Office 2007 Basic Navigation Chart – Understanding the Office 2007 Interface

 In the words of the Microsoft team, “the Office 2007 has seen the most significant update to the user interface in the more than a decade. The reason behind this is the progress in the hardware and software field that let the users use data even more extensively. The interface has been designed in a fashion to offer a streamlined and uncluttered interface to minimize distraction so as to achieve the results faster.” And, indeed, they have been successful in creating a more enhanced user interface that offers more speed while working.

Although there are plenty of features that you can explore in your spare time to get the most of out of each MS Office application, the common features across each application are the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon, the Microsoft Office Button, and the Contextual Tabs. Once you get good at using these, you do not need any book or tutor to learn Office 2007. In addition to the above, we will also discuss one of the most interesting features in the Office 2007—the Live Preview—at the end of this article.

The following sections will help you get ahold of the Office 2007 interface very easily without any need for reference books or tutorials.

 The Microsoft team working on Office 2007 removed all the menu tabs, menus, and sub menus along with the toolbars from the previous versions of MS Office and placed them under a special (yet simple and easy to understand) section containing several tabs, each relevant to a specific area of functionality relevant to the application. This makes it easy for the user to locate the shortcuts for tasks they wish to get done. This section is called the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon. The ribbon, tabs, and commands therein are specific for each application of the MS Office. However, most of the tabs are common across the many MS Office 2007 applications.

For instance, if you are using MS Word and want to insert a table of contents into your document, you need not search for the option through the different menus and sub-menus as in the previous versions. You just need to see what tabs are available and click on the one most relevant to the task you want done. In the case of a TOC (table of contents), you can check it out under the Office 2007 Ribbon tab “Review.”

Similarly, if you are using MS Excel and want to protect the document, all you have to do is to take a look at the different tabs on the Office 2007 Ribbon and click on the most relevant tab, which in this case is again “Review.” Likewise, proofing and other tools also can be found under “Review” in the various MS Office 2007 applications.

Another example is inserting an image in your file, be it Excel, Word, or PowerPoint. You need not go through a plethora of steps to insert an image into your file. A look at the Office 2007 Ribbon will show you the tab named "Insert." Clicking this tab will give you options to insert the image as you wish. If you wish to set the page layout, just click on the Office 2007 Ribbon tab named "Page Layout" and you get all the options related to page setup and much more.

Adjusting to the Office 2007 Ribbon and its tabs does not take much time. Once you have any Office 2007 application open on the computer, you can check out the different options available under each tab of the Office 2007 Ribbon. Almost all of them are common across all the MS Office 2007 applications, especially across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Others, too, have easy to use Office 2007 Ribbon tabs that offer you easy access to different commands while saving you time and offering you a decent workspace.

 TIP: The Ribbon also offers you the option to save the most frequently used commands to the MS Office 2007 Quick Access Bar located right at the top of the window to the left next to the big round button at uppermost top left. You can see a small strip containing some symbols. This is the MS Office 2007 Quick Access Bar. All you need to add a command to Quick Access Bar is to right click on the option, and, from the context menu, select the option "Add to Quick Access Bar." To remove an item from the Quick Access Bar, right click on the symbol and select the option to remove the icon.

The next page will detail other important features that are common and are designed to help with MS Office 2007 navigation irrespective of the different applications in different MS Office Suites.

Please continue reading on page two for more on understanding the Office 2007 interface.