Review: Microsoft Office 2007 - Beta 2

The styles section, as you'd expect, contains a palette of styles to choose from: mouse-over a sample and selected text will appear in a live preview of that style.

There’s also a button to replace the contents of the palette with other style sets.
The final section contains Find, Replace, Go and similar commands.

With most ribbon sections, if you don’t see what you want, a small arrow in the corner summons an old-fashioned dialogue. Complementing the styles palette are the themes (found in the Page Layout ribbon) that combine sets of fonts, colours and graphic effects.

Although it is possible to hand-build similar styles in previous versions, this is a longwinded business, and the elegant ready-made styles in 2007, together with some new fonts, provide a much easier way to get away from the dreary double-act of Times and Arial.

Other Word ribbons contain tools for inserting, page layout, reviewing, viewing, mailing and reference; Excel replaces those last two with formula and data tabs. Note that the ribbons are not modal.

This means you can type or edit with any tab active, and keyboard shortcuts, such as Control & F for find, also work with any tab. If you get stuck, the online help has a list of all Office 2003 commands and where to find them in 2007.

For those who felt cramped by Excel 2003, the worksheet size has been increase to 1,048,576 rows x 16,384 columns. There are similar styles and themes to those in Word, and Rich Conditional Formatting makes for easier and more effective highlighting of high, low or mid-range values in a worksheet.

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