Review: Microsoft Word 2007

Word 2007 is one of the major components of Microsoft's Office 2007 suite.

As with the majority of Office 2007 applications, it uses the new ribbon-style menu system.

The Home ribbon gives character, paragraph and style formatting, plus clipboard and search tools.

The dull default Arial-and-Times styles we’ve been used to have been replaced by elegant combinations of font, colour and formatting, arranged in a palette.

Hover the mouse over a style and you get a preview of the selected text – a click confirms, while moving the mouse off the palette cancels. You can also change to a different style set, which affects the whole document - again, you get a preview.

Complementing styles are Themes (accessible from the Page Layout Ribbon). These apply a complete set of fonts, colours and graphic effects to an entire document.

The Insert ribbon covers everything that was previously in the Insert menu (dates, graphics, text boxes etc.), but also things that also belong there, such as headers, footers, and tables.

Other ribbons cover References (footnotes etc), Mailings (mail merge, envelopes, etc), Reviewing (comments, proofing, and mark-up) and View. The View ribbon encompasses the former View and Window menus, as well as access to macros. If you have the optional Developer ribbon enabled, then you get more macro and VBA tools, document protection, XML schemas and form controls.

The only menu left is the Office menu, lurking behind the top-left logo: this contains the old File menu, the options dialogue and up to 50 recently used files. A useful touch is that you can ‘pin’ files to this list so they that stay put.

The Status bar has also had a makeover and now includes a running word count and a zoom control. Another new suite-wide feature is the mini-toolbar. Select some text and a ghostly transparent toolbar appears beside it – mouse over this, or right-click, and it firms up to provide basic formatting. Note that the taskpane is still available for jobs such as accessing clip-art or the thesaurus.

The contextual spelling check is another welcome new feature. This is designed to spot a correctly spelled word in the wrong place – "it’s" instead of "its", for instance.
Although the ribbon takes getting used to, you’ll find many sections have a small arrow to the right of the label – this summons the traditional dialogue.

Other aids include pop-ups for keyboard shortcuts; press the Alt key and letters will appear on the ribbons and tabs prompting further input. If you’re still stuck, as well as off-line text help there’s an online Flash guide to finding Word 2003 commands in 2007.

Surprisingly, given the extent of the makeover, Microsoft still hasn’t got window handling consistent. With multiple documents open in Excel, you're given one program window and taskbar buttons for each worksheet, which makes sense.

However, with Word you are stuck with either multiple program windows – each with its own ribbon and taskbar button - or a single parent with a single taskbar button just showing the active document.

Word 2007 brings with it plenty of improvements, but the lack of customisation options will frustrate some.

This article is part of our complete Microsoft Office 2007 review
Microsoft Office 2007 overview
Microsoft Excel 2007 review
Microsoft Outlook 2007 review

See also
Microsoft Windows Vista review
Video review: Windows Vista

Also consider
Tesco Complete Office software suite
An excellent budget alternative to Microsoft Office, providing all the basics required of an office suite

Openoffice.org 2
Improved compatibility with Microsoft Office make this a genuine alternative for many home and business users

Zoho Virtual Office productivity software
Share contacts and organise calendars

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