Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007

Product Description

May be installed on up to three non-commercial home computers.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #3 in Software
* Brand: Microsoft
* Model: 79G-00007
* Released on: 2007-01-30
* Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
* Format: CD-ROM
* Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .65 pounds




Features

* Essential software suite for home computer users makes it a pleasure to complete schoolwork and other tasks
* Includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote
* Intuitive user interface that exposes commonly used commands; updated graphics and formatting galleries help you to easily produce high-quality documents
* Work with confidence and security thanks to the improved automatic Document Recovery tool and the Document Inspector tool, which removes personally identifiable information from your document
* Enhanced Help system includes online tutorials with step-by-step instructions; includes OneNote, a digital notebook that helps you gather, organize, and search many types of information in one place

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 is the essential software suite for home computer users and includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote. This system enables you to quickly and easily create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and organize your notes and information in one place, making it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done.


The new streamlined workspace and easy-to-browse tabs make program features easier to find and use. View larger.


Insert graphics and charts such as these into your documents to make them more appealing. View larger.


Use the new diagram and improved charting tools to create rich and stunning visuals and charts. View larger.


Quick and easy-to-use table styles help your tables look great and consistent across Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. View larger.


The Document Inspector helps find and remove potentially sensitive "hidden" information from your documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. View larger.


Office OneNote 2007 enables you to gather, organize, and search almost any type of information. The powerful search tool is shown here, with results highlighted in yellow. View larger.
This updated version features a new streamlined user interface that exposes commonly used commands, enhanced graphics, and formatting capabilities that let you create high-quality documents, plus a powerful note and information organization tool, and more reliability and security with the document inspector tool and improved automatic document recovery. With these enhancements, Home and Student 2007 makes it a pleasure to complete schoolwork and other tasks at home.

Which edition of Office is right for you? View a comparison of Microsoft Office 2007 editions.

Create High-Quality Documents
Home and Student 2007 gives you access to updated graphics, formatting galleries, and an intuitive user interface that exposes commonly used commands. These features enable you to easily produce high-quality documents that will make you proud. Improved picture, charting, and graphics tools help you produce better-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations more quickly, while a large library of standard charts, quick formatting tools, and SmartArt diagrams make it easy to include rich and stunning visuals and charts. The results-oriented user interface makes it easier for you to find and use product features so you can enhance your documents according to your specifications. More stable bullets and numbers, SmartArt diagrams, and graphics and charting galleries provide you with a wealth of other formatting choices. Meanwhile, document themes help ensure a consistent appearance among the documents you create in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to make working across the programs you use most more convenient. PowerPoint also features context-sensitive tabs and easy-to-use galleries that make it simple for you to include tables and other graphics in your documents.

Enhanced Reliability and Security Features
With an improved automatic Document Recovery tool and the new Document Inspector tool for removing personally identifiable information from your documents, Home and Student 2007 helps you work with more confidence and security. Thanks to these two features, you'll never have to worry about losing documents after a system failure or exposing your personal identification information or unwanted comments to others before sharing your documents.



Formatting galleries make it easier to find and apply formatting changes. View larger.
User-Friendly Operation
Packed with innovative features and improvements, Home and Student 2007 has a streamlined interface and an enhanced Help system, including online tutorials with step-by-step instructions, so you can quickly learn the product and find the answers to your questions. In addition, command tabs on the results-oriented Ribbon reveal commonly used commands that previously appeared only in lengthy drop-down menus. The Help system also offers a smooth transition between the Help menu in the Microsoft Office system and Help on the Internet (when connected). Larger, more informative ScreenTips provide help concerning commands, and the command tabs themselves are context-sensitive, changing automatically depending upon the task that you are trying to complete, so you won't waste time figuring out the appropriate command. When you need more guidance, online tutorials provide step-by-step instructions for common tasks.

Organize Notes and Information
Home and Student 2007 includes OneNote, a digital notebook that helps you gather, organize, and search many types of information in one place. This means you can consolidate typed text, images, audio and video recordings, digital handwritten notes, Web clippings, and more on the same page. OneNote also provides flexible note-taking tools to help you organize information the way you want. Categorize important projects or information in a way that makes sense to you, using an easy-to-use layout of notebooks, sections, and pages. Type or organize content anywhere on the page and track important items with customizable note tags. To help keep you on track, the powerful Instant Search feature helps you to find information you are looking for quickly. With it you can even search handwritten notes, the text in images and scanned documents, and spoken words in audio recordings.

Preview Changes and Spot Trends
Home and Student 2007 saves you time by making it easier to format your Office documents with Live Preview. This tool lets you quickly preview proposed changes to your document while you're working on it without having to repeatedly search through layers of menus. Taking a look at your proposed formatting before committing to it lets you experiment without risk and can help minimize future edits. Excel features highly visual conditional formatting with new data bars, more colorful gradients, and icons that you can use to format data based on specific rules, so you can more easily identify key data trends, which can help you study and prepare written papers or reports.

Create and Save Custom Slide Layouts
PowerPoint lets you create presentations with ease using prebuilt and user-defined custom slide layouts. With the custom layout feature you can quickly create the precise layout you envision without being bound by one of the prepackaged, standard layouts. You can then save your custom layout for use in future presentations.

Broader Distribution of Your Documents
Home and Student 2007's features aren't limited to the work you do at home; they extend to broader distribution of your documents and presentations. New support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) file formats helps ensure increased distribution and sharing of your documents with users on any platform. This is particularly ideal for either sharing documents with friends and families, or for presenting information and assignments in a computer-integrated class.

