Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is a version of Microsoft Office, a family of office suites and productivity software for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007, the same respective release dates of Windows Vista. It was preceded by Office 2003 and succeeded by Office 2010.

Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars. Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. The new formats are intended to facilitate the sharing of information between programs, improve security, reduce the size of documents, and enable new recovery scenarios.

Office 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, or a later operating system; it is the last version of Microsoft Office to run on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is Office SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports Excel Services, a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.

With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.

Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite, as Windows Speech Recognition was integrated into Windows Vista. Windows XP users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.

According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed (its sample comprising 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers).

The first beta of Microsoft Office 2007, referred to as Beta-1 in emails sent to a small number of testers, was released on November 16, 2005. The Beta-1 Technical Refresh was released to testers on March 13, 2006. The Technical Refresh fixed issues in installing with Windows Vista build 5308.

Microsoft revealed the ribbon on March 9, 2006 at CeBIT in Germany.

Office 2007 Beta 2 was announced by Bill Gates at WinHEC 2006, and was initially released to the public at no cost from Microsoft's web site. However, because of an unprecedented number of downloads, a fee of $1.50 was introduced for each product downloaded after August 2, 2006. The beta was updated on September 14, 2006 in Beta 2 Technical Refresh (Beta2TR). It included an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality.

The beta versions continued to function in a reduced functionality mode after February 1, 2007. If users downloaded the Technical Refresh to update Beta 2, then users could use its full functionality until March 31, 2007 for client products and May 15, 2007 for server products. The Beta program ended on November 8, 2006, when Microsoft declared the product "Released to Manufacturing" (RTM) and started manufacturing the final product. After RTM, the availability of the beta download ended.

Office 2007 was released to volume licensing customers on November 30, 2006, and to the general public on January 30, 2007.

Since the initial release of Microsoft Office 2007, three service packs containing updates as well as additional features have been released. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Packs are cumulative, so previous Service Packs are not a prerequisite for installation.

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 was released on December 11, 2007. Official documentation claims that SP1 is not simply a rollup of publicly released patches, but that it also contains fixes for a total of 481 issues throughout the entire Office suite. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 was released on April 28, 2009. It added improved support for ODF, XPS and PDF standards, and included several bug fixes. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 was released on October 25, 2011.

The ribbon, a panel that houses a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organizes commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The ribbon is present in Microsoft Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Access 2007 and some Outlook 2007 windows. The ribbon is not user customizable in Office 2007. Each application has a different set of tabs that exposes functions that the application offers. For example, while Excel has a tab for the graphing capabilities, Word does not; instead it has tabs to control the formatting of a text document. Within each tab, various related options may be grouped together. The ribbon is designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible with fewer mouse clicks as compared to the menu-based UI used prior to Office 2007. Moving the mouse scroll wheel while on any of the tabs on the ribbon cycles—through the tabs. The ribbon can be minimized by double clicking the active section's title, such as the Home text in the picture below. Office 2007 does not natively support removing, modifying or replacing ribbon. Third party add-ins, however, can bring menus and toolbars back to Office 2007 or customize the ribbon commands. Add-ins that restore menus and toolbars include Classic Menu for Office, ToolbarToggle, and Ubitmenu. Others like RibbonCustomizer enable the customization of ribbons. Office 2010 does allow user customization of the ribbon out of the box.

Microsoft Office 2007 includes features geared towards collaboration and data sharing. As such, Microsoft Office 2007 features server components for applications such as Excel, which work in conjunction with SharePoint Services, to provide a collaboration platform. SharePoint works with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which is used to host a SharePoint site, and uses IIS and ASP.NET 2.0. Excel server exposes Excel Services, which allows any worksheet to be created, edited and maintained via web browsers. It features Excel Web Access, the client-side component which is used to render the worksheet on a browser, Excel Calculation Service which is the server side component which populates the worksheet with data and perform calculations, and Excel Web Services that extends Excel functionalities into individual web services. SharePoint can also be used to host Word documents for collaborative editing, by sharing a document. SharePoint can also be used to hold PowerPoint slides in a Slide Library, from which the slides can be used as a formatting template. It also notifies users of a slide automatically in case the source slide is modified. Also by using SharePoint, PowerPoint can manage shared review of presentations. Any SharePoint hosted document can be accessed from the application which created the document or from other applications such as a browser or Microsoft Office Outlook.

Microsoft Office 2007 also includes Groove, which brings collaborative features to a peer-to-peer paradigm. Groove can host documents, including presentations, workbooks and others, created in Microsoft Office 2007 application in a shared workspace, which can then be used in collaborative editing of documents. Groove can also be used in managing workspace sessions, including access control of the workspace. To collaborate on one or more documents, a Workspace must be created, and then those who are to work on it must be invited. Any file shared on the workspace are automatically shared among all participants. The application also provides real-time messaging, including one-to-one as well as group messaging, and presence features, as well as monitoring workspace activities with alerts, which are raised when pre-defined set of activities are detected. Groove also provides features for conflict resolution for conflicting edits. Schedules for a collaboration can also be decided by using a built-in shared calendar, which can also be used to keep track of the progress of a project. However, the calendar is not compatible with Microsoft Outlook.