With Office 2010 beta out now, I figured this would be a good time to get the hang of Office 2007. Better late than never.
Although I’m still not completely sold on the ribbon, I think I finally understand what the developers had in mind when they created it. The premise seems to be that you start at the Home tab for your basic document creation, then move to the next tab for Inserting additional features, and so on. If you think of it in that order, it can be a little less frustrating. Also, if you click on the arrow on the bottom right of each group (see green box in my screen shot), you’ll see some dialog boxes that will look very familiar to you and get you back into your comfort zone.
In my opinion, the key to making Office 2007 work for you is to customize the Quick Access Toolbar (see red box in my screen shot). This will let you easily add commands you frequently use, such as open, close, and save.
The feature I like the best is “live preview” where you can hold your mouse over a formatting option and see right away how it changes the appearance. What do you think? Are you a user of 2007? Still on 2003 (or even 1997!)? Planning to beta test 2010? Let me know!