The most recent articles from Personal Computer World

Review: Ability Office Business office suite

Tim Smith — 2008-08-21T10:00:00.000Z

Tim Smith, Personal Computer World, Thursday 21 August 2008 at 10:00:00

Is this value office suite good enough value to ward off Open Office?

Competition is fierce in the office suite market.

Few suites can match Microsoft Office for collaboration and sheer presence, and Open Office can’t be beaten on price.

So where does that leave Ability Office Business (in effect, version 5 in the series), at a cost of £35?

To start with, it has photo-editing and management elements something that’s missing from both of the aforementioned suites as well as a central launcher.

The launcher sits as an icon in the system tray and acts as a shortcut to the seven programs in the suite.

Ability Write’s look will be comforting to anyone feeling disconcerted by the changes in Office 2007. The icons are attractively designed, the menus are laid out in a familiar fashion and there is even a taskbar.

Ability Write is frustratingly loyal to its own file format. Load an MS Word .doc file, edit it and the press CTRL+S to save and you'll find that instead of saving it in the background, the Save As box appears.

Ability tells us that this prevents incompatible formatting information being lost, which seems fair enough, but it’s still annoying.

There’s no shortage of advanced document features with text effects to play and indexes. It’s simple to create the latter and entries can be hidden to prevent the document from looking cluttered.

File import is particularly good, with support for some older formats, such as Ami Pro and Word Pro. Files can be exported in just as many formats and there is PDF export, too. However, there is no support for Office 2007 documents, nor is there support for ODF, which is harder to understand given it has been an open format for some time.

The Spreadsheet model includes a well-designed formula helper, with tabs separating the various functions. There are about 200 formulas included, some of which can use arrays for more complicated calculations. Worksheet tabs can be coloured, but the colour is then applied to all the cells in the worksheet.

It also failed to open a spreadsheet with some custom functions, but this may be due to the fact that the macros are based on VBScript rather than Visual Basic for Applications. Another limitation to macros is that it cannot record them to be used in Microsoft Office and Open Office, which may be a problem for anyone with existing spreadsheets or who has to share with others.

Ability Presentation continues the trend of the word processor and spreadsheet applications in that it’s easy to use with an interface that will be familiar to anyone moving from Office 2003. However, it suffers when importing documents from Powerpoint. It is put to shame again by Open Office, which managed not only to include the title images created by Powerpoint 2007, but also kept the transparency colour.

The Database module is supplied with some good templates for tables and databases, covering a variety of tasks from cataloguing a home music and film collection to planning a business project.

Finally, Ability has added image-editing applications in the form of Photopaint and Photoalbum. The latter includes the option to organise photos into albums, but it does not support tagging, which would make organising large collections easier. Photopaint, meanwhile, is a solid editor for basic image tweaks, but you’ll need to buy a separate editor for advanced work.

Ability Office Business is very nearly a complete set of programs; the only missing pieces are email and PIM clients. However, the big problem for Ability is that Open Office does many tasks much better and it’s free.

Review: Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro document creation software

Cliff Joseph — 2008-08-12T11:43:00.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 11:43:00

The popular Acrobat series branches out into multimedia

Coinciding with the decision of the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) to adopt the Acrobat PDF file format as an official industry standard, comes the release of Acrobat 9 from Adobe.

And, with this upgrade, Adobe is continuing to transform PDF into an all-encompassing file format that allows you to combine all sorts of content, from simple text and graphics to web pages, video and even 3D graphics.

As always, the Acrobat name refers to a family of products rather than one specific piece of software. The basic Reader program called Adobe Reader, rather than Acrobat Reader remains a free download that allows anyone to read Acrobat PDF files. However, to create your own PDF files you need to buy one of the other products in the Acrobat range. As well as the Pro version reviewed here, it’s available in Standard (£311.38) and Extended (£727.32) versions.

Businesses and other users that just want to create basic text and graphics documents, such as manuals and forms, will probably find the Standard version is all they need. The Standard version also allows you to add Flash Video files to PDF documents (Flash Video is the format used by sites such as Youtube), so you have some ability to create multimedia PDF files. However, to make best use of this option you’ll really need the new Portfolio feature that is only available in the Pro and Extended versions.

