Office Home and Student 2007 provides home computer users and students with the software essentials they need to get tasks done more quickly and easily. You can create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and organize your notes and information in one place.

Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office packaging page.

Four major areas of innovation distinguish the 2007 release of Office Home and Student. These areas of innovation work together to help home computer users get things done more quickly and easily:

• Easily find commands and Help to get you started. Office Home and Student 2007 has the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface and an enhanced Help system, including online tutorials with step-by-step instructions, helping you quickly learn the program and find the answers to your questions. The improved user interface makes it easier for you to deliver better results faster by simplifying the way Microsoft Office works. It organizes program features according to the tasks you want to accomplish, reveals additional features when needed, and previews formatting and editing changes as options are browsed and selected.
• Create high-quality documents you can be proud of.Office Home and Student 2007 has new graphics, formatting galleries, and the Ribbon, a new device that exposes commonly used commands, enabling you to produce high-quality documents you can be proud of.
• Organize notes and information for your personal projects, tasks, and to-do’s, so you can get things done. Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 gives you a digital notebook where you can gather, organize, and search all types of notes and information — typed text, images, audio and video recordings, Web clippings, computer files, and more — all in one place.
• Get tasks done with confidence and security. With an automatic document recovery feature and the Document Inspector tool for removing personally identifiable information from your documents, the latest release of Office Home and Student 2007 enables you to work with more confidence and security.

As we’ve added more and more features and functionality to the applications, it’s gotten more challenging for people to find the things they want to do with the software. For example, Microsoft Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands; you could easily browse through the menus and find everything you could do. In comparison, Microsoft Office Word 2003 has more than 1,500 commands, many of which are admittedly difficult to find. Helping people quickly find the commands and options they need is the key benefit of the Office Fluent user interface.

We wanted to deliver new capabilities that empower people to get the results they want, faster. We had four major design goals:

• Make it easier for people to find and use product features.
• Reduce design clutter and interruptions.
• Make it easier for people to discover the capabilities they need.
• Support the creation of great-looking documents.

The 2007 versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and the authoring part of Outlook — your calendar, your mail notes, and your contacts — have the Office Fluent user interface.

Microsoft Office comes in a variety of different editions, and provides full-featured productivity applications for both home and business users. Microsoft Works is a low-cost alternative to a full-featured Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft Works is a nicely integrated productivity package designed specifically for home users and families with computing beginners.

Find pricing and licensing information on the 2007 Microsoft Office system pricing page.

Office Home and Student 2007 will be sold through a variety of resellers and distributors or can be acquired from computer manufacturers or system builders in conjunction with a new computer purchase and will be preinstalled.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 is offered at one low price for everyone.

Yes. Office Home and Student 2007 is licensed only for noncommercial use by households. It cannot be used in commercial (business) situations.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 is licensed only for noncommercial use by households.

No.

See the system requirements for Office Home and Student 2007.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 will not run on Windows 98. Office Home and Student 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later.

No. Office Home and Student 2007 is designed to run on both Windows XP (SP2 or later) and Windows Vista.

Yes. The 2007 Microsoft Office release will expand on the open XML support that has been in Office XP and Office 2003 by using the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas as the default format for creating and saving documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

The Ecma Office Open XML Formats will offer some key improvements over the binary file formats in use today within Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, and Office PowerPoint 2007. Because these new file formats are compressed, the resulting document sizes will be much smaller — between 50 and 75 percent smaller in some cases. The file format architecture also improves data recovery of damaged or corrupted files.

Yes. Office Home and Student 2007 programs can be configured to save files in earlier Microsoft Office file formats (.doc, .xls, and .ppt). When configured this way, the Microsoft Office system programs operate in a Compatibility Mode that enforces compatibility between releases of Microsoft Office by disabling functionality that is incompatible with prior Microsoft Office releases.

Yes. Office Home and Student 2007 introduces the new Ecma Office XML Formats, which are compact and robust file formats that provide improved integration with external data sources and systems. These formats are backward compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office XP, and Microsoft Office 2000 with the addition of a file format converter patch, available from Office Online and Microsoft Update. Users of Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 can open, edit, and save files by using the new Ecma Office XML Formats.

Yes. You will be able to convert Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to a Portable Document Format (PDF) file directly from within Office Home and Student 2007. You can save your work as a PDF file by simply using the Save As command from within one of these Microsoft Office system programs. It is just that simple — instead of printing the document to fax it or send it by overnight mail, customers can save a PDF file and electronically distribute a read-only, “as-printed” representation of the document.¹

In order to create accessible PDF documents, Office Home and Student 2007 will support the PDF 1.4 specification, which is compatible with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later.

Microsoft is committed to responding to customer requests and to the adoption of open document formats for content sharing, publishing, and archival needs. With Office Home and Student 2007 support for XML Paper Specification (XPS) file creation and PDF format as well as our existing support for the native formats of Microsoft Office, HTML, and Ecma Office XML Formats, customers will have a rich variety of choices when it comes to sharing, publishing, and archiving their documents.¹