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What's new in Office 2007

1.1 New interface

The program window in Office has a new design. The menus and toolbars from earlier versions, and most of the task panes have been replaced by ribbon toolbars or categories as they are also called.
The File menu has been replaced by an Office menu.

The new interface is however not so difficult to use, and with some practice you will soon become familiar with the changes.

1.1.1 The Program window

A brief description of the standard new Office window:
At the top left is a large Office button, used to click open the new Office menu, to the right of this button a Quick Access Toolbar for commonly used functions, and the Title bar showing the name of the program and document.
The Office button and Quick Access Toolbar are not particularly useful for keyboard users. Jaws: You can read the Title bar in the usual way by pressing JawsKey+T.
Under the Toolbar and Title bar are tabs for the different ribbon toolbars. The current ribbon is displayed and shows groups of controls (the current ribbon is usually the Home ribbon when you first open the program).
The Editing area and Status bar are similar to before.

Navigation in the Program window

To move between the ribbon toolbar, editing area and status bar press F6. You can also move to the ribbon toolbar by pressing Alt, which you used previously to move to the menu bar.

1.1.2 Office Menu

The new Office menu includes most functions that were previously in the File menu: New, Open, Save, Save As, Print etc..
Press Alt+F to open the Office menu. You can navigate in this menu in the usual way. Press Down and Up Arrow to move through the Office menu and Right Arrow to open a submenu.

You can alternatively use hot keys in the menu which are often like those in previous Office versions, for example Alt,F,A to open the Save As dialog box. F12 also opens this dialog box as in the 2003 version. So for these functions there is not a big change from Office 2003 to 2007!

There is an important function that has been moved to the Office menu: you will find a button for Word Options at the bottom right in the Office menu. Options was previously under the Tools menu.

1.1.3 Quick Access Toolbar

The new Quick Access toolbar at the top of the window is found in all the Office 2007 programs. This toolbar can be customized to include buttons for functions that you use often. You can move to the toolbar by pressing Alt, and then Up arrow. Use the Left and Right arrows to navigate along the toolbar and press Space to activate a button.

1.1.4 Ribbon Toolbar

The ribbon toolbars have many controls for accessing a great number of functions! There are several different ribbon toolbars. For example when you open Word there are seven tabs displayed for different ribbons: Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review and View.
Each ribbon contains several groups of controls which are grouped according to task, making it a little easier to find what you are looking for. These controls may be drop-down menus, list boxes, buttons, galleries, and controls to open dialog boxes.

Many of the most familiar functions are in the Home ribbon, for example text and paragraph formatting in Word. There are some changes for example Table functions are found in the Insert ribbon in Word.

NB! The shortcut menus in Office 2007 can be very helpful; you will often find the function you are looking for here, which can be quicker than searching through the ribbon toolbars.

Navigation in the Ribbon Toolbar

Press Alt to move from the editing area to the ribbon toolbar. Press Left or Right arrow to change the ribbon.
Press Tab or Shift+Tab to navigate between the various controls inside the ribbon.

Alternatively you can learn keyboard commands for functions you use often.
Press Alt to move to the ribbon toolbar. When you press the hot key for the category, for example H for the Home category you will activate the hot keys for this ribbon. Then press the hot key to open the function, for example L to open the menu for styles.
The sequence of steps for formatting with a style would then be as follows: select the text in the editing area, press Alt to move to the ribbon toolbar, press H to activate the hot keys in the Home category, and press L to open the Styles menu. Choose the style with the arrow keys and press Space.

We will look at different functions in more detail later, this is just an example.

Many of the keyboard commands you are familiar with from Office 2003 can also be used in Office 2007! To name just a few examples: Ctrl +F to find text, Ctrl+P to print, Ctrl+B for bold font

In addition to the standard ribbon categories which are displayed when you open an Office 2007 program, there are also ribbons which are task dependent. These will only be displayed when you carry out specific tasks, for example select an object, picture or diagram.

1.1.5 View Controls and Status bar

To the right of the status bar at the bottom of the window are View controls to change the View for example Print Layout, Draft (Normal in 2003) etc. And there are also buttons to zoom in and out. You can move to the View Controls by pressing F6 to move to the status bar and then use the arrow keys to move to the View Controls. Keyboard users would usually access these functions using the View ribbon.
Jaws: press JawsKey+PageDown to read the status bar.

1.1.5.1 Customize the Status bar

You can customize the status bar and decide which indicators you want to display. Press F6 to move to the Status bar and use the shortcut menu. Press Space to check/uncheck indicators and continue through the menu using the arrow keys. When you have finished press Esc to close the menu.

1.1.6 Mini Toolbar

When you select text a mini toolbar appears with the most commonly used functions. The toolbar becomes visible when you move the mouse over it and is not accessible to keyboard users.

1.2 Program Options

In Office 2007 Program Options has moved from the Tools menu to the Office menu. Press Alt+F to open the Office menu and then press I to open the Options dialog box. The program Options are organized into different categories. Press Up and Down Arrow to move through the list of categories. Press Tab to navigate to the controls in the category.

1.3 Help

In Office 2007 the Help menu has been replaced by a single Help button in the top right hand corner. Press F1 to open the Help Window. Here you can write in a Search word or open one of the links to the Help topics (use Jaws+F7 to show the list of links).
Press F6 to move between the Search box, Status bar (Connected to Office online) and Toolbar. The Toolbar has buttons to print, change font size, Show table of contents etc.

Screen tips (visual only) are noticeably improved usually including a description of the function.

1.4 New File Formats

Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 have new file formats for saving documents, work books and presentations. The file format is based on the new open XML format for Office. In connection with this change over the standard file format has an x added to the file extension for example .docx, .xlsx. Documents, workbooks etc produced in earlier Office versions will be opened in Compatibility Mode (you can read this in the Title bar after the file extension). To use new features in Office 2007 you may need to convert to the new file format (choose convert in the Office menu). If you are not using new features you can work in Compatibility Mode.
If you are sending a document to someone using Word 2003 you should save as Word 97-2003 document.