I’ve been using Word 2007 for a couple of months. And no, I don’t have to just because I work at Microsoft. I use Office all day, and I love to see what new features are coming. And in this release, Office has a lot to offer. It has by far more useful changes than previous versions of Office. In fact, for me it’s been the most exciting update to Office I’ve seen. It helps me get things done faster and create more compelling documents. If you want, try Office 2007 and Word 2007 yourself. Here are some of the pros and cons of what I’ve found about Word 2007 so far.

Pros

  1. The new user interface: The UI—organized by task—really helps me get work done. The new UI is organized around ribbons— which replace of the old menus and toolbars. The ribbons include the most commonly-needed commands in task-orientated categories. For example, when you open Word you get commands related to fonts, paragraphs, styles, and editing, because those are the tools people use most often when they start writing. Once you’re used to the ribbons (it took me about a day to adjust to them) they make Word and the other Office applications much easier to use. By far, the new UI is the biggest improvement in Word and make the upgrade worth the effort.

    Image of Word 2007 user interface

  2. Chart and table tools: The new tools to create and design charts can help you design a professional-looking chart in less then 5 minutes. Gone are the days when it takes a power user to present a well-formatted, easy-to-read table or chart. The image below shows the tools to help design a table, but designing charts is just as easy. The second image is a table I made in about two minutes. What’s really great is that the design tools and options are consistent with those in PowerPoint 2007 and Excel 2007. You can paste charts or tables between these programs and use the same tools to update them.

    Image of user interface to build a table

    Image of table created in Word 2007

  3. Blogging:That’s right—you can blog right from Word 2007. You can use the same Word features that make writing easier and faster, such as spell checker, and then publish to your blog. You can learn more at Blogging from Word 2007.
  4. Ongoing word count: This simple feature really shouldn’t excite me that much, but as an editor word count is important to me. In Word 2007, the document's word count shows in the status bar next the page count. This feature can also be helpful for writer and students.
  5. Styles preview: In Word 2007—and throughout other Office 2007 applications—you can preview styles before making changes to the text. In previous versions, you would have to make the change numerous times if you didn’t like the result.

Cons

  1. New file formats: Word 2007 saves documents in the new XML-based .docx format, which isn’t compatible with the .doc format used in earlier versions. While you can save your documents so that they will be compatible with earlier versions of Office, I forget to all the time. As a result, my colleagues send back my documents asking me to save them so that it’s compatible with their versions. Once more people are running Office 2007, compatibility won’t be a problem.
  2. Styles changes: The default styles for things like Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 have changed from previous versions of Office. It's not a huge thing, but a bit rattling. I'm sure I can adjust. In addition, I couldn’t get Word 2007 to use my old styles.

Simply said, a lot of people are going to be happy with Word 2007. (The same can be said about the other Office applications, but I’m more comfortable commenting on Word since I’ve use it more.) Give Office 2007 a try and let me know what you think.

—Jason Kozleski