Office Enterprise 2007

It's been four years in development, but it looks like Microsoft's Office developers have used their time well. Office 2007, in any of its eight editions, is quite a new broom and the almost-top-of-the-line Enterprise edition includes all five main applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access - as well as some very useful extras. The fundamental change in the new Office is the way you interact with the main programs: this is down to the Ribbon. Gone are the standard menu bar with toolbar beneath and instead you have a series of tabs, each showing panels of icons with the most commonly-used tools and functions on them. Switching between tabs gives new sets of icons and the Ribbon is bolstered by the mini toolbar, which fades in near your mouse pointer for making format changes. After a few minutes you start to get the idea of the Ribbon and for most functions it proves a lot quicker to use than the old interface. There are some idiosyncrasies, though. Why has the file menu become an Office button in the top left-hand corner of the screen and why is the default Ribbon tab labelled Home? These seem to be changes for change's sake. Office now uses the XML file format for consistency across all the main applications, though it still differentiates them with .docx, .xlsx and .pptx filetypes. Files are automatically compressed with Zip compression. With all the work concentrated on the interface, the feature sets of the main applications haven't changed as much. Word, Excel and PowerPoint all offer themes, like super styles, covering colours and design elements as well as typography. Switch themes and the look of the entire document changes. Many formatting and layout alterations you make in the big three apps can be previewed by hovering your mouse pointer over the style, font, colour or whatever selectors. New fonts are supplied with Office and widely used in Word, along with a new default line spacing of 1.15 lines. These give documents a modern, open feel