Microsoft Office 2007 Basic Edition review

Along with Windows Vista, Microsoft has also launched the latest version of its office suite, Office 2007.

As with previous versions, there is a range of suites (see http://tinyurl.com/y4xlty for more details), including the new lower-cost Basic Edition, which we review here. Containing just Word, Excel and Outlook, it has pretty much everything most people use. The next version up, Standard (around £330), also includes PowerPoint.

This release is the first major Office overhaul in years. Excel and Word now have a brand new interface called the Ribbon. Instead of menus and toolbars, tabs run along the top of the screen like the tabs in an internet browser. When you click on a tab, a toolbar appears below with all the commands and controls previously found in the menus. The Ribbon displays only those commands and options found on the tab you have selected. The new look and feel makes it much easier to find the right command and to discover new features. It takes some getting used to, though, and some - such as the Developer tab, which displays macro commands - have to be turned on. This caused some confusion when we were using Excel.

The new versions of Word and Excel place a far greater emphasis on design. Both provide drop-down lists of styles and themes you can apply to your documents. Each style is represented by a thumbnail image that shows fonts, colours and other attributes. As you scroll over a thumbnail your document changes to provide a live preview of how it would look if formatted to that scheme. This approach to formatting saves time and makes it easier to design a good-looking document.

Word has received the biggest shake-up. Charts are now done entirely in Excel. Almost all the formatting options are easier to use, and we like the new word count that sits at the bottom of the screen; it updates to show the word count of a selected paragraph, too, which is useful when you're writing to length.

Excel has a useful new predictive function that helps you complete formulae properly. It has new templates for tables and charts, new conditional formatting features and enhanced sorting and filtering.

Outlook hasn't got a new interface, but it does have some useful new features. It can finally read RSS feeds, something the free Thunderbird email client has been able to do for a long time. The new To-Do bar allows you to see and update appointments and tasks no matter which screen you're in, and the coloured categories make organising your mail quick and easy.

Word and Excel can now save to PDF, which is great, but other office suites have been able to do this for ages. However, you still have to download and install a Microsoft PDF plug-in to make this work. The new XPS format, Microsoft's alternative to PDF, is slow to open and crashed our browser more than once. Most infuriatingly of all, both Word and Excel now have new default file formats that older versions of the two programs can't read. You have to make a conscious decision to save to the older .doc and .xls formats if you want to share documents with users of other office suites, which is a needless complication.

Annoyances with file formats aside, this is an excellent office suite and, in terms of features and ease of use, it's also the best. The Basic Edition makes Office affordable to home users for the first time. If you do a lot of word processing and spreadsheet work, then it's well worth the money. But for occasional users, either Ability Office or OpenOffice with the Thunderbird email client is a better choice.