Previous versions of Acrobat did have a limited ability to be used for presentations work, as they allowed you display a PDF document one page at a time. The Portfolio extends this into a full-scale presentations tool by allowing you to import and combine a variety of different file formats and assembling them within ready-made templates.

Clicking the Combine button in the program’s main toolbar allows you to import any group of files you want to use in your portfolio MS Office documents, existing PDF files, graphics and Flash Video files can all be used. Each file then acts like a slide within a presentation, and you can arrange these files using various layout templates.

The Portfolio feature can’t compete with dedicated presentations programs such as Powerpoint, however, Acrobat 9 Pro Extended includes an additional feature called the Presenter that allows you to use Powerpoint presentations within PDF files. The advantage of this is that you can put the compressed PDF file onto a website or distribute it across an intranet so it can be read by anyone that has the free Adobe Reader. The Extended version also allows you to import other video formats, such Windows Media or Apple’s Quicktime, and even 3D graphics taken from CAD programs.

The emphasis on multimedia content in this upgrade may mean Acrobat 9 isn’t an immediate

must-have upgrade for companies already using earlier versions of Acrobat to produce relatively simple forms and manuals. However, many users will appreciate the ability to create PDF Portfolios with Acrobat 9.

We’d prefer simply Pro and Extended versions available at slightly lower prices, as £300 for the entry-level Standard version seems a bit steep. There’s no doubt Acrobat is here to stay as a file format for distributing documents and information, and even many smaller businesses will probably benefit from having at least one copy of Acrobat 9 Standard available for sharing documents with clients and colleagues.

Review: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 software

Cliff Joseph — 2008-02-15T00:00:00.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Friday 15 February 2008 at 00:00:00

A long-awaited update that works on Intel Macs and has loads of new features

The hullabaloo surrounding the ultra-thin Macbook Air has rather overshadowed another important Mac product that was also released during the Mac World Expo in San Francisco last month.

Microsoft finally got around to launching a new version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – the first upgrade to the Mac suite for almost four years.

A lot has happened in those four years, including Apple’s decision to abandon IBM’s PowerPC processors and cosy up to Intel instead. So the biggest single change in Office 2008 is that it runs natively on Intel processors rather than using the relatively slow emulation mode that the previous Office 2004 relied on for the past few years.

Another crucial update is the use of the same XML-based file formats as the Windows version of Office 2007, which provides better file compatibility between the two platforms. The individual programs within Office 2008 - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage – get a facelift with a new interface design that follows Apple’s brushed-metal look.

The toolbar in Word and Excel is now attached to individual documents, rather than fixed in place at the top of the screen, which makes it easier to work with multiple open documents. There’s also a new feature in the toolbar called the Elements Gallery, which allows you to insert instantly a variety of additional elements into your documents.

In Word, it allows you to add items such as preformatted tables and charts, and in Excel you can quickly insert templates for invoices and lists, as well as clipart and simple diagrams. However, the Elements Gallery is perhaps put to best use in Powerpoint, where it can be used to instantly alter the layout of individual slides or apply a new design theme to an entire presentation.

Word also gets a new Publishing mode that acts like a miniature DTP program for creating page layouts. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but options such as vertical text, simple drawing tools and text-wrapping options allow you to create more complex page layouts than did previous versions of Word.

A useful new feature in Excel is the Formula Builder, which lists all the maths functions in a floating palette for easy access and allows you to type values straight into the palette rather than having to select individual cells by hand on your spreadsheet.

Finally there’s the Entourage email and organiser program, which overhauls its ageing anti-spam and phishing controls, and gains a companion program called My Day that can display your calendar events and To Do lists on screen even when Entourage isn’t running.

So far so good – but there is a gaping hole in Office 2008. Microsoft has removed VBA (Visual Basic For Applications programming language) from this Mac version of Office. It’s a potential disaster for businesses that use VBA to create macro-based documents, as it means Mac users within those organisations are left high and dry.

Microsoft will no doubt argue that Macs are rarely used in big corporate environments, so the number of people affected by this is small. However for that small number of users this will be a serious problem and might prevent them from upgrading altogether.

The irony is that Office 2008 for Mac can be recommended to home users, small businesses, students and educational users but not to the bigger organisations that rely so heavily on the Windows version of Office.

