Chapter 2. Navigating in the New Office

Welcome to Oz. Whether you’re a brand-new user to the Office applications or a veteran Office user, this chapter bids you welcome to the 2007 version. If you’re new to Office 2007, this chapter provides an overview of what very likely is a user interface unlike any you’ve encountered previously.

If you’re completely new to Office and have been using other applications such as WordPerfect or 1-2-3, you’re likely more accustomed to toolbars and menus than you are to Office 2007’s Ribbons, so when I contrast Office 2007’s Ribbons with the previous interface, you’ll likely immediately grasp just how different the primary Office 2007 applications are, even if you never touched an Office 2003 program.

The Ribbon is a completely new way of presenting tools and features to users of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. (Outlook message windows use the Ribbon, too.) Briefly, the Ribbon is a set of contextual tools designed to put what you need where you need it when you need it. When you click one of the major tabs on the Ribbon, the tools you need for specific tasks should mostly be right where you need them. The ideal result is that you don’t need to go looking for what you want.

In fact, the Ribbon might actually be considered a new kind of toolbar. Instead of a list of different toolbars accessed from the View menu, however, the different parts of the Ribbon are organized into tabs and groups. The result is that more of the tools are exposed to you, making it more likely that you’ll discover what you need.

If you’ve used other versions of the main Office applications in the past, the 2007 versions will seem strange and different. Imagine that you left earth in the year 1994—the last time that the Office interface was overhauled—and returned in the year 2007. Over the ensuing thirteen years, the interface slowly morphed from menus and toolbars into the Ribbon.

When considered from an evolutionary perspective, perhaps the 2007 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access don’t look so different. What you, the space traveler, do not realize, however, is that the radical changes occurred not slowly and gradually over more than a decade, but in one giant leap from Office 2003 to Office 2007, only 15 minutes before you landed. Everybody who stayed right here on Earth is just as stunned as you are.