's attention precisely when they're needed most. Certain sets of commands are only relevant when objects of a particular type are being edited. For example, the commands for editing a chart are not relevant until a chart appears in a spreadsheet and the user is focusing on modifying it. In current versions of Office applications, these commands can be difficult to find. In Excel, however, clicking on a chart causes a contextual tab to appear with commands used for chart editing. Contextual tabs only appear when they are needed and make it much easier to find and use the commands needed for the operation at hand.

Galleries
Galleries are at the heart of the redesigned applications, and they deliver a set of clear results to choose from when working on your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or Access databases. By presenting a simple set of potential results, rather than a complex dialog box with numerous options, galleries can simplify the process of producing professional looking work. For those who prefer a greater degree of control over the result of the operation, the traditional dialog box interfaces are still available.

Live Preview
Office Standard 2007 features Live Preview, a fresh and innovative technology that shows the results of applying an editing or formatting change as you move the pointer over the results presented in a gallery. This dynamic capability streamlines the process of laying out, editing, and formatting so you can create excellent results with less time and effort.

Customer Reviews

Before You Upgrade -- Things You Need to Know
Normally I might wait to install a new software upgrade, but I just got a new laptop and thought it would be best to use Office 2007 with the new Vista operating system. I was wrong.

You would expect that a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft could put out a powerful and bug-free piece of software. But after a month of using Office 2007, you get the distinct impression that this software is not ready for public release. Microsoft should be ashamed.

I don't know the root cause of my problems, but I have to stress that I am running a clean install of Office 2007 on Vista, so there shouldn't be any software conflicts or issues.

So what are my issues? The list is long:

-- My biggest concern is that MS Word constantly hangs and stalls. It can making editing a document very painful. I suspect the problem is when I put images or Visio diagrams into a document. But that is something the old MS Word was able to do without an issue. Oddly, if I have a colleague open the document and save it out in Word 2003, the problem goes away! What?! It's killing my productivity.

-- When ever I cut and paste from an old document, Word hangs for 15 to 20 seconds. And often the formatting and margins in my new document go haywire. I keep having to spend a ton of time fixing things. This never happened in the old Word. This is another time killer.

-- Every few days, Outlook 2007 starts telling me that it cannot display my email folders. Uh oh! I have to completely restart my computer to see my email again.

-- Outlook 2007 breaks many graphic emails that people send -- they look like a mess. It is because Outlook 2007 does NOT render HTML correctly since it uses the Word engine, not Internet Explorer to display email. I have no idea why Microsoft did this, but they have got to fix it.

-- Many of the issues in the old Word 2003 still haven't been fixed. If you place an image, it can often be hard to get it to appear correctly. Why can't they solve this one?

-- While most Office programs have the new ribbon interface (which I like), some programs like Visio 2007 do not. So you have to remember how to use two interfaces. Couldn't Microsoft find the time and money to update ALL its programs? Give me a break.

-- On a few occassions in Visio 2007, my files have failed to save correctly. At first I thought this must have been my fault, but it's happened to me a few times and can't be a coincidence. A few times I've gotten an error message and lost my work. Ug.

-- Word and Excel 2007 use a completely new file format. So anyone you send a document to has to have 2007 installed (which isn't likely the case). To get around this, you can save it down to a 2003 file format, but then you end up with two files on your hard drive -- one in the new format and one in the old format. What a pain! Also, there definitely seems to be an issue with Office 2007 opening older Office 2003 files. Could be the cause of many of my problems, but there is no way I can avoid using old files. They should have worked harder on compatibility.

There are good things about the new 2007. I do like the new interface design and the new features in Outlook 2007 are amazing for organizing tasks and sharing your calendar.

But I don't think it's fair that Microsoft released a product so full of serious, serious bugs that have cost me hours and hours of extra work. I didn't spend hundreds of dollars on a beta product and don't think the public should have to suffer. Surely they can afford to do better!

License allows an additional laptop install
The product requires activation, which includes sending machine identification information to Microsoft.

The good news is that the Office Standard license allows installation on both a desktop system AND a laptop. It also allows you to transfer the license to new systems, over time.

From the license: "Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device. ... You may install another copy on a portable device for use by the single primary user of the licensed device. ... You may reassign the license to a different device any number of times, but not more than one time every 90 days"

A Giant Leap Backwards
Office 2003 had it's share of difficulties, but was overall a useful application, as were the previous versions of Office. I was never a huge fan, but appreciated the common logic of the application and with each upgrade they've continued to move forward with improvements.

Now they've introduced a set of applications that are a gigantic leap backwards in productivity and usability. It's loaded with overburdened, irregular icons and hidden menus. All of the menu sets, menu names, and functionality has been completely rearranged with no noticeable benefit for the user.

Even the help functionality, of all things, has been rendered completely differently and contains less information and more generalities referencing help for Word within Outlook and vice versa. This would be helpful except that the same menu name bears entirely different meaning between the two applications now.

Menus are also too light so you can't really tell if highlights are active or passive in drop menus. Drop menus change radically within each element of the frame or window, and there are layers upon layers of custom menus you need to build from scratch.

Let me say that again... you need to build your own menus. I'm not kidding.

Basic functionlity that you used to find as a default icon in the last several versions you need to hunt down in a "Quicklaunch" type supermenu that's hidden above (or below) the default icon menu.

I am a web usability, design, and production professional who's used more beta applications and experimental software than most users could imagine and I'm warning *anyone* to stay away from this until you absolutely must upgrade. Microsoft needs time to get the content updated on the help screens and create some functionality to return to "classic" menus that can be customized later.

I generally have a lot of patience for new applications and have been accused of being to accomodating to bad usability by Microsoft in the past. Well in this case, I've never been so frustrated by *any* application.

I need to be productive and this set me back by at least a day already.

Be warned!!!!!