Apologies for the wait. I'll crank through the rest of these in the next couple of days. As promised, this post is on Excel 2007 and Word 2007. EXCEL 2007 Being a writer, I try to avoid Excel as much as possible. As a small business operator, however, that's a fruitless pursuit. Fortunately, next to PowerPoint, I found Microsoft's new ribbon to be really effective under Excel (above). 'Course, that's probably be Apologies for the wait. I’ll crank through the rest of these in the next couple of days.As promised, this post is on Excel 2007 and Word 2007. EXCEL 2007 Being a writer, I try to avoid Excel as much as possible. As a small business operator, however, that’s a fruitless pursuit. Fortunately, next to PowerPoint, I found Microsoft’s new ribbon to be really effective under Excel (above). ‘Course, that’s probably because I don’t use Excel so much, so a new interface won’t bother me there as much as it would under other applications. On the plus side, I liked how the ribbon organizes all those parts of Excel that tend to make me scratch my noggin. Formulas, for example, are easily organized by type and placed into simple drop-down menus. The hover-help system really helped me here, too. For Excel pros, Excel 2007 has a number of new features. Our local Excel users commented that they liked the formula auto-complete feature, which auto-suggest complete formulas based on both context and history. Larger spreadsheets, especially those to be used for reports and such, also benefit from a new Page Layout feature that lets you see what the final product will look like with all formatting changes applied–tho it seemed much like a print-preview funtion to me, it’s easier to get to. The real geeks also liked the beefed up support for PivotTables (now support hierarchical data) and User-Defined Functions, which can now fully support Excel 2007’s increased column/cell count (1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns–just enough for my credit card bills).For us normal mortals, however, Excel 2007 is simply easier to understand. They’ve spruced up its graphics capabilities, too, making 3D-graphs and charts both easier and snazzier–once you figure out how to get to them on the ribbon, that is.This extends to more than just charts and graphs, tho. The new Excel makes formatting a spreadsheet with a specific look, much easier. Values can be more easily organized, reports better formatted, you can even apply themes to entire workbooks–excellent way to spruce up those year-end financials. After talking with Microsoft, there’s one other thing that stands out about Excel 2007: We’re all going to be touching it more. Excel 2007 is being used as a primary or alternative front-end for a number of Microsoft applications, including Accounting 2007, the Dynamics family, SQL Server and more. By adding features like CUBE functions, Excel has a much easier time importing, organizing and displaying outside data sets. I’m going to keep trying to avoid it, but I think it’s a hopeless quest. WORD 2007 Now this is where I live. And, yes, the ribbon bugged the hell out of me almost the entire two weeks. Once your mouse gets the new icon locations into its memory, it’s admittedly a mite quicker to find whatever I’m looking for. What’s to like? If you’re a blogger, then Word’s new blogging feature might help you. I say might, because setting this up is still not a slamdunk. It couldn’t handle publishing to a privately held blog like this one. It did manage to let me post to the Technology Filter blog, but there’s still some issues to be worked out with photo uploading and similar details. Still it’s at least as good as LiveWriter and you can take advantage of SmartArt right then and there.SmartArt is available across the whole Office 2007 suite. It’s a smart diagraming tool that lets you pick a basic diagram look, add you specific text additions and then modify the diagram (say, with more data) or change the entire look of the diagram (to another chart type, for example) without losing any of the data. Lets people collaborating on a document easily change everything, including the artwork. YOu can even add fancy diagram effects for a cooler overall look. More Word 2007 tools: Academics will like the new auto-generation of bibliographies and content citations. Can even connect to online Web services to talk to online references–but all that wasn’t yet enabled under the beta. We editor/writer types get a host of new conveniences. Word count is enabled in the status bar, for instance. And Microsoft has included something called Building Blocks, which is a fancy form of the clipboard. Let’s you store oft-used pieces of text in there so their easily accessible for future use–very handy for lawyers that constantly rebuild specific contracts, for instance. Spell check has been noticeably improved. Microsoft has upped Word 2007’s ability to examine the context of a word rather than simply the spelling. Seems to reduce the number of possible or wrong choices. I was skeptical that this would work through everything day-to-day, but so far so good. Me likey.Great new selection of style sheets, cover sheets, templates and themes. Quick styles is another time saver–a way to organize all these new formatting views. Under Word 2003, you’d have to apply a formatting change, check it out, then hit Undo if it didn’t appeal. Quick Styles lets select your text, then simply mouse over the formatting toolbar to see how things affect that text. This is a paradigm you’ll find throughout the Office 2007 suite, especially PowerPoint. There’s much more to Word 2007 if you have back-end server support. Word talks to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Information Rights Server, and can do some really cool stuff in conjunction with InfoPath. We’ll be looking at these capabilities in an upcoming Test Center review, where we’ll put Office 2007 in front of a full complement of back-end servers.The basic end-user Word experience is solid. If you’re still confused about PDF and OpenDoc support, here’s the skinny on that: Native PDF support is out, but after Office 2007 ships, users will be able to download a free add-in that will provide PDF creation support across the entire suite. OpenDoc is for the future. Microsoft is working with other developers to create a format that can talk to the new Office docx format–but that’ll take a little extra time.Meanwhile, day to day, no problems to report. Microsoft says it’s increased reliability for the upcoming RTM version, but I never had a Word problem in two weeks–and I’m in Word about as much as I am in Outlook. Recommended all the way. Technology Industry