Software Review: Microsoft Office Small Business 2007

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: New design user friendly; lots of programs; unhelpful help kept to a minimum

Cons: Expensive, especially for personal use; steep learning curve at first

The Bottom Line:

Lots of big changes

But the programs are stronger

Once you relearn them

Not the Microsoft Office Suite for Personal Use, but It's Perfect for Small Businesses

Change is never popular.  So you can imagine how I reacted at first when I was upgraded to Office 2007 at work.  It took programs I had managed to figure out to get along with (I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan) and made them a whole new learning experience.  Trust me, I wasn't that productive during the first few weeks.  But as I got the hang of it, I really started to like the changes.  I even came to the point where I thought it might not just be change for the sake of change.

Every version of Microsoft Office is different.  Hopefully, you already know the programs you need, so you can look for the particular programs you need.  This particular package is the Small Business package.  It's probably got more programs than the casual user needs, and a price to match.  If you are looking for something simple, you probably want the Home and Office version.  But I'll get to that in a minute.  In the mean time, here's what is included in this version of Office.

Word - One of several programs that every version of Office has, this is the Microsoft's word processing program.  You'll want this for typing anything related to, well, words.  (At least one program has a name that makes sense.)  I'm using Word to type this review, for example, before I post it here at Epinions.  It's a great program to use for essays and letters.  You can add graphics, although whenever I try to do that, I always wind up screaming at my machine.  If you stick with writing and editing word documents in Word, you'll be very happy with it.

Excel - I use this program every day in my day job as an accountant.  Honestly, I don't know how accountants lived without this program.  I know it scares many people, but it is really very simple to use.  You start with a blank grid, and you can create your own spreadsheet full of facts and figures.  Then you can create your own formulas to get totals of all the data or parts of it.  As if that's not enough, the program even creates graphs of all kinds with the touch of a button.

PowerPoint - This seems to round out the holy trinity of Office products.  As far as I know, all three of these are in just about every version of Office released.  Anyway, this program is how you quickly and easily create presentations for meetings.  This can be something as important as a board meeting at a company or as informal as the worship choruses and sermon points for a Sunday church service.  Everything you need is here, including cool backgrounds, although you might want to add your own.

Publisher - Now we're getting into the programs you are spending big bucks to buy in this bundle.  This program is designed to help you create a great looking layout for your printed text.  This is useful if you are designing your own brochures, business cards, fliers, or any other piece of printed material that isn't just straight text.

Outlook - This is a very powerful little program, and the more I use it, the more I realize that.  I've used it for years for my work e-mail, and it is nice for that.  You can easily see messages sent and received and search by sender, date, subject, or even a conversation if there are multiple replies back and forward.  But it doesn't stop there.  It includes a calendar where you can list appointments.  It's got a task list that you can color coordinate to keep you more organized (or waste more time getting organized).  And the version included here can keep your business contacts for you, including names, addresses, and phone numbers.

The biggest absence to this list, at least in my mind, is Access.  That's probably because I also use it every day at work because my boss loves his databases.  But many people can probably get by without it.

These programs are all great if you are in a business where you need them.  And if you are in a business, I recommend thinking about this particular bundle.  However, if you are just buying for home, you probably don't need all these programs (or to spend all the money to get them).  Microsoft does sell a cheaper Home and Student package.  For about a quarter of the price, you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote - a program I've never used but that is supposed to make random note taking easier.

I mentioned earlier the big changes that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007.  Take everything you know about an Office program and throw it out the window.  Instead of drop down menus at the top, there are now tabs.  Each tab has a series of buttons you can click to do all the things you used to need the menus to do.  It took quite a while to get used to what was where when it came to looking for things.  But now I have the hang of it.  Almost everything I use on a regular basis is on the Home tab.  And the buttons have either an appropriate word description or a familiar icon from the old version.  It still takes a little time to find what I need if I want to do something I don't normally do, but that's always the case with me.  While all the old shortcut keys still work, they aren't advertised.  Personally, I've always been a mouse person, so it doesn't bother me.  My boss, however, hates his mouse, so not being able to learn new keyboard shortcuts drives him crazy.

Probably because of the changed format, they also introduced new extensions for saving the files with this version of Office.  Fortunately, they do allow you to save stuff in the old format, so if you are slowly upgrading a bunch of computer, you can still work on one file over all of them.  I am a little surprised that they don't prompt you to save an old format file in the new format when you save it, but I appreciate it.  Since I haven't bothered upgrading most of my files, I can say I haven't found any loss of feature by using the old format, either.

I've never been the biggest Microsoft fan.  I've always found that their programs think too much for themselves.  In their attempts to help me, they cause me greater pain and time undoing their "help."  While that can still be the case here, I've found that their intrusive unhelp is being kept to a minimum.  It's not quite enough to make me love them, but I don't dread trying something new anymore.

I will probably never completely sing the praises of Microsoft.  But after the very steep learning curve, I've really come to appreciate the changes made to Office 2007.  Here's hoping that for the inevitable upgrade, they build on the good.