A lot has changed for Microsoft Office in the 15 years since it became a computing staple.

There have been regular updates to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Microsoft has added the Outlook email and contacts program and Access, a database program.

Updates to Office have been regular and, if we’re honest, unremarkable. There’s little that can be done to these programs to tempt most of us to upgrade.

This time it’s different. Microsoft has introduced a couple of elements that change how Office works. The first is a new interface – Office now looks very different. The second is a new XML-based file format, which changes how files are saved, and the information that is saved when you press the Control and S keys.

Office versions…
As with previous versions, Office 2007 comes in various configurations. The Basic version is available only with new computers and includes Word, Excel and Outlook. The Home and Student version doesn’t include Outlook but adds Powerpoint and One Note. The Standard version includes Outlook but not Onenote, and the Small Business edition adds Publisher and a Business Contact Manager.

The Professional version adds Access to the bundle, and other versions, available to corporate customers only, add applications such as Groove (team collaboration) and Information Rights Management. Frontpage is no longer included in any version because Microsoft has a new range of software called Expression for web design.

Doing the filing
One big break with tradition is in file formats. The old proprietary formats – .doc, .xls and .ppt, have been replaced by the open-standard Office XML format (.docx, .xlsx and .pptx). These incorporate Zip compression, for smaller files, and XML technology for custom tags to make searching and sorting easier – the latter being chiefly of interest to business users.

This is no cause for panic among users of previous versions. Microsoft has provided a free download of converters so that Office 2000, XP and 2003 users can open and save the new formats. Get it from http://tinyurl.com/ykums3. In any case, the Office XML formats aren’t compulsory – there are options to set the older formats as the default ‘Save’ type.

Finally, in a mystery that brings the word ‘lawyers’ to mind, the ‘Save as Pdf’ feature that was part of the beta version has been removed from the retail product – but it’s available as a free add-in, downloadable from the http://tinyurl.com/y39ave.

Look and feel
The menu-and-toolbar approach has been with us since the earliest versions of Office – and before that in the standalone versions of Excel and Word for Windows. The first version of Word had about 100 commands. In Word 2003 there are more than 1,500, and Microsoft has decided that many of these are too difficult to find.

In recent years, stop-gap measures such as the Office Assistant, the Task Pane and truncated menus have proved neither effective nor popular, so Microsoft has redesigned the interface from scratch. The intention was to make it easier to exploit the capabilities of the programs to produce great-looking documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Read on to see if we think they’ve succeeded.