Microsoft Office 2007 will be available to corporate customers by the end of this year, with the retail version coming early in 2007.

UK prices have yet to be announced, but the US versions range from a $149 Student edition to a $679 Ultimate edition.

As always when reviewing beta versions, we must stress that the final product may differ. One feature that seems set to change is the ability to save files in Pdf (Adobe Acrobat) format – an established feature of the Star Office, Open Office, Wordperfect and Ability suites.

Although it is present in beta two, Microsoft and Adobe appear to have fallen out over this, and it looks as if it will not be included in the final version. The future of saving in Microsoft’s own-brand portable document format – XPS – is also uncertain.

If you read PCW’s beta one review or tried the beta two release (as featured on the cover disc of PCW's August edition), then you’ll know that there’s a completely redesigned interface.

The menu and toolbar interface has been with us for over 15 years, and during that time has had to absorb more and more. The stopgap solutions of task panes and curtailed menus didn’t contribute much to usability.

According to Microsoft, the original Word for Windows had about 100 commands. Our count in Word 2003 reveals over 1,000 commands, 29 toolbars and 14 task panes. So, out the menus and toolbars go - well, almost.

Beta one left us with just a File menu, but beta two replaces this last vestige with the Microsoft Office Button. This is the nearest thing you’ll find to a traditional menu.

You’ll see a list of recent documents; familiar actions such as save or print; a Finish option which includes tools to remove hidden data and restrict changes and, at the bottom of the dialogue, an Options button.

The latter brings together all the options that were hitherto spread across the interface, such as Options, Add-ins, Word’s Autocorrect and Excel’s formula checking dialogues.

Everything else is done with ribbons. What look like menu titles – Home, Insert, Page Layout, and so on – are tabs, each revealing a new set of ribbons.

Word’s Home ribbon, for instance, contains five sections, comprising clipboard tools, font formatting, paragraph formatting, styles and editing. The first three contain familiar toolbar buttons.

Continued on page 2...