Many schools are upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2007. I had a chance to look at Office 2007 recently and here is what I found:
The major difference between the 2003 and the 2007 version is the toolbar. Now it is called a “ribbon” and it is much larger than the traditional toolbar from earlier versions of office. Thankfully, it can be minimized by double-clicking the active tab or by pressing CTRL+F1. The tabs are still visible so if you need to use the buttons you have just hidden, you can just click on the tab again, and POOF there they are. Of course, you can also restore the ribbon by pressing CTRL+F1 again.
When I first looked at it, I have to be honest, I thought, “What a mess!” But it really wasn’t that bad. Remember upgrading from Office 2000 to Office 2003? Well, if you do, then you may remember the first time you tried to use the dictionary or the thesaurus in Word and it wasn’t where it used to be on the tool menu. With 2003, you had to right-click the word you wanted to look up or find a synonym for to access that feature. But, once you knew that, it was easy sailing. It’s the same with the ribbon. Once you play around with it for a while, you’ll see these changes are really not a big deal.
There is one more thing I’d like to mention that I was very happy to notice as I was playing around with the new version. Say you are working in Word 2007 at school and you want to email the document home so you can finish it. The only problem is, you have Word 2003 (or maybe even 2000) at home. Well, no worries. You can save the document you are working on as a Word 2003 or 2000 document. Then you can open it at home and finish it there. And since Word 2007 is backwards compatible, you can then email it back to yourself at school (or use your flash drive, like I do) and you’ll still be able to open it and work with it, if you need to.
Before I go, I want to also link to the Office 2007 User Guides posted on the Microsoft site. It’s always a good idea to go to the source!
Enjoy your summer!!
Posted on July 6th, 2008 by Caroline LaMagna
Filed under: Once a Techie
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