Microsoft Office 2007 was released early this year. This latest version of Office is designed to work with the new Windows Vista but is also compatible with Windows XP. It offers many new features and functionality that will be beneficial to users.  However, the two main challenges with upgrading to Office 2007 are the significantly different user interface to previous versions of Office and the new XML-based document formats.  Let's look at each of these in turn.

The new user interface

Some of the most popular Office 2007 applications, namely Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, have been updated with the brand new user interface which will require a little extra time getting used to it. Around two decades ago, when the first version of Word and Excel appeared on Windows, these applications utilized the familiar menu and toolbar-based UI that has appeared in almost all operating systems and applications. Since then, for the next decade, users could easily access the applications' various commands.

By the late 1990's, Office was getting much more features and becoming more complex than ever. For Office 2007, Microsoft has finally given up the original UI, thus the Ribbon UI is introduced. The Ribbon UI replaces the old UI at the top of the application window. This area of UI is separated into context-sensitive tabs. Users will find most of the commonly-used commands in the Ribbon's Home Tab.

The Ribbon is context-sensitive, if the user does something a bit more complicated, s/he may find new tabs appearing. More and more commands will spill out when the user expands the application window horizontally. However, for those who do not like the new Ribbon UI, traditional commands can be customized into the Quick Access Toolbar and the Ribbon can be hidden.

However, the "Ribbonization" of Office is incomplete. Outlook, OneNote, InfoPath and Publish have NOT been Ribbonized yet. It can be expected in the later patches or releases of Office.

Reference:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx

The new document formats

The new file formats are called OpenXML by Microsoft. They are based on XML, a standards-based, self-documenting markup language that is somewhat like HTML. XML has found widespread success around the world in a variety of places, and its use as the heart of the OpenXML document format suggests that Microsoft is serious about interoperability and openness.

Documents created in the OpenXML formats are smaller and more robust than their predecessors. This is because the new formats are really renamed ZIP-based compressed files that contain a variety of separated, componentized data, each broken down into individual files inside the container. By comparison, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets stored in Office 2003 or earlier formats are monolithic binary files. These are files in which the data, styles and other information are all mixed together in a proprietary way. Microsoft claims that the file size of a document in the new format can be up to 75% smaller than those in the old formats.

In order to differentiate these new file format documents from binary documents used by previous Office versions, a four-character file extension is adopted. So instead of a .doc Word document, you will see .docx. Excel's .xls becomes .xlsx and PowerPoint's .ppt becomes .pptx. A full list is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2007_file_extensions. Of course, you can still open and save to the old formats as desired. However, extra care must be taken when working with others as the new format is not backward compatible.  This means users with previous versions of Office receiving Office 2007 documents saved in the default format will not be able to open these documents.  Although the converter pack allows users with previous versions of Office to view Office 2007 files, these files may have missing functionality when converted. More information on the converter pack is available at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101686761033.aspx.

Reference:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100069351033.aspx

The implementation plan

Microsoft Office 2007 has been recently made available on the CSC Student LANs for teaching and learning. The software CDs of Microsoft Office 2007 (English and Chinese HK), Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (English and Chinese HK) and Microsoft Office 2007 Language Pack (Chinese HK and Simplified Chinese) will be distributed to departments for lab deployment, standalone installation and eligible staff to work at home. Meanwhile, all these items will be made available under the Microsoft Campus agreement for download installation to staff PCs through the departmental network. As the look and feel of the software has undergone significant changes, the CSC highly recommends attending training before upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007. A computer course on "What's New in Microsoft Office 2007?" has been arranged on 06 July 2007. It is now open for enrolment. Staff can enroll the course through AIMS in the e-Portal.

System requirements

Hardware upgrade should not be needed when upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2007. However, minimum hardware requirement should be met for upgrading Office 2000 and Office XP.

Reference:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/ha101668651033.aspx