Review: IBM Lotus Symphony desktop productivity

Alan Stevens — 2007-11-30T00:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Friday 30 November 2007 at 00:00:00

Free desktop suite offers functionality behind a Notes-like interface

Microsoft’s Office suite will, typically, account for a large chunk of the small business IT budget, but there aren’t that many alternatives.

Openoffice.org is one with, as an open source application, clear benefits when it comes to cost. And now there’s another from IBM, called Lotus Symphony, which is, similarly, an open source application and available for free download.

Not to be confused with the 1980s Lotus Symphony spreadsheet program, what you get this time round are the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation graphics editors from IBM’s Lotus Notes email and collaboration product. These it claims to have ported to run on either Windows or Linux desktops, using its Eclipse open source framework.

In reality, what the developers appear to have done is take an old fork of Open Office and use it as an engine to provide the necessary functionality behind a Notes-like interface. That’s all fine in theory but, in practice, we found it far from perfect.

The first thing you discover is that the software is only available as a beta and beta 1 at that. That’s something IBM fails to mention in a lot of the marketing material. It’s also a fairly hefty download, with 133MB required for the Windows XP/Vista implementation and 213MB for Linux. Installation is pretty straightforward but, likewise, a fairly lengthy process.

What you end up with are three separate applications Lotus Symphony Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, which load themselves into a common graphical workspace. For non-Notes users the interface can take a while to get used to but it isn’t that hard to master and, although nowhere near as comprehensive as Office, you do get most of the functionality you’d expect from each of these applications. You also get a few extras, such as being able to export documents to PDF.

Another claimed advantage is the ability to save documents in the Open Document Format (ODF), although this only applies when sharing documents with other applications also able to support it. Microsoft Office isn’t one of those and although Lotus Symphony can read and write a number of other formats, the list is very short and there’s no support for the latest Office 2007 specifications, nor the ability to save to HTML.

We also found the product sluggish. Even when installed on a dual-core notebook PC with plenty of Ram it took almost a minute for the main workspace window to open, followed by further delays whenever a new tool was used for the first time.

On the plus side, you can use the same applications and share documents on Windows and Linux platforms. However, Openoffice.org can also do this, and it supports more Linux implementations, along with Sun’s Solaris and the Apple Mac platform. You also get more than just a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics, particularly in the latest version 2.3, which is now a very useable product.

It’s not clear exactly what IBM hopes to achieve with Lotus Symphony, especially as it is also backing the Openoffice.org project. Notes customers may get something out of it and will find they get the software included as part of the next update. For non-Notes customers, however, especially small businesses, it seems to offer little that can’t be had from Openoffice.org and, based on our experiences, looks unlikely to challenge Microsoft’s market domination.

Review: 4Team Corporation ShareO office software

Alan Stevens — 2007-11-19T00:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Monday 19 November 2007 at 00:00:00

Share Outlook folders using email with this add-in

If you want to share Outlook folders without having to buy into Microsoft’s Exchange Server, there are plenty of products available, including Softalk Share Server which we reviewed in the December 2007 Business Section.

ShareO, from the 4Team Corporation, is a little bit different in that it doesn’t require a server at all. Instead, it uses email to synchronise folders on a peer-to-peer basis.

The mechanism involved is straightforward. You decide on an Outlook folder to share and the people you want to share it with. A ShareO add-in then converts the folder and its contents into a special email message and sends it to the selected users. The same add-in running on recipients’ PCs then converts it back to a local folder with further emails exchanged to keep the contents synchronised when changes are made.

ShareO can be used to share almost any Outlook folder, including contacts and calendars, and free/busy information. It also lets you share other Windows documents, either by dragging into an Outlook folder or by setting up a link to a nominated folder on the hard disk. Any changes made to that folder will then be automatically synchronised, again, using email.

As an Outlook add-in, ShareO is easy to install and can be used with any version from Outlook 2000 onwards, although the latest service packs will be needed on early implementations. A new ShareO menu is then added to the toolbar and a Sharing option made available with a special management panel displayed when this option is selected.

