Product Description

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 provides people at home or work witha comprehensive set of tools that helps them gather and consolidatevirtually any type of information find what they are looking forquickly and easily share information with others ac

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1759 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 45491G
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.57" h x 5.51" w x 7.87" l, .93 pounds

Features

• Office Ultimate 2007. Version Upgrade

Manufacturer's Description:
Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 provides people at home or work with a comprehensive set of tools that help them gather and consolidate virtually any type of information, find what they are looking for quickly, and easily share information with others across geographical or organizational boundaries so they can deliver better results faster. Building upon Office Professional 2007, Ultimate 2007 includes core applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, and Outlook with Business Contact Manager, as well as powerful 2007 versions of Groove, OneNote, and InfoPath that make working from home a new experience. Ultimate also offers electronic forms, advanced information rights management and policy capabilities, and integrated enterprise content management.

Which edition of Office is right for you? View a comparison of Microsoft Office 2007 editions.

Streamlined User Interface Get better results in less time with Ultimate's streamlined user interface that helps you create documents faster, more easily, and more intuitively. Reduce the time and frustration of learning new software with commands that present the right tools when you need them. Improved picture, charting, and graphics tools let you produce better-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and a large library of standard charts, quick formatting tools, and SmartArt diagrams make it easy to include rich and stunning visuals and charts. Work Anywhere Ultimate 2007 provides people who work from home with the familiar tools they may use at the office to efficiently create, gather, analyse, and share information. It also includes Groove, an innovative application that lets users create and customize Groove workspaces in minutes and invite colleagues, partners, and customers to join-- all with enhanced security and without requesting IT resources. Groove stores all your workspaces, tools, and data right on your computer so there's no need to connect to the corporate network to access information. You stay productive whether you're working in the office, at a customer site, on the road, or from home. This software also keeps copies of your workspaces and files, which are synchronized across your own computers, even if they are not online at the same time. Effortless Collaboration Ultimate 2007 lets you collaborate easily with colleagues, partners, and customers--all with one program. There's no need to switch tools when you need to work with people outside your organization. In addition, increased support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) file formats helps ensure broader distribution of your documents with others. Manage Notes and Information Ultimate 2007 includes OneNote, a digital notebook that provides a flexible way to gather notes and information, powerful search capabilities so users can find what they are looking for quickly, and easy to use, shared notebooks for teams to work together more effectively. It enables greater efficiency while mobile so you can gather and view notes and other information on a Smartphone or Pocket PC mobile device and sync it with your OneNote notebook on your portable computer. In addition, OneNote enables you to gather all needed content in one place, regardless of data format, further simplifying information exchange between colleagues. Create and Manage Content Ultimate 2007 provides tools that help you create and manage content more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Use audible and text alerts that notify you of specific changes to monitor document changes and gain greater visibility of the most up-to-date project information in Groove. The new Instant Search in Outlook helps you quickly find e-mail messages, while Excel makes it easier than ever to analyse data with powerful visualization options. You can also compile and track information from different sources in Access, allowing you to filter data when you need to. When it's time to analyse important data, Ultimate 2007 lets you visualize key data trends using conditional formatting, which includes improved data bars, more colourful gradients, and icons so you can format data based on specific rules and easily identify key data trends with visual cues. Stay Organized Outlook features a new To-Do Bar for organizing tasks, appointments and e-mail messages flagged for follow-up. You can also view tasks on the calendar alongside your appointments. Uncompleted tasks roll over to the next day and accumulate until completed. To help save time, take advantage of the preview feature, which lets you view proposed changes to your document while you're working on it without having to repeatedly search through layers of menus.

Create workspaces and collaborate with ease with Office Groove 2007. View larger.

Tasks are easy to follow up on because they are included on the new To-Do Bar and within Outlook reminders. You can also drag tasks onto your calendar. View larger.

Improved Security
To help save time and protect your work, Ultimate 2007 helps you keep your e-mail more secure and reduce electronic junk mail. Outlook includes an enhanced junk e-mail filter to help reduce electronic spam and protect against potentially harmful attachments, and security enhancements to help prevent "phishing," a fraudulent e-mail attempt to trick you into providing financial or personal information. This allows you to spend less time troubleshooting problems, or scrambling to replace lost files or data, and more time enjoying a productive computing experience.

Customer Reviews

Really poor effort. Not worth the money
Doesn't do anything significant that 2003 couldn't do.

New user interface is incredibly annoying for experienced users. Can't be customised. Things that previously done with 1 click now take 2-3 clicks (or even 4 sometimes). Commonly used functions are buried.

Only a limited amount of customisation of the interface is possible using the single "quick access toolbar". the "ribbon" can't be customised at all and occupies a lot of space. If you hide the ribbon then you have to double click to bring it back. things that could be done from the keyboard now require the mouse. Slower to do and annoying.

Colour schemes are limited and unclear. Some items are highlighted in a sort of orange/yellow colour (often difficult to spot) others in pink or red. Tab colours on Excel are also not very good.

Macros are not as easy to set up as 2003 and what is really annoying is the ability to customise the macro button having assigned it. This really annoys me since I had all my commonly used functions set up as Macros with custom macro buttons so that 95% of what I wanted only needed a single click. As a result my productivity is well down.

This is the perfect example of a program written by developers for looks rather than in consideration of the user. I cannot seriously recommend Office 2007. Some of the very cheap competitors now offer better and more useable word processors and spreadsheets.

I am planning to revert to offce 2003 ASAP.

A real let down!
I've ended up reverting to Office 2003. It's a nightmare for someone who is used to the earlier version(s), I can't understand why they have changed it so much it certainly doesn't seem to have improved things. It MIGHT be ok for someone who has never used Office before but I'm not convinced.

Significant improvements in usability
Having been a long time user of Office I was an early adopter of Office 2007. The look and feel took quite a bit of getting used to but I am now a complete convert. The ribbon concept in particular is a major step forward and for me reduces the number of keystrokes needed, increased as one reviewer said.

In Excel 2007 the increase in the number of rows from 64k to millions is worth the price of the upgrade alone. Excel becomes a serious data analysis tool with this upgrade.


Outlook 2007 however I have found to be buggy and am underwhelmed by. It is this the takes the review down to 4 stars.