Significant differences between Office 2007
I’ve read a lot of early documents trying to sort out and describe the new Office 2007 interface. Not only has there been some confusion over where all the familiar stuff has gone and how to use the new stuff in Office 2010, but there have been rampant inconsistencies in terminology. So, for instance, the Office button has been variously called “the Logo button,” “the Office icon,” and “the big round control at the left end of the ribbon bar.”
To help clarify things — and Download Office 2007 possibly to facilitate clearer conversations about all these features as you help users get up to speed.
If you’ve seen Office 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Windows 7,or Outlook items such as messages), you know about the Ribbon.
It houses tabs with functional groupings of buttons and drop-down lists that are supposed to be relevant to particular tasks. Some icons are bigger than others, engineered that way to add prominence to the most commonly used items. Below is the Ribbon that appears when you’re in an Excel worksheet cell.Each of the beRibboned apps initially displays a standard set of tabs, which vary depending on the application. For instance, Excel’s standard set of tabs (which you can see above) includes Formulas and Data, whereas Word offers References and Mailings.
In addition to the standard tabs, you’ll see specialized contextual tabs that appear depending on what you’re working on. For example, if you insert a chart in Excel, the Chart Tools tab will appear, with Design, Layout, and Format subtabs, as shown below.Incidentally, you may sometimes see more than one contextual tab. I was working with a picture in a table in a Word doc, and both the Table and Picture tabs appeared on my Ribbon(30 rock dvd).
Tabs come with their own terminology, too: Each tab is divided into groups. So, for instance, the Word Home tab below has groups called Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, and Editing. And certain groups (alias dvds) have dialog box launchers, those tiny icons in the bottom-right corner of the group. Click that icon and you get a traditional dialog box or task pane associated with the group.
When you move the mouse pointer over items in the Ribbon, you’ll see Enhanced ScreenTips. They’ll probably come in handy for novice users and those who are learning the Office 2007 ropes. More experienced users may not pay much attention to them, although in some cases, they should. For example, if you forget you’re working on a document in Compatibility Mode (ally mcbeal dvd), you might otherwise be confounded if you run into limited functionality. The ScreenTip shown here serves as a useful reminder.