From this you can choose recipients from your Outlook address book as well as set a variety of configuration options. For example, it’s possible to either include or exclude sub-folders and message attachments and either synchronise changes manually or whenever Outlook sends and receives messages. You can also choose to either ignore or apply any updates and decide on what to do when items are deleted by another user.

When a ShareO message is received, recipients are first asked whether or not they want to share the folder concerned then given the option of moving or renaming the folder within their local Outlook tree. They can either leave the settings alone or manage the share using the same management panel as on the sender’s PC.

We found it relatively easy to use, although you are presented with a lot of options which could be a little offputting for novice users. The documentation could also be made easier to follow. Another issue is the potential size of the messages created by the ShareO add-on.

When a large folder is first shared a lot of information needs to be exchanged, so you need to make sure there are no mailbox size limits on the server used which might prevent it all getting through. Likewise, you may have to edit anti-spam and other content filters to make sure the messages that need to be exchanged aren’t blocked.

On our test network management wasn’t a big issue. However, the more folders you share and the more users involved, the harder it will become to keep tabs on everything. Performance can also be an issue and synchronisation conflicts harder to resolve, such that on a large network you’re probably better off looking at server-based alternatives. But it worked well on our tests and if you keep it simple could be all you need to share Outlook information on your network.

Review: Numara Track-It 8 helpdesk software

Alan Stevens — 2007-10-18T00:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Thursday 18 October 2007 at 00:00:00

Keep on top of network assets and users with this small-business helpdesk

For a helpdesk application, Track-It 8 from Numara Software is unusual in that it’s very much aimed at the smaller company looking for a complete solution.

Despite this, it doesn’t try to do too much, concentrating on the delivery of core helpdesk and asset management features.

The latest Track-It 8 release is available in several formats, from an entry-level standard edition (from £295 ex Vat) able to support one technician and 25 assets, to the enterprise edition we looked at, which can accommodate five technicians and 100 assets.

The same base set of asset discovery, inventory and helpdesk tools come with each version with other optional modules also available to, for example, distribute software and add barcode scanning facilities.

Initial installation begins on a Windows 2003 server and is fairly painless. An SQL database is required, but a copy of SQL Server 2005 Express will be loaded if this isn’t already available. The same setup routine will also configure the optional web front end and the technician’s console, after which additional consoles can be downloaded and iinstalled on demand. The latest console has also been optimised to work better over low-bandwidth Wan links.

Once installed, the software can quickly be set to discover network users and physical assets on the network. Any device with an IP address can be added to the management database, including switches, routers and printers as well as PCs. However, for a more detailed inventory of PC hardware and software a custom agent needs to be deployed with another agent required to support remote control. Agents for Windows PCs and Apple Macs are provided and can be pushed out by the management server as required.

It can take a while to get to grips with the console which, for reasons best known to themselves, the developers have chosen to make resemble Microsoft Outlook in this release. By itself the new interface doesn’t appear to add much, but is a lot more customisable than in previous versions. Grid-like views are the order of the day, and these can be endlessly re-ordered and labelled.

You can also print the contents of any grid, and reporting is very well catered for with a copy of Crystal Reports XI included as standard. Predefined reports cover most common requirements and custom reports are built as required.

It’s all very impressive and you can more or less start using Track-It 8 straight away. However, a fair amount of configuration work will be required to get the most out of it. For example, work orders are used to drive and track helpdesk activity with email used as the principal communication channel. To this end most companies will want to customise the associated templates and rules to generate automatic replies and apply standard escalation procedures to suit their needs.

There was a lot we liked, including the dashboard homepage in the console and the newly added ability to locate and report on ‘missing’ assets. Skills-based routing of work orders is another key facility, plus you can now automatically apply service-level agreements (SLAs) to work orders. The documentation, however, didn’t impress us, especially when it came to getting started, which meant we had to spend a lot of time experimenting to find out exactly how things worked. The licence management module is pretty basic too, and a lack of IT Infrastructure Library framework (ITIL) verification could be an issue for some customers.

Review: Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Wireless voice recognition

Paul Lester — 2007-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

Paul Lester, Personal Computer World, Thursday 23 August 2007 at 00:00:00

The popular voice recognition suite goes wireless and gets a Vista overhaul

The Dragon Naturally Speaking series from Nuance has rightly held the flame for commercially available voice-recognition software, and the company continues to develop and update the brand.

