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I evaluated the Professional edition of Microsoft Office 2007, I with special emphasis on the Outlook email system, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. I tested Office on my HP Compaq Presario 2100 using Windows XP SP2 and 1/2GB of memory.
(For many details that I couldn't include in this review, visit my blog: http://contentcurmudgeon.blogspot.com.)
Microsoft offers a wide range of editions. For this product, there are eight, ranging from Basic through the new Enterprise 2007. All editions include Word and Excel. Only the Ultimate and Enterprise editions contain Groove, the new collaboration tool. The Professional edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Publisher, and Accounting Express (U.S. only). Office is packaged with a single installation CD plus an instruction manual. Running Office products in "compatibility mode" allowed me to import and export very complex Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents flawlessly.
Like OpenOffice applications, Mcrosoft Office now uses a multiple-file, compressed format it calls "Open XML" for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. This format is essentially a ZIP file containing separate text, graphics, and other information files for its primary office applications: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. In earlier office editions, Microsoft used a proprietary internal format (such as "Rich Text Format" in Word). Now, instead of a ".DOC" file extension (for example), the spelling ".DOCX" is used for the file extension.
Open XML allows these primary applications to work more consistently with each other. This new format has several advantages, the most obvious of which is that the new format keeps the size of Office files small - about half the size of older file counterparts. By separating text, graphics, and other components, documents should be more stable. For example, if your document has a corrupted graphic, you should be able to replace the bad graphic and resume using the document. If you want to exchange a document with someone using an earlier version of an Office suite program (excepting Outlook), they must use Office 2007, you must save the document using the office "compatibility" mode to give them the version they can open and use, or they must load a "compatibility pack."
The first screen shot in this review shows four views of this new file format. Starting at the upper left and going...