File formats

It isn’t just the visual redesign that brings a fundamental change
to Office 2007; Microsoft has also made some pretty major changes to
the underpinnings of the supported file formats. In fact, Word, Excel
and PowerPoint all get new default file formats, storing documents as a
series of XML files inside a ZIP container.

The ZIP compression means the resulting files are smaller – down to
a quarter of the size of the equivalent binary file from Office 2003 -
and they’re also more robust. Errors in transmission will corrupt the
file less often and, if corruptions occur, the main parts of the
document can still be read.

Based on XML and ZIP, the documents can easily be manipulated by
programs on workstations or servers without needing the Office apps to
be automated or even installed. This makes it possible to build
efficient, robust and scalable apps that wrangle Office documents,
gathering data from them or pushing data into them.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint will open and save old, binary format
documents and render them with 100% fidelity. You can also upgrade old
documents to the new format without problems, but many of the new
features in the applications rely on the new file format: saving new
documents in the old formats will probably mean losing some formatting
or functionality. The applications will warn you if this is going to
happen.

Export as PDF/XPS

Virtually all Office 2007 Beta 2 apps will allow you to export your
documents directly, either as PDF or as XPS (XML Paper Specification),
the new Microsoft rival for PDF. These formats allow you to share final
format documents with other people if they don’t need to be able to
edit the document contents. You can choose whether to save a small file
for viewing onscreen or a larger file for printing on an office
printer. Due to the reported anti-trust concerns, Microsoft looks
likely to take out the ability to save PDF or XPS from the final
version of Office 2007, but you should be able to download a patch from
Microsoft to add those capabilities back in.

Themes

All the main applications now make use of a common set of Themes
that control the fonts, colour schemes and effects used in the
documents. Picking a theme will change the body and heading fonts, the
colour scheme and the glow, highlight or shadow effects on objects, all
with one click. Office comes with a set of 20 themes and you can also
make your own. Corporate customers will be able to define one or more
corporate standard themes and, if they want, not distribute the other
themes, so that all users can easily produce documents that conform to
the corporate standard.

Diagrams

Another feature that appears in many applications is the new
diagramming tool called SmartArt. Building on the previous Office
Diagrams feature, SmartArt lets you turn a boring list of words into a
diagram with a couple of clicks. The diagrams have circles, rectangles
and arrows. Browse the gallery of diagram types and pick one. Paste
your text into the outliner and you have a diagram. Add colour and
effects such as shadows or 3D with just a couple of clicks. SmartArt
certainly livens up a document and is simple to use.

Microsoft Office 2007: Nuts and bolts

Originally from Technophilia by Abdul Jaleel

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