From the Manufacturer
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 offers familiar programs with essential tools to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The suite contains the following Microsoft Office programs: Word 2007; Excel 2007; PowerPoint 2007; OneNote 2007.

What's New?
The 2007 edition of this product includes many new features and benefits, including the ability to create great-looking documents faster. New graphics and visual galleries help you create more dynamic documents and presentations.

In addition, the suite enables you to find commands and help with ease. An improved user interface and help system make it easy to find the tools you need to get things done. Another key improvement is that you can now work more securely and confidently. An improved Document Inspector and automatic document recovery help to protect your work.

Familiar Programs, New Features
One of the many reasons to upgrade to the 2007 version of this suite is that you can format, present, communicate, gather, and organize your information in more dynamic ways with new versions of familiar Microsoft Office programs. Here's a preview of what each of these programs has to offer:

OneNote 2007
Gather nearly any type of information in one place and easily find the content you need.

Word 2007

* Create great-looking documents with enhanced bullets, text effects, and visual galleries.
* Access frequently used commands more easily with an improved user interface.

Excel 2007

* Create eye-catching charts using 3-D, soft shadowing, and transparency.
* Organize and analyze data with new tools such as Conditional Formatting for sorting and visualizing information.

PowerPoint 2007

* Create dynamic presentations faster with new themes, layouts, and styles.
* Add visual impact with new charts, SmartArt diagrams, and tables and quickly preview changes.

Customer Reviews

Major upgrade for Office5
While Office 2003 offered a refreshed look and some improvements in functionality, the basic structure remained the same. While veteran users were able to easily navigate the familiar menus, it had become increasingly difficult to locate some features (for instance, in Word, would you find "insert new rows" to a table in the "insert" or "table" menu?).

With Office 2007, Microsoft offers the "ribbon", a new and more intuitive way to access features that we used to find in the menus. While the features are basically the same, they are now grouped together according to when and how you would normally use them. These groupings are accessed by clicking on tabs, which are organized in the order you'd use them. The best way to get a better understanding of this change is to check out the screenshots, or download a free trial version of Office from Microsoft. While Office 2007 was released at the same time as Vista, you do not need Vista in order to run it. The program ran fine on my Windows XP laptop, which only had 512 MB of RAM, and it runs even better on my Vista laptop with 2 GB of RAM.

As for which version of Office to buy, this is the third time I've opted for the Home and Student version (which has had other names in previous releases, but is still being sold for $149). I need Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and this is the most cost-effective way to get those programs. I was disappointed that Microsoft dropped Outlook from the Home and Student version. In order to continue to use Outlook, I installed Outlook 2003 and haven't had any problems.

Instead of Outlook, you get OneNote, a program that uses notebooks and tabs to save and organize all sorts of files and documents. I haven't had much time to play with OneNote yet, but the more I use it, the more impressed I am with it. It looks like one of those programs that you can personalize to meet your own needs and not have to fight with it to get it to do what you want.

This is a significant upgrade and should allow all users, new and experienced, to work more efficiently and quickly.

Finding really hard to relearn1
The new look of the software is really confusing. I'm not a computer expert by any means, but I am knowledgeable enough that my family and friends call me to help them fix their computers and software problems, so I'm not a newbie either. I understand the basic idea that some things are on the screen for you to see, the things they consider to be the most important; but the things I use the most, like frame or underlining are now several click away and you can't customize the menus to what you like. They've put up what they think is important and that's it. If you use other features, you're out of luck... it's hunt and peck every time. You also have to learn to think the way they think. If you want to find a feature, it might not be in the menu set of screens you think. They may consider it a different type of feature than you think of it being, so you have start searching all the different sets of menus to find the feature you're looking for. Also, I like to copy and paste from boxes like this, when writing on the internet, for spell checking... well you can't do that anymore because when you paste back your text it appears in HTML format with all the weird stuff that goes along with it. It might be that I'm just too set in my ways and don't feel I have the time to learn a completely new software to do a simple letter. Maybe if I had the time to relearn everything I might find it easier, but I just don't have the weeks it would take to devote to the study of each product (Word, Excel mainly). I got the software and tried it for several months and went back to my old Word and Excel.

Stay Away as long as you can!1
They changed everything! In an effort to make it more user friendly, they've rearranged most of the controls. Menus are replaced by headings. It is difficult to accomplish what were easy changes before. Some of this will likely improve with use.

WORD 2007 is constantly trying to think for you, auto formatting as you type. However, it often isn't thinking what you are, and making it obey your commands is frustrated by the new headings. Particularly frustrating, when I "right-click" on a list to restart numbering at "A" (ie. after roman numeral II on an outline), WORD 2007 flatly refuses. My research paper is now formated:
I. Heading
A. subpoint
B. subpoint
C. subpoin
II. Heading
D. subpoint
E. subpoint
F. subpoint
III. Heading
G. subpoint etc....etc...
This is ridiculous and inexcusable! I also had to individually superscript 130+ footnotes. Somehow, in changing the font from the Widows default "Calibri" back to "Time New Roman," the footnote setting was altered and I have yet to determine how to restore it. However, if I open a new document it is fine, but I really don't want to retype a 30+ page research paper.

POWERPOINT 2007 works well enough, compared to the older version. They have added a few bell and whistles, but nothing that gets in the way.

If you have to buy a new computer you're likely stuck with the new MS Office 2007. But don't buy it until you have to. It is NOT an upgrade from the previous two versions