A number of different versions are available, from the most basic Standard package up to the 9 Preferred Wireless Edition on test here.

Notably, this version incorporates Vista compatibility and, in addition to general wireless support, youíll find a Plantronics CS60 USB wireless headset in the box.

You can either fit one of four over-ear supports, which hold the earpiece and mouthpieces in the correct position on your face, or for extended use you might prefer the full headband grip, as the former can get a bit sore after an hour or so of use.

Provided you install everything in the right order, setup is pretty straightforward, with Naturally Speaking picking up the USB dock supplied with the earpiece when you first run the software. Performance here was very good, with the added bonus of being able to stand quite a distance away from your computer (up to 10m typically) and still issue voice commands.

Although you can get started straight away without going through any voice training, Nuance advises you to at least run through the basics to personalise the software. In addition, you can have Naturally Speaking scan your My Documents folder along with sent items in your email to get a better idea of the sorts of specific words and phrases you use.

The performance of this aspect of the software is fairly good, but even though we took some time running through training routines and re-teaching specific words, we didnít find it to be the stated 99 per cent.

The package includes Realspeak Text to Speech, which will read back any highlighted text to you in a lilting female voice that sounds rather like a heavily distorted Moira Stuart. The Preferred Edition will also communicate with the various components of Microsoft Office (including the new 2007 version).

There's decent support for handheld devices, including dictation for Pocket PCs and Palm Tungstens, and the ability to transcribe directly from compatible portable recorders. You can also use a dedicated transcribe folder to automatically convert any audio files you drop into it, selecting a specific user profile during the process so any language settings or alterations youíve made are taken into account.

As well as general text processing, Naturally Speaking is adept at recognising spoken words as commands. You can open files and applications, browse the internet and control your Windows environment reasonably well without going anywhere near your PC. It takes some time to learn the keywords required to navigate effectively, but once you do itís quite an enjoyable experience being able to sit back and surf the web without typing or using the mouse.

Despite a range of impressive improvements, including some very tidy wireless support that adds more convenience to proceedings, the software isn't flawless. It is, perhaps, a little unfair to expect it to be, but factors such as rereading and correcting mistakes that are an inherent drawback to the speech recognition process mean that those expecting time-saving results are likely to be let down.

Having said that, it's still the best dictation package around and has what it takes to stay on top of the admittedly sparse competition.

Review: Human Concepts Orgplus 7 chart organisation software

Alan Stevens — 2007-06-27T00:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 27 June 2007 at 00:00:00

Tools for quicker, slicker charting

When we last looked at Orgplus from Human Concepts we were impressed with what this specialist application had to offer, saying that it would “find a place in any small business wanting to produce charts on a regular basis”.

Since then it’s been made even better, the latest Orgplus 7 release offering some 30 improvements designed to make the software both quicker and easier to use as well as adding extra, very useful functionality.

Orgplus takes over where programs like Powerpoint and Visio leave off, providing not only tools to draw complex organisation and other hierarchical charts but adding a host of data import, publishing and automation facilities.

You can also perform spreadsheet-like calculations on the data, choose how to display it, create and link to sub-charts and so on to create all kinds of things from company structures to phone lists, salary tables and other documents.

Among the improvements in Orgplus 7 are support for Windows Vista and integration with the latest Office 2007 suite. The package also comes with an updated set of sample charts and templates, plus a host of new options designed to make life easier when it comes to entering and managing the supporting data. One we liked in particular is a new tree view, which lets you navigate your way around the entries that make up a typical hierarchical chart without having to go through each level individually.

You can also add comments to chart entries and track any changes made, both useful features when it comes to collaborative working. Facilities to chart alternate reporting structures have also been added, along with improved text and picture formatting and a tool to add off-page references to navigate directly from any chart box to another, to a sub-chart or even a totally separate Orgplus project file.

The amount and type of information that can be entered into employee profiles is also enhanced in the new release. Added to which, you can now edit profile data directly and apply conditional formatting to, for example, dynamically highlight particular staff entries based on criteria such as performance ratings and employment status. Multiple profile views can now be combined and tabs within those views, similarly, conditionally displayed based on the item selected.

