First Observations and Customizations in Office 2007

Now that I’m starting to use Excel 2007 and Word 2007 (I haven’t gotten to Powerpoint and Access yet), I’m starting to like the new ribbon bar.

To put that in perspective, you have to understand that I absolutely hated Office 2003′s design of displaying the few menu-bar items that I had recently used and then, if I hovered long enough, changing the limited menu bar to the full menu bar. One of the first things I did in any Office 2003 program was to make the menu bar show the full menu all the time.

The ribbon bar is designed to resize automatically, collapsing some sections to an alternative layout, depending upon how wide your display window is. So far, it seems that all the information is still accessable via smaller width windows, but it’s not as easily accessible.

Here’s a set of examples. First, we see the Excel 2007 ribbon bar at a width of 800 pixels, as you would see it if your monitor was set to show 800×600 resolution, or if your window was 800 pixels wide.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Now, see how some of the ribbon bar sections show more options now, at a width of 1024 pixels.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Finally, at a width of 1200 pixels, the bar is again different, but there wasn’t any real change in accessibility to the available options.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Microsoft made another neat menu bar for Office 2007, the Quick Access Bar, which is located at the top left corner of the program’s window.

By default, as shown below the icons that show here are Save, Undo and Redo.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Fortunately, there’s a options pulldown at the right side labelled Customise Quick Access Toolbar. This allows us to add the icons of our choice to the toolbar.

If you click on the Customise Quick Access Toolbar icon, you get the menu shown below. To pick among the many, many options available, click on More Commands…

(click on the image for a larger version)

Once you’ve clicked More Commands…, the dialog box below opens and lets us pick, choose, and change the order of the icons shown on the toolbar. You may have to use the option box labelled "Choose commands from:" in order to find the command you want. I needed to do this and pick All Commands in order to find Save As and Print.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Now you can see my finished Quick Access Toolbar, which now includes Save, Save As, Pring, Undo and Redo. I’ll probably add Print Preview to it also.

(click on the image for a larger version)

I spent some time looking for the Office 2003 icon for Print To instead of just Print. In Office 2003, the Print icon printed to the default printer. The Print To icon opened a dialog box where I could select the printer to which I wanted to print. Since I usually used Click2PDF as my printer, which took the print command and instead created a PDF file with the output, I would need to use the dialog box to change printers when I wanted a real paper copy.

I’m pleased to see that the Print icon in Office 2007 opens the printer dialog box, instead of immediately routing the print job to the current default printer.