Office 2007 Introduction

Welcome to the "new world" of Microsoft 2007 Office. As you may have heard, 2007 Office is a major change from previous Office versions. If you are new to Microsoft Office you will find 2007 very intuitive. When you click on "something," like an image, text, or spreadsheet area, special Ribbons, customized to your selection, will appear to assist you.

For this reason, we are creating an introduction to some of the new features of several Office applications. First, we'll take you through the Microsoft Office Button, the Quick Access Toolbar, Ribbons, Tabs and Groups - to familiarize you with these common features. Then we'll show you some of the unique Ribbons, Tabs and Groups of each application.

If you have 2007 Office installed on your computer here are a couple of hints on how we'll proceed.

To open an application, Double click quickly on the application icon (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) on the Windows desktop. Or, click the Start button, in the lower left corner of the screen, then click All Programs, move the cursor over Microsoft Office and select the application you desire.

In this tutorial, when we indicate that you need to click a mouse button, it will mean to click the left mouse button - unless we indicate that you should click the RIGHT mouse button. So, always move the cursor over the "place" we indicate and "click left" unless we tell you otherwise.

The Microsoft Office Button

We'll use Microsoft Word 2007 for our initial illustrations of Ribbon, Tab and Group examples.

The first thing you'll notice, when you open a 2007 Office application is that there is no longer a File choice in the Menu Bar. The arrow above points to the Microsoft Office Button - which replaces File.

As you move your cursor over the Microsoft Office Button a preview image (image on right) will appear.

Click the Microsoft Office button.

When you click the Microsoft Office button, it will turn orange and a "File like" menu will appear (similar to the image on the right).

You'll notice that you now have little images for choices and that some of them have little arrows pointing to the right. These arrows indicate that there are additional choices for a selection.

We'll show you one of these on the next page.

On the right side of the Microsoft Office Button menu screen you will see your most recently used files - Recent Documents (see arrow above on right).

Each Microsoft Office Button menu is tailored to its Office application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc).

Move your cursor over the arrow to the right of the Print button ( 1. ), a menu of print choices will appear on the right - under Preview and print the document ( 2. ) (image on right).

Click Print ( 3.) at the top of the Menu.

A standard Print Menu screen will appear.

It is suggested that you spend a few minutes clicking the various choices in the Microsoft Office Button menu screen to familiarize yourself with what they do.

If you look at the bottom of the Microsoft Office Button menu screen you will see two buttons. Since we're using Word, the buttons indicate Word Options and Exit Word.

The buttons change with each application (e.g. PowerPoint will indicate PowerPoint Options).

When you click the Word Options button the image below will appear. Notice, on the left side of the menu screen there are a number of choices (e.g. Personalize, Display, Proofing, etc.). when you click a choice on the left side of the screen, the options for that choice appear on the right. Take a few minutes and move through these choices to familiarize yourself with this menu screen. You will see that Microsoft has placed a lot of resources that were under File-Tools-Options, in previous versions of Office, in this menu.

The last choice - Resources - furnishes a lot of online resources for the application which you are using. We clicked the Microsoft Word Resources text link and the image below appeared.