One of the benefits of Orgplus is its ability to publish and distribute charts, with a freely distributable reader included as standard. The HTML tool is enhanced in Orgplus 7 to improve print quality and, optionally, enable project files to be downloaded directly from a host website. You can also arrange to automatically email published charts using an associated distribution list – great for keeping interested parties up to date when changes are made.

Apart from the new tools the user interface remains much the same and, although intuitive for the most part, it can take a while to work out how to use some of the more advanced features. The supporting documentation, though, is excellent and it doesn’t take that long to get to grips with Orgplus and use it to produce very professional-looking documents.

Prices too are unchanged. The Standard edition is £149 ex Vat but most businesses will want the Professional version we reviewed, which adds the ability to import existing data and extends the publishing and automation facilities. An upgrade from previous releases costs £65 ex Vat.

Review: Harrissoft Properite property management software

Alan Stevens — 2007-02-22T00:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Thursday 22 February 2007 at 00:00:00

A place for buy-to-let landlords to manage their property

Aimed at the burgeoning buy-to-let housing market, Properite is a specialised application designed to equip landlords with all the tools they might need to manage their properties, tenants and rental income.

The software is a standalone Windows application, written for Windows XP (Home or Pro), with Microsoft Word required to create, edit and print things such as tenancy agreements, welcome packs and other documents included in the package. You’ll also need the Microsoft .Net Framework V1.0, a copy of which comes with the program and can be either downloaded or supplied on CD-Rom.

Installation takes just a couple of minutes, after which a wizard guides you through the setup of your first property. Basic information is asked for at this point, such as the address, purchase date and price of the property, plus the number of rooms and the landlord’s name and phone number.

There are no limits on the number of properties that can be configured, and each is stored in a separate folder, along with any other documents associated with it.

Other details can then be added. For example, you can record gas and electricity meter readings, dates when smoke detectors have been tested or are due for testing, and key-holder lists for burglar alarm systems. You can also compile inventories – especially useful with furnished property – log valuations and create rental adverts with photographs.

Another wizard helps you to capture information relating to tenants, such as referee and guarantor details, previous addresses, deposits taken and so on. A separate tool is used to manage tenants’ details, from which you can create and print screening checklists, tenancy agreements, receipts and other documents.

However, the templates are quite general and include spelling and other errors. It’s also worth getting any legal agreements checked out by a solicitor before they’re used for real.

In the Premium Edition, you get a cashbook to record both rental income and outgoings, with facilities to calculate income and capital gains tax liabilities. There are no direct links to popular accounting packages but information can be exported in .csv format.

The ability to keep a detailed history of events relating to each property is another option, along with a graphing tool that can be used to see how each property is performing and to investigate what might happen if rents or interest rates were to change.

For some reason, however, the developers have opted for fancy 3D graphs that, while showcasing their programming skills, do little to make the information easy to understand.

There’s also a memo pad and an Outlook-style diary, which works well. However, we didn’t find the interface that intuitive.

A workspace metaphor is used to start with, but this does little more than act as a portal for the other tools and seemed a little redundant. We also found the way the windows resized and moved about a little quirky at times and would have liked more integration with other applications.

If you’re a landlord or a property agent, you may find Properite useful because it organises all your property information. However, that apart, we found it far from a complete solution, with a lot lacking on the financial and legal side. It was also a little rough around the edges and didn’t provide much more than standard office productivity tools.

Review: Microsoft Outlook 2007

Tim Nott — 2007-02-16T00:00:00.000Z

Tim Nott, Personal Computer World, Friday 16 February 2007 at 00:00:00

Integrated RSS feeds but the interface hasn't been given the full Office 2007 treatment

Outlook has a rather ambivalent attitude to the new Office 2007 interface. The main window still sports the traditional menus and toolbars, and yes, you can customise them.

If you create a new message, appointment or contact, however, you’ll be in a ribbon-bedecked environment.

Although Outlook had a major overhaul in 2003, there’s still a lot that’s new with this version. First up is the To-Do bar. This summarises items from your task list, appointments from your calendar, mail messages flagged for follow-up and items from other sources such as SharePoint Services .

Colour categories provide a rather elegant way to tag disparate items, be they mail messages, contacts, appointments or tasks. Right-click on any of these items, select Categorize and choose a colour. The item will then appear with, for example, a blue blob next to it or a blue highlighted header.

