Three major areas of innovation distinguish the 2007 release of Office Professional Plus. These areas of innovation work together to enable you and your organization to deliver better results faster:

• The Microsoft Office Fluent user interface (UI) helps make it easier for you to deliver better results faster by simplifying the way Microsoft Office works: it organizes program features according to the tasks users want to accomplish, reveals additional features when needed, and previews formatting and editing changes as options are browsed.
• Each program within the suite introduces new capabilities that give information workers powerful new tools for working with information efficiently and effectively. A dramatically upgraded graphics engine makes it much easier to produce great-looking, high-impact documents, spreadsheets, and presentations without spending hours tweaking formatting commands. Additional innovations include Microsoft Office Excel 2007 data visualization, Office Word 2007 Building Blocks, Office PowerPoint 2007 SmartArt diagrams, the Office Outlook 2007 To-Do bar, and the complete redesign of Microsoft Office Access 2007.
• Out-of-the-box integration with the information management and workflow capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps streamline tasks associated with reviewing, publishing, and consuming content, freeing people to focus more on the content itself.

In addition, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 is now part of the Office Professional Plus 2007 suite. Office Communicator 2007 helps people be more productive by enabling them to communicate seamlessly with others in different locations or time zones, with a range of different communication options including instant messaging (IM), phone and voice conferencing, video conferencing, or Web conferencing. Integration with 2007 Microsoft Office system programs Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint Server gives teams immediate access to a full set of collaboration tools.¹

As we’ve added more features and functionality to the applications, it has become more challenging for people to find the things they want to do with the products. For example, Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands, and you could go through the menus and see everything you could do. Today, Microsoft Office Word 2003 has more than 1,500 commands, many of which are admittedly difficult to find. That element of discoverability is just one of the key issues addressed by 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 releases of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook (with the exception of the main Outlook window) have the Office Fluent user interface.

Yes, and capabilities are available to third-party developers interested in adding functionality to Office Professional Plus 2007 in a way that integrates smoothly with the Office Fluent user interface. Developers will be able to add their own custom tabs by using a rich set of controls, including buttons, list boxes, and galleries. In addition, they will be able to integrate their commands into the existing tabs and the existing contextual tabs.

Yes, commands from existing add-in menus and toolbars will automatically appear on a new add-in tab that appears when Microsoft Office add-ins are present.

Microsoft developed Ecma Office Open XML Format to respond to customer requests for more rapid document creation from disparate data sources and to extend our commitment to industry-standard XML. By creating a new robust, yet compact, structure based on industry standards such as XML and ZIP, the new default file formats speed document creation while reducing the size of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and improving data recovery in corrupted files.

Yes, the Office Professional Plus 2007 programs can be configured to save files in the earlier Microsoft Office formats. When configured this way, the Microsoft Office programs will operate in a Compatibility Mode which will enforce compatibility between versions of Microsoft Office by disabling functionality that is incompatible with prior Microsoft Office releases.

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

Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office packaging page.

Yes. To try Office Professional Plus 2007, visit the online test drive.

See the system requirements for Office Professional 2007.

Office Professional Plus 2007 introduces the new Ecma Office Open XML Format, which are compact, robust file formats enabling improved integration with external data sources and systems. These formats are compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 with the addition of file format conversion software, available from Microsoft Office Online and Microsoft Update. With the File Format Compatibility Pack, users of Microsoft Office 2003 and Office XP applications can open, edit, and save files using the new Office Open XML Format. Users of Microsoft Office 2000 programs will use an external utility to convert Ecma Office Open XML Format files to 2007 version binaries and back again.

Office Professional Plus 2007, when combined with Office SharePoint Server 2007, delivers an expanded set of capabilities that make it easier to deliver better results faster across your organization. Key capabilities include:

• Office PowerPoint 2007 slide libraries that make it easy to share presentation content.
• Document management capabilities that streamline the process of creating, reviewing, and publishing content.
• Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet publishing capabilities that enable viewing Excel 2007 spreadsheets using a Web browser.
• Electronic forms distribution capabilities that extend the use of Microsoft Office InfoPath electronic forms beyond your firewall.

Find more information about these new capabilities.

Using the collaboration features in Windows SharePoint Services technology, organizations can help their employees create and manage rich, easy-to-build Web sites to work together on documents, projects, and tasks. These sites can be organized, discovered, and used throughout the organization. Features such as document versioning, approval workflow, check in and check out, document profiling, and publishing can help improve information flow. You can also personalize and customize intranet and extranet sites using advanced user-profiling capabilities.

Windows Server 2003 is the foundation for an integrated infrastructure. By adding the power of smart clients and collaborative servers, you get easier, more secure, and more reliable access to your own and shared information, including team documents. The result is documented productivity increases that already are saving millions of dollars annually for businesses and governments worldwide.

For example, Windows Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services together can help teams collaborate through team collaboration sites. Similarly, Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) for Windows Server 2003 enables you to implement information rights management (IRM) technologies introduced in the 2003 release of the Microsoft Office system. IRM can help prevent sensitive documents and e-mail messages from being forwarded, edited, or copied by unauthorized individuals.

XML is an open, industry-standard language for organizing and storing data. Having data in XML means that the information is transportable and can be easily shared and reused.