Microsoft will release a revamped version of Word on January 30th.
According to Microsoft, Word 2007 is the end-product of a gigantic market research effort.
“It used to be the loudest programmer won the Word design wars,” says Paul Coleman, senior marketing manager for Microsoft Word. “No more. We built this iteration from years of feedback on about 6,000 data points in the program.”
In an overview of the product on the product’s website, Microsoft said, “Office Word 2007 is a powerful authoring program that gives you the ability to create and share documents by combining a comprehensive set of writing tools with an easy-to-use interface.”
The summary also describes the new and improved features of the soon to be released Word, “Office Word 2007 helps information workers create professional-looking content more quickly than ever before. With a host of new tools, you can quickly construct documents from predefined parts and styles, as well as compose and publish blogs directly from within Word. Advanced integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and new XML-based file formats make Office Word 2007 the ideal choice for building integrated document management solutions.”
The “Help and How-to” section lists the product’s Top 5 Picks:
· Open a Word 2007 document in an earlier version of Word
· Create forms that users complete in Word.
Using Word 2007, documents can be branded by applying a document theme.
The Microsoft Office Word 2007 product guide states, ” Word 2007 helps you build professional-looking documents with ease. You’ll spend more time writing and less time formatting documents with new editing and layout tools that are presented in a streamlined user interface. To speed template-based document authoring, Word 2007 templates can be deeply integrated with business processes and back-end systems through document controls and XML Data Binding. The new Ecma Office Open XML Formats provide reduced file sizes and improvements in recovering of files that have become corrupt or damaged.”
Jonathan Blum, contributor for CNN’s Fortune Small Business magazine said, “Microsoft’s hard work paid off in many ways: Word 2007 is lovely to look at and use.”
Word 2007 has more intuitive layout tools and better adaptability with Outlook and Excel.
Microsoft expects major productivity improvements with the use of Word 2007 within the new Microsoft Office 2007 suite.
And apparently, the new Word also blends in flawlessly into the textbook-manufactured Vista.
Each document on the Word appears as a new window, with the bright new colors of Vista’s translucency and three-dimensionality, highly lauded features of the new operating system.