This makes it easy to identify items associated with a particular project or person. You can also create a mail search folder for each colour – all messages categorised with that colour will be moved to the corresponding folder.

You can now also integrate RSS feeds into your mail folders, either by subscribing through Internet Explorer, or directly by typing the URL into the RSS tab on the Account Settings dialogue. Unlike Mozilla Thunderbird, which has had RSS capability for some time, when you click on a RSS feed title it opens in the default web browser rather than in Outlook itself .

As with mail messages, RSS items can be marked for follow-up and thus shown in the To-Do bar. There’s now a one-click preview of most email attachments, including Office documents, Visio drawings, text files and most image formats.

When we tried this by sending attachments from another email account and client, Outlook was rather cagey – first it decided the message was junk and wouldn’t show the attachments at all, then when we moved the message to the Inbox it issued a warning before previewing a DocX file. Still, better to be safe than sorry.

Finally, it’s not entirely true to call Instant Search a new feature of Outlook 2007. First, it isn’t installed with Office – you need to download version 2 of Windows Desktop Search, and second, you can use the latter (or older versions) to search your email in older versions of Outlook or in Outlook Express. What is new, however, is the integration of the search bar into the mail folders, contacts, tasks and calendar.

This article is part of our complete Microsoft Office 2007 review

Microsoft Office 2007 overview

Microsoft Word 2007 review

Microsoft Excel 2007 review

Also consider

Tesco Complete Office software suite

An excellent budget alternative to Microsoft Office, providing all the basics required of an office suite

Openoffice.org 2

Improved compatibility with Microsoft Office make this a genuine alternative for many home and business users

Zoho Virtual Office productivity software

Share contacts and organise calendars

Review: Microsoft Excel 2007

Tim Nott — 2007-02-16T00:00:00.000Z

Tim Nott, Personal Computer World, Friday 16 February 2007 at 00:00:00

Microsoft's spreadsheet application gets a much needed overhaul

Just as with the majority of components within Office 2007, Excel uses the new ribbon interface.

The Home ribbon includes sections for font formatting, alignment, number and cell formatting, clipboard, search and filtering, and styles.

The last section contains a rather clever conditional formatting tool. This will come in handy if, for example, you have a table of numbers and want to highlight the cells according to their magnitude.

The traditional way to do this is to set up a rule for each range you want distinguished and then apply a distinctive format; background colour, for example. This takes a lot of time, and the formatting options are limited.

In Excel 2007 you can do this with two clicks, and have a choice of coloured shading, data bars or coloured icons – all with live preview.

Formulae share a ribbon with tools for managing named cells and auditing tools that check for errors or show a cell’s dependents or precedents. Charts take up the lion’s share of the insert ribbon, and they have their own pop-up ribbons for Design, Layout and Format.

Office’s other charts – organisational, process and Venn diagrams – have been reborn as SmartArt. Although probably most used in PowerPoint, they are available suite-wide.

In design terms they are a vast improvement on the previous clunky diagrams, and there are nearly 100 to choose from. As with other graphic elements they respect the colour scheme of the current theme.

The Data ribbon contains tools for advanced filtering and sorting, ‘What If’ analysis, links to other worksheets and importing data from other sources such as an SQL server.

Other improvements include size – the former worksheet limit of 256 columns and 65,536 rows has been extended to 16,384 and 1,048,576 respectively, which should satisfy the most avid power-user or aspiring millionaire.

To cope with this, Excel’s memory management has been increased from 1GB to 2GB and it now takes advantage of dual-core processors. As with Word and other suite members you can now save as a Pdf (Adobe Acrobat) document, or Microsoft’s own XPS format, formerly known as Metro.

This doesn’t come as standard, so you'll need to download the appropriate add-in and jump through the Office Genuine Advantage hoop to enable this.

Overall, Microsoft has done a good job with this Excel makeover and, thankfully, it doesn't suffer from the same problems as Word 2007 [/REVIEW LINK] when viewing multiple documents.

