Office 2007

Having written about Windows Vista last time, I think its only fair to mention Office 2007 this time.

The most striking feature of Office 2007 is the much talked about ribbon interface, which is quite an innovativation. I don't think it suits many applications but for document centric applications, it's a very natural way of working. Once you get used to it working in Word or Excel (I've yet to try Powerpoint) is a much more productive experience as the various tools are a lot more easily accessible.

Document formatting in Word and Excel has also had a big boost with the introduction of themes, new fonts and 'live' preview of a change. All in all these 2 applications have had a a huge makeover.

But they aren't alone, Outlook too has had a lot done to it, the most visible change is the introduction of a ribbon interface when editing an email, an equally useful addition is the To-Do bar that shows upcoming events and tasks. One of my favourite features is that you can now run more than one email account and file in your Outlook profile, setting which email account saves to which file, for me that means I can say goodbye to multiple email profiles (a must if you want to keep private and business emails separate).

Best of all is the strong support for the .Net Framework evidenced by the release of Visual Studio Tools for Office. With this its possible to extend the Office applications in new ways with the only limitation being the imagination of the user and/or developer. I make use of it to pull data from a database each month into an Excel spreadsheet and an obvious use would be for the creation of reports, after all Excel is one of the most widely used and popular database reporting tools.