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Screenshots:
Microsoft Office 2007 has a radically redesigned interface, dubbed Ribbon, as well as some compelling new features. Here are some of the highlights and new features in Office 2007.
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The Ribbon interface in Microsoft Word. Each Ribbon element has a small icon in the corner, clicking the icon will bring up the old-style dialog box, hovering on the element shows the dialog box preview and, when applicable, provides links to the relevant help page.
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Ribbon interface in hidden mode. Moving the mouse over any of the tabs will reveal the Ribbon, but when you don't need it it stays out of the way providing the cleanest workspace of any Office version yet. The top menu can be customized to hold all your frequent menu items.
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In this shot the document has a default style applied, but the mouse hovers over the "Title" style so that the selected text automatically previews the changes without having to apply them. Clicking the style will apply it, mousing off will leave it as it was.
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This is Word in the "blogging mode." Ribbon elements are contextual, in this case, because a picture is selected, the picture tools become available. Deselecting the picture would cause those tool to hide themselves. As you might imagine the HTML output of blogging mode is somewhat bloated with inline styles, but on the brighter side, the output of this simple example was at least standards compliant.
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Excel got a serious makeover as well, this shot shows the new conditional formatting tools and, as with the previews in Word, hovering over a format style gives you a preview without having to commit to it. The blue bars on the sample graph are being applied by the conditional format rule that the mouse is hovering over.
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Another new Excel feature, the top half shows the table header as it looks when opened, in the bottom section you can see that as you scroll down the table header labels jump into the cell header so you can keep track of your columns.
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Outlook doesn't have the Ribbon bar in the explorer pane, but it is used when composing new messages. New Outlook features include a live preview for other Office documents which means you can read Word Excel and other files inline rather than having to open them separately. Microsoft has published the live preview specs so others, like Adobe PDF files, may be available at some point. Also note the To-Do bar, in this case showing the calendar view.
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Outlook also has an improved calendar view which includes an overlay feature. Multiple calendars can be viewed on top of each other which makes it easy to see where schedules overlap and conflict.
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Powerpoint uses Ribbon and sports enough new themes to keep Al Gore happy. As with the rest of the Ribbon apps, there are live previews of formatting changes.
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