This article is part of our complete Microsoft Office 2007 review

Microsoft Office 2007 overview

Microsoft Word 2007 review

Microsoft Outlook 2007 review

Also consider

Tesco Complete Office software suite

An excellent budget alternative to Microsoft Office, providing all the basics required of an office suite

Openoffice.org 2

Improved compatibility with Microsoft Office make this a genuine alternative for many home and business users

Zoho Virtual Office productivity software

Share contacts and organise calendars

Review: Microsoft Office 2007

Tim Nott — 2007-02-16T00:00:00.000Z

Tim Nott, Personal Computer World, Friday 16 February 2007 at 00:00:00

The latest edition of Office introduces new file formats and a clutter-free interface

The new 2007 version of Microsoft Office has been available to corporate clients since November 2006, but retail customers have had to wait until the end of January 2007.

As ever, it is available in a variety of configurations and prices, from the Student/Home edition at £90, comprising Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote to the Ultimate edition at £487.

The version supplied for review, Professional, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook with Business Contact Manager and Publisher. The best price we could find was £357 for the full version or £235 for an upgrade. To qualify for an upgrade you need any Office 2000 (or later) suite or program, or Works 6.0 or later.

So, what’s new? The two big changes are in the file formats and the interface. The proprietary binary file formats – Doc, Xls and Ppt – have been supplanted by Office Open XML (OOXML), with the DocX, XlsX and PptX extensions. These combine Zip technology to reduce file size (if you rename a DocX extension to Zip, you can see that the document consists of several files) and XML.

The latter isn’t new to Office – version 2000 introduced XML-based Smart Tags – but the new formats are claimed to ‘enable rapid creation of documents from disparate data sources, accelerating document assembly, data mining, and content reuse’.

As the name implies, OOXML is open-standard, but is not the same as the XML-based Open Document Format used by OpenOffice. The latter already has ISO ratification, but at the time of writing Microsoft was encountering obstacles in fast-track ISO approval.

You can read more about Microsoft's ODF standard in our news story.

This may cause the company to lose government contracts, but end users have little to fear since the new formats are not compulsory, and you can continue to use the former Doc, Xls and Ppt formats as default. What's more, Microsoft has made available converter packs, via Office Update, that will let 2000 and 2003 users open and save files in the new formats.

The other big change is in the interface. The familiar menus and toolbars that have graced Word and Excel since 1990 are gone. Microsoft’s reasoning is that the accumulation of features and commands has made it hard to find anything through the menu system. Previous alterations to the interface – the irritating Office Assistant, the space-hogging task pane and the infuriating ‘adaptive’ menus - have not proved popular. So, let’s hear a big welcome for the new ribbon interface.

The text labels at the top of the screen may look like menus but they are really tabs; each revealing a different ribbon of tools below. Word, for example, has a Home ribbon containing formatting, clipboard and search tools, and other task-orientated ribbons for Page Layout, Mailing, and so on. Other ribbons – such as Excel’s Chart Design – don’t have a permanent tab but appear when needed. Whichever tab is open, you can still edit text, numbers and formulae. Keyboard shortcuts also work irrespective of the current ribbon.

Customisation (once the joy of power users and the despair of support staff) has all but been excised. Although custom keystrokes are still permitted, the r ibbons are set in stone – only the Quick Access Toolbar can have commands or macros added.

Is it worth upgrading? For home and small business users, the new file formats bring little benefit. XML is largely irrelevant and if file size is still an issue in these days of sub-25p per gigabyte hard disks, then XP and Vista users already have methods of file compression. It isn’t cheap, and UK purchasers have to pay 40 per cent more than their US counterparts.

And elegant though the new interface is, upgraders are still going to have to devote time and effort to learning it. For new recruits who can do without Access or Outlook, then the sub-£100 Home and Student edition is an enticing proposition. Indeed, although we've given the overall suite three out of five for value for money, the Student edition is well worth five out of five in this category.

More Office 2007 reviews:

Microsoft Word 2007 review

Microsoft Excel 2007 review

Microsoft Outlook 2007 review

Also consider:

Tesco Complete Office software suite

An excellent budget alternative to Microsoft Office, providing all the basics required of an office suite

Openoffice.org 2

Improved compatibility with Microsoft Office make this a genuine alternative for many home and business users

Zoho Virtual Office productivity software

Share contacts and organise calendars