Advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office has in the past been roundly criticized for its lack of usability and the restrictions this has placed on user's productivity, with estimates of 15% or less of office features actually being used (Boeri, 2007). In Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft has sought to silence the critics of their usability and open up the navigation of their suite of personal productivity applications more than ever before. The design, placement of features, navigation to advanced features and the introduction of the command Ribbon in Office 2007-compliant applications including Microsoft Word further demonstrates how usability has been transformed from a weakness to strength. The depth of usability enhancements are so pervasive that reviewers have been overwhelmed by the navigation options in early beta releases (Oppenheim, 2007). Microsoft has created a total of eight different versions of Microsoft Office 2007 in this specific release, stratifying applications and add-on development applications across the Ultimate, Professional Plus, and Enterprise Editions (Krasnoff, 2006). The core components of Microsoft Office 2007 include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, Project and SharePoint Designer.

The advantages of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite of applications include the enhanced usability and navigation that are consistent across each application, a feature that has been heavily hyped as changing the personal productivity paradigm in computing (Morejon, 2006). Despite the hype, the consistency of navigation represented by the ubiquitous Office button, the availability of Live Preview throughout all applications, heavy investment in Contextual Tab definition and cross-integration across applications and reliance on Quick Access and Mini Toolbars further supports the main objective of changing the definition of usability in personal productivity applications (Mendelson, 2007). Support for additional file formats including Office Open XML, PDF, and Open Document standards have made Office 2007 more usable from an integration standpoint (Fontana, 2009). In specific industries and professions there is also the need for XML to be highly secure, specifically in the areas of accounting and finance (Zarowin, 2008). Microsoft has anticipated this requirement by also concentrating on the need for secured XML that is complaint to accounting standards, specifically in the Microsoft Excel 2007 Edition (Zarowin, 2008). At a platform level Microsoft also introduced entirely new approaches to enabling greater collaboration as well. These included a complete refresh to SharePoint, their low-end portal and collaboration platform, and Groove, a collaboration platform specifically designed for Microsoft Office 2007 (Krasnoff, 2006).

The advantages of any application suite can be seen from an initial review. Yet to appreciate the long-term advantage of any suite of applications each component needs to be used. In evaluating Microsoft Office 2007 it is immediately apparent that Quick Parts, a tool that allows for quickly inserting fields into Word for example, can save several steps that had to be completed in previous editions (Boeri, 2007). The use of a consistent series of keystroke sequences and the anchoring of the Clipboard also is specifically designed to allow for usability of all content, across all applications (Wildstrom, 2007). This was specifically done to allow for greater data and information usability across all applications, a feature than had only been partially supported in the varying application versions in the past (Boeri, 2007). Microsoft apparently put a massive amount of effort into improving Excel, and the 2007 edition reflects much greater flexibility in graphing, table alignment, formatting and calculation options (Adams, 2006). There are also fewer constraints in Excel 2007 for completing tables and greater focus on graphical ease of use (Zarowin, 2008). Microsoft has also struggled to keep pace with the level of innovation that the Internet has brought to personal productivity applications. In the design of Outlook 2007 the integration of better scheduling and RSS feeds has been accomplished (Dyszel, 2007).