place of nathan.

I recently upgraded our office to Microsoft Office Small Business 2007. Utilizing Microsoft’s Open licensing, the upgrade was very cost-effective.

Small Business includes, Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher. (actually, Accounting Express is included, but i have no idea what that is!)

Each of these programs has undergone a major upgrade from their previous version (2003). The menu structure was stolen (err, i mean, borrowed) from Apple, and is much more intuitive–like all things Apple. Things actually make sense now. It is very easy to find things, and that is a good thing.

I actually made the switch back to Word 2007 from OpenOffice.org’s Writer.

I’m fairly happen with Word 2007, although i still heavily prefer using Adobe InDesign. But for portability within the office, I have found Word very much easier to use than its predecessor.
Excel likewise introduces the intuitive menu structure.
The one thing I dislike about excel is its graphs. in a line graph, it produces very thick (like 10 pt) lines instead of thinner lines. It makes for a fairly heavy graph, and isn’t as good for smaller details because of the lines. i haven’t been able to get the lines to thin down any.

Office 2007 also introduces a new file extension, adding an ‘x’ on to the end of the extension. So now word documents are of extensions ‘.docx’. This is kinda annoying…earlier versions of Office need to apply a patch to be able to open this new format.

All in all, Office 2007 is probably the best product Microsoft has ever offered. It certainly isn’t its most innovative product or its most useful product, but it’s a very good product.
I do recommend the upgrade if you are still using an older version.

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