Office 2007: Professional Edition is the latest version of the set of interrelated desktop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. There is a new version for the Mac OS X system called Office 2008, but since that version is not out for Windows at this time, I am addressing the Office 2007: Professional Edition version.

Office 2007: Professional Edition is referred to as an office suite and contains the following applications: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Access, Accounting Express, and Publisher. There are several versions of the suite available at different prices and all of the features can be compared on their feature matrix.

Since Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for office productivity suites, and each of the individual products, if not standards in their own right, rank in the tops of most lists, I am diverting the focus of this review toward the development aspects of these products.
We can all find plenty of reviews touting the new features — of what the latest version of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint brings to the table, but that is really only the half of it. Within the Office suite, there are features that can really make product development truly dynamic within your own applications, or even as add-ons to the suite. Office 2007: Professional Edition makes great strides in doing what we could only wish for just a few years ago. Before I go in to this let me highlight some new features of this product as it pertains to developers.

So what is new in Office 2007: Professional Edition?

Please note that as with all suites, there are a certain number of global improvements and Office 2007: Professional Edition is no exception.

• Office Fluent UI – is a new interface that replaces the previous system of layered menus, toolbars, and task panes with a simpler system. It provides updated context menus, enhanced screen tips, a mini toolbar, and new keyboard shortcuts. These are implemented in Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word.

• Office Open XML – are the new open XML standards on which documents created in Microsoft Office are based. This format is different than the binary format on which past versions were based. Since the standards are open, they are royalty free, interoperable with standard XML processes, more efficient since they use the Zip compression technologies to store documents, and can be made more secure through programmability.
• The Ribbon – is a strip across the top of the window that exposes what the program can do. It consolidates into one place all of your interactions with the program. In prior versions, you might need to look through 3 layers of menus and open many tool bars and task panes to find your item. Now they are all consolidated in the Ribbon. This can even be custom programmed to handle add-ons that you can develop on your own.