Office Ultimate 2007 provides people who work at home and within small businesses with a comprehensive set of software tools they need to create, manage, and share information across organizational and geographic boundaries. With Office Ultimate 2007, you can collaborate with others regardless of their location, collect and store virtually any type of information in one place, quickly find and manage needed content, and easily share and update information.

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2008 ¹
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office Groove 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

There are some great new programs included in a Microsoft Office suite for the first time, including Office Groove 2007 and Office OneNote 2007. These programs enable individuals to share information and collaborate with others regardless of their location. In addition to these programs, four major areas of innovation distinguish Office Ultimate 2007. These areas of innovation work together to help people who work from home and in small businesses create, manage, and share information. The innovation areas help you:

• Work from home. Office Ultimate 2007 provides you with the entire Microsoft Office toolset you’re accustomed to working with at the office or at home.
• Simplify working together. Office Ultimate 2007 can enhance your ability to share information and work more collaboratively. The tools in Office Ultimate 2007 enable you to easily gather, consolidate, find, and share information, regardless of location or organization increasing your efficiency and productivity.
• Get better information insight. Office Ultimate 2007 makes it possible for you to gather, access, and analyze data easily.
• Create and manage content. Office Ultimate 2007 enables you to create and manage content more efficiently and effectively than ever before by providing you tools to organize your information, share many types of data, and gain greater visibility to the most up-to-date project information.

As we’ve added more and more features and functionality to the programs, it has become more challenging for people to find the things they want to do with the software. For example, Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands, and you could go through the menus and see everything you could do. By comparison, Microsoft Office Word 2003 has more than 1,500 commands, many of which can be difficult to find because they are buried in layers of menus. That element of discoverability is just one of the key issues addressed by the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface.

We wanted to deliver new capabilities that empower people to get the results they want, faster. In that vein, 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.

Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, and Office Access 2007 all have the Office Fluent user interface. In addition, specific parts of Office Outlook 2007, such as when you author a new e-mail message, uses the Office Fluent user interface.

The Microsoft Office system comes in a variety of different suites and provides full-featured productivity applications for both home and business users. Microsoft Works is an attractively priced 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 Ultimate 2007 is 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. Visit the How to buy the 2007 Microsoft Office suites page for purchasing options.

Yes. Office Ultimate 2007 will be available in both upgrade and new user versions. The upgrade version will require that you own a qualifying prior release of the Microsoft Office system.

For qualifying prior releases see the 2007 Microsoft Office System pricing page.

Read system requirements for Office Ultimate 2007.

No, Office Ultimate 2007 will not run on Windows 98. Office Ultimate 2007 requires Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later.

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

Yes. Office Ultimate 2007 will expand on the Open XML support in Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft Office XP by using the Ecma Office Open XML Formats 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 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Because these new file formats are compressed, the resulting document sizes will be much smaller, somewhere between 50 and 75 percent smaller in some cases. The file format architecture also improves data recovery of damaged or corrupted files.

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

Office Ultimate 2007 introduces the new Ecma Office Open XML Formats, which are compact, robust file formats that facilitate improved integration with external data sources and systems. Theses formats are compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office XP, and Microsoft Office 2000 with the addition of a file format converter patch, available from Microsoft Update. Users of Microsoft Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 can open, edit, and save files using the new Office XML Formats.

Yes. You can convert Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to Portable Document Format (PDF) documents directly from within Office Ultimate 2007.² You can save your work as a PDF file by using the Save As command from within one of these Microsoft Office system programs. Instead of printing the document to fax it or send it by overnight mail, customers can save a PDF and electronically distribute a read-only, “as printed” representation of the document.

To facilitate creating accessible PDF documents, Office Ultimate 2007 supports the PDF 1.4 specification, which helps to ensure compatibility 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 archiving needs. With the support in Office Ultimate 2007 for XML Paper Specification (XPS) file creation and PDF, as well as existing support for the native formats of Microsoft Office system products, HTML, and Open XML Formats, customers will have a rich variety of choices when it comes to sharing, publishing, and archiving their documents.