Office 2007 is an obvious departure from the past.

The familiar menus and toolbars of previous versions have been replaced with the Ribbon, which is bigger and has a very clever trick up its sleeve.

The Ribbon is separated into a series of tabs that each represent a category of tasks, such as Home for basic tasks and View for display options. When selected, each tab displays its own group of icons.

The idea is to make better use of the toolbar space so that more useful options are available. This might seem confusing at first, but it’s very easy to master and this feature will explain everything you need to know. You can always stay in control of the Ribbon and there are plenty of helpful keyboard shortcuts.

Change for the sake of it?
Anyone who has used Office XP will know this is not the first time Microsoft has tried to second-guess users by hiding menu options that were rarely used. Office XP’s system didn’t work well and often caused more confusion than it solved. There are no such problems with the Ribbon.

The company conducted a survey, called the Microsoft Customer Experience Feedback Program, into how people actually use Office. An option to take part in the survey was included in the installation process for Office 2003 and more information can be found on the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program website. Microsoft analysed the feedback and the Ribbon was born.

And it’s been a slightly controversial birth; not everyone approves of the new interface, as people have had to relearn where their commonly used commands live. Adding to the frustration, while Office 2003 had a toolbar that could very easily be customised, its successor is more fixed. This has led to a range of unofficial add-ons that return Office 2007 to its old look – we’ll examine a f ew of these later on.

It is not just the icons in the toolbars that have gone, but also the menus. Instead, these have been replaced with tabs along the top of the Ribbon, making it easier to browse through different options; menus had a habit of disappearing if the mouse is moved in the wrong place.

Given the automation, what you can’t do is move icons around in the Ribbon. This may come as something of a disappointment. A common customisation for Word 2003 and earlier was to create a new toolbar that had only essential icons in it. It was possible to condense the three rows of icons into one by ignoring icons when keyboard shortcuts were used instead.

And that leads to another potential problem with the Ribbon: it is roughly as big as three lines of the old toolbar, so it can be intrusive on smaller screens. But there are ways around both of these problems, as we will demonstrate.

Quick access
The first new part of Office is the Office button: the large round yellow button in the top left of the screen (we are using Word as an example in this feature, but the new Ribbon appears in all Office 2007 programs).

This is like a Start button for Office programs and can be used to access functions that used to be in the File menu, such as creating, opening and saving files. The Program Options window can also be found here.

To the right of the Office button is the Quick Access bar, with a small selection of frequently used icons including Save ­ this is one area of the Ribbon that can be customised, as we’ll explain shortly.

The Ribbon itself is made up of seven tabs that are always available, although the visible tab will change depending on certain tasks in the main part of the document. For example, move the cursor into a table and a tab with all the editing and formatting icons relating to tables will appear automatically. Move the cursor back into ordinary text and the Ribbon will return to the previous tab.

The Home tab has icons for some common tasks; there are options for editing the font and paragraph as well as Styles. Office 2007 gives a preview of how a style would affect your document as you move the cursor over the different options.