Now that Microsoft has finalized the code of Microsoft Office 2007 at last, corporate customers will be able to get their hands on Office Small Business 2007 soon.

The rest of us will have to wait until early next year to buy a boxed version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and the other members of the Office 2007 family. The consumer editions of Microsoft Office 2007 will hit the stores early next year, in step with the Vista operating system.

Some of the major changes in Office 2007 include the fact that major programs each organize features into tabs rather than drop-down menus and dialog boxes and New XML-based files, which squeeze more data into fewer kilobytes have been added. It is worthy of note that you won’t be able to open a file in the new format immediately when using earlier versions of the programs. This will make sharing work with people without the new version [those who haven’t upgraded] difficult.

Other cool features in Office include a strong emphasis on style templates, with the ability to preview on the fly changes made to fonts and graphics. New shortcuts for analyzing information within Excel let you display patterns of data as a colorful heat map. There’s new support for blogging within Word, Outlook gets deeper search and task management abilities in addition to SMS text messaging, and Office 2007 features easier-to-manage overall document security.

You can get a free online test drive of the new office at office.microsoft.com, to check out its features.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 7:05 am and is filed under Business, Commercial, Developer, Main, Office, Social Software, Text, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.