Meet the
Challenges of Upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007
By
Kevin Chan
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Microsoft Office 2007 was released
early this year. This latest version of Office is designed to
work with the new Windows Vista but is also compatible with
Windows XP. It offers many new features and functionality that
will be beneficial to users. However, the two main
challenges with upgrading to Office 2007 are the significantly
different user interface to previous versions of Office and the
new XML-based document formats. Let's look
at each of these in turn.
The new user interface
Some of the most popular Office 2007 applications, namely
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, have been updated with the
brand new user interface which will require a little extra time
getting used to it. Around two decades ago, when the first
version of Word and Excel appeared on Windows, these
applications utilized the familiar menu and toolbar-based UI
that has appeared in almost all operating systems and
applications. Since then, for the next decade, users could
easily access the applications' various commands.
By the late 1990's, Office was
getting much more features and becoming more complex than ever.
For Office 2007, Microsoft has finally given up the original UI,
thus the Ribbon UI is introduced. The Ribbon UI replaces the old
UI at the top of the application window. This area of UI is
separated into context-sensitive tabs. Users will find most of
the commonly-used commands in the Ribbon's Home Tab.
The Ribbon is context-sensitive, if the user does something a
bit more complicated, s/he may find new tabs appearing. More and
more commands will spill out when the user expands the
application window horizontally. However, for those who do not
like the new Ribbon UI, traditional commands can be customized
into the Quick Access Toolbar and the Ribbon can be hidden.
However, the "Ribbonization" of Office is incomplete.
Outlook, OneNote, InfoPath and Publish have NOT been Ribbonized
yet. It can be expected in the later patches or releases of
Office.
Reference:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx
The new document formats
The new file formats are called OpenXML by Microsoft. They
are based on XML, a standards-based, self-documenting markup
language that is somewhat like HTML. XML has found widespread
success around the world in a variety of places, and its use as
the heart of the OpenXML document format suggests that Microsoft
is serious about interoperability and openness.
Documents created in the OpenXML formats are smaller and more
robust than their predecessors. This is because the new formats
are really renamed ZIP-based compressed files that contain a
variety of separated, componentized data, each broken down into
individual files inside the container. By comparison, Word
documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets
stored in Office 2003 or earlier formats are monolithic binary
files. These are files in which the data, styles and other
information are all mixed together in a proprietary way.
Microsoft claims that the file size of a document in the new
format can be up to 75% smaller than those in the old formats.
In order to differentiate these new file format documents
from binary documents used by previous Office versions, a
four-character file extension is adopted. So instead of a
.doc Word document, you will see .docx. Excel's .xls
becomes .xlsx and PowerPoint's .ppt becomes .pptx.
A full list is available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2007_file_extensions.
Of course, you can still open and save to the old formats as
desired. However, extra care must be taken when working with
others as the new format is not backward compatible. This
means users with previous versions of Office receiving Office
2007 documents saved in the default format will not be able to
open these documents. Although the converter pack allows
users with previous versions of Office to view Office 2007
files, these files may have missing functionality when
converted. More information on the converter pack is available
at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101686761033.aspx.
Reference:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100069351033.aspx
The implementation plan
Microsoft Office 2007 has been recently made available on the
CSC Student LANs for teaching and learning. The software CDs of
Microsoft Office 2007 (English and Chinese HK), Microsoft Office
SharePoint Designer 2007 (English and Chinese HK) and Microsoft
Office 2007 Language Pack (Chinese HK and Simplified Chinese)
will be distributed to departments for lab deployment,
standalone installation and eligible staff to work at home.
Meanwhile, all these items will be made available under the
Microsoft Campus agreement for download installation to staff
PCs through the departmental network. As the look and feel of
the software has undergone significant changes, the CSC highly
recommends attending training before upgrading to Microsoft
Office 2007. A computer course on "What's New in Microsoft
Office 2007?" has been arranged on 06 July 2007. It is now open
for enrolment. Staff can enroll the course through AIMS in the
e-Portal.
System requirements
Hardware upgrade should not be needed when upgrading from
Office 2003 to Office 2007. However, minimum hardware
requirement should be met for upgrading Office 2000 and Office
XP.
Component |
Requirement |
Processor |
500MHz or higher |
Memory |
256MB RAM or higher |
Hard disk |
2GB |
Drive |
CD or DVD ROM |
Display |
1024x768 or higher
resolution |
Operating system |
Windows XP with SP2,
Windows Server 2003 with SP1, or later operating systems |
Reference:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/ha101668651033.aspx