The traditional menus and toolbars have been replaced by the Ribbon — a new device that presents commands organized into a set of tabs. The tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications. For example, in Office Word 2007, the tabs group commands for activities such as inserting objects like pictures and tables, doing page layout, working with references, doing mailings, and reviewing. The Home tab provides easy access to the most frequently used commands. Office Excel 2007 has a similar set of tabs that make sense for spreadsheet work including tabs for working with formulas, managing data, and reviewing. These tabs simplify accessing application features because they organize the commands in a way that corresponds directly to the tasks people perform in these applications.

File Extensions

The 2007 Microsoft Office introduces XML-based file format for Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. The new file format is called Office Open XML Formats and represents a major change to how Office works behind the scenes.  Below, you will find more detail about the benefits of the new way of doing things.  Right off the bat you will be able to identify one of the new documents because it will have an “X” in the extension of the file name.  For example, older Word documents might look like Document1.doc while the new format would look like Document1.docx.  The following highlights are some of the additional overall benefits of the Office XML Formats:

• Open and royalty-free

  The Office XML Formats are based on XML and ZIP technologies, so they are universally accessible. The specification for the formats and schemas will be published and made available under the same royalty-free license that exists today for the Microsoft Office 2003 Reference Schemas, and that is openly offered and available for broad industry use.

• Efficient

  The Office XML Formats use ZIP and compression technologies to store documents. A significant benefit of the new formats is substantially smaller file sizes—up to 75 percent smaller than comparable binary documents. This is one of the advantages of using the combination of XML and the ZIP technologies for storing files. Because XML is a text–based format that compresses very well, and the ZIP container supports compressing the contents, users can obtain significant reductions in file size. This type of file compression offers potential cost savings because it reduces the disk space required to store files and decreases the bandwidth needed to transport files through e-mail, over networks, and across the Web.

• Interoperable

  With industry-standard XML at the core of the Office XML Formats, exchanging data between Microsoft Office applications and enterprise business systems is simplified. Without requiring access to the Office applications, solutions can alter information inside an Office document or create a document by using standard tools and technologies capable of manipulating XML. The new formats enable you to build archives of documents without using Office code.

• Robust

  The Office XML Formats are designed to be more robust than the binary formats, and, therefore, to help reduce the risk of lost information due to damaged or corrupted files. Even documents created or altered outside of Office are less likely to corrupt, because Office applications are designed to recover documents with improved reliability by using the new formats. With more and more documents traveling through e-mail attachments or removable storage, the chance of a network or storage failure increases the possibility of a document becoming corrupt.

• Secure

  The file formats help to improve security against documents with embedded code or macros. By default, the new Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 file formats do not execute embedded code. So, if a person receives an e-mail message with a Word document attached, he or she could open the attachment knowing the document does not execute harmful code. The Office XML Formats include a special-purpose format with a separate extension for files with embedded code, enabling IT staff to quickly identify files that contain code.

Other Notable Features

• The Microsoft Office Button

Many of the most valuable features in previous versions of Microsoft Office were not about the document authoring experience at all. Instead, they were about all the things you can do with a document: share it, protect it, print it, publish it, and send it. In spite of that, previous releases of the Microsoft Office applications lacked a single central location where a user can see all of these capabilities in one place. File-level features were mixed in with authoring features.

The new UI brings together the capabilities of the Microsoft Office system into a single entry point in the UI: the Microsoft Office Button. This offers two major advantages. First, it helps users find these valuable features. Second, it simplifies the core authoring scenarios by allowing the Ribbon to focus on creating great documents.

• Contextual tabs

Certain sets of commands are only relevant when objects of a particular type are being edited. For example, the commands for editing a chart are not relevant until a chart appears in a spreadsheet and the user is focusing on modifying it. In current versions of Microsoft Office applications, these commands can be difficult to find. In Office Excel 2007, clicking on a chart causes a contextual tab to appear with commands used for chart editing. Contextual tabs only appear when they are needed and make it much easier to find and use the commands needed for the operation at hand.