Microsoft has come out with Office 2007 and people are quickly switching over to and learning that it is not the same look and feel as previous versions. Actually it is a completly different look and feel from any of the previous versions of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Word 2007 has a lot of visual changes but for the most part it is the same Microsoft Word everyone knows. Lets start with a new document, you will notice a the top you no longer have your “File” and “Edit” drop down menus. Instead you have about 8 tabs be default and these tabs include everything you once had within your drop down menus. The home tab has most of waht you are familiar with, bold, italic, underline, left, center, right justification and bulleting options. Your “page” area where you actually type hasn’t changed much at all, it still gives you a white sheet of paper 8.5 x11 as the default size. If you want to change how you see the page (print layout, full screen reading, web layout, outline or draft) just click on the “View” tab and you will see to the left you can change the way you view the page. You will also notice that you can zoom in and out from here, arrange windows, add gridlines and a document map.

You will also notice that a lot of your usual buttons (print, save, open, new) have either been moved higher or are compleletly missing. At the very top left corner you will see what is the “Quick Access Toolbar” and you can add pretty much what ever you want to this toolbar. I personally added new, open, save, quick print, and undo to my Quick Access Toolbar. What ever you don’t find there you can click the circle in the far left hand corner and get pretty much all of the options you know and love, along with you most recent open documents.

Note to keep in mind, Microsoft Word 2007 now has a default font of Calibri at 11pt instead of the Arial 12 pt.

• Insert tab
  • Which has everything you could want to ever insert into your word document, table, picture, video, etc.
• Page Layout
  • Apply themes, define margins, orientation and columns with this tab
• References
  • Used for inserting footnotes, citations and indexes. Great for writing an essay or a research article
• Mailings
  • All of your envelop and mailing needs are in this tab
• Review
  • Everything for reviewing what you have written. Spelling and Grammer Checker and comments
• Developer
  • If you do any type of Visual Basic programming within Microsoft Word this will be your tab. It gives you access to form elements and Visual Basic code.

So play with it and post your comments here about what you have found with Microsoft Word 2007.