IT Training Scotland provides full migration training on any aspect of Microsoft Office 2007. We also have hundreds of courses that cater to the individual programs found within Office. Courses such as advanced Excel training to basic Outlook training.
The ambitious, ground-up rebuild of Microsoft Office Standard 2007 presents drastically different interfaces and new file formats. The new Office looks so unlike its predecessors, it’s likely to spark intense love-hate responses from users. If you’re patient, eager to try the latest tools, and willing to relearn most of what you already know about Office, then you may relish the challenge of Office 2007.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 can produce more-polished documents and presentations, and Outlook’s new scheduling abilities make it a handier communications hub. Professionals who want to impress clients and co-workers with attractive reports, charts, and slide shows will find this a worthy upgrade. First-time Office users may have an easier time than veteran users getting their bearings.
The new era of Office affects even those who don’t upgrade, and a conversion tool is needed to let older Office versions open Office 2007′s default, Open XML files. Office 2007 does offer complex features that you can’t yet find elsewhere.
The Interface You Will See On One Of Our Microsoft Office 2007 Training Courses
Once you open each Office 2007 application, you’ll see a radically different, blue interface that’s brighter than in the past. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint arrange features within a tabbed Ribbon toolbar that largely replaces the gray drop-down menus and dialog boxes from a quarter-century of Office software.
The Office logo menu, docked in the upper left corner, bundles many commands from the old File and Edit menus. Outlook lacks the logo button and adopts the Ribbon only within its message composition and scheduling windows. There’s a core set of always-on tabs, as well as contextual tabs that hide until the software detects that you need them. For instance, the Picture Tools Format tab only shows up when you click on an image.
The Office 2007 programs, which share a new graphics engine, strongly emphasize ways to decorate documents. Pull-down Style Galleries let you preview how new fonts, colour themes, chart styles, images and such appear before you apply the change. This is great for selecting from menus of fonts or page templates.
At the same time, however, the “intelligent” shape-shifting may bewilder those who don’t realize that they must click a style to apply a formatting change. In most cases, the preformatted styles only present colours within the same range already used by your document.
On the one hand, newbie’s to Office software, particularly young, visual learners, may find the 2007 interface easier to master than Office 2003. Icons label most of the commands, and many expand into pull-down menus.
Get Used To The New Features Office 2007 Brings On Our Microsoft Office 2007 Training Courses
Many of the changes to Office 2007 feel skin deep. By that, I mean that there’s a strong emphasis on making documents, spreadsheets, and presentations easier on the eyes. You can adjust the brightness of images, for instance, add 3D effects such as drop shadows and glows to pictures and charts. And many of the features that might appear new are simply easier to stumble upon in the new interface. The useful Document Inspector provides old and new ways to clean up hidden metadata in files. But don’t expect too many new features.
Word 2007 offers some basic tools that you’d otherwise look to in desktop publishing programs such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign. A host of new templates as well as preformatted styles and SmartArt diagrams let you dress up reports, flyers, and so on with images and charts.
We find that the Ribbon layout in Excel improves its usefulness for working with complex spreadsheets. For instance, researchers can access all the formulas in handy pull-down menus. You can make deeper data sorts and work with as many as a million rows. It’s easier to find the Conditional Formatting for drawing heat maps or adding icons in order to display data patterns. Plus, along with the other glossier graphics throughout Office, Excel charts get a facelift.
PowerPoint 2007 is vital if you depend upon professional-looking slide shows to help close a deal. The new template themes are more attractive and less flat-looking than those of the past, although there’s little new in the way of managing multimedia content.
Among the four main applications in Office, Outlook 2007 provides the most practical improvements. To start, it lets you drag tasks and e-mail messages to the calendar, a long-awaited feature that makes scheduling more simple. The new To-Do Bar’s task and calendar overview and the ability to flag an e-mail for follow up at a specific time are terrific for time management.
When sending e-mail attachments from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Outlook composition window opens with all of its formatting options. Integration has improved throughout the applications.
Note that when you open older Office files with the 2007 applications, you’ll work in the Compatibility Mode with fewer features until you convert files to the new format. And as with the release of Office 1997, you can’t open a file with the new extension right away when using earlier versions of the programs. Those who are running Word 2003 or 2000 and need to open a Word 2007 DOCX file have to download a one-time Compatibility Pack.
Should You Attend A Microsoft Office 2007 Training Course?
Should you get IT training when you upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007? With more programs depending on the Office 2007 suite to display information it certainly would be advantageous to know the features of this product before using it in the workplace.
In addition to that, If you’re style-conscious and want to play with new document templates, then Office 2007 should please you. Outlook outshines its predecessors if you need to lean on it daily to manage meetings and tasks.
The radical new interface of Office 2007 applications is here to stay. If you are interested in attending one of our Microsoft Office 2007 training courses or any of the indavidual programs found within office such as Word, Outlook or Excel training, then please fill in the form on our contact page and one of our experienced team will be in touch.