The Top Five Compelling Reasons Your Law Firm or Corporate Legal Department Can Benefit from Using Microsoft Office 2007 

Office 2007 is unlike any Microsoft upgrade since Windows 95 was released because the change is revolutionary -- not evolutionary. The most impactful change in Office 2007 is the new interface. The familiar menus, File, Edit, View, etc. no longer exist. The menus have been replaced with "the Ribbon", which is a set of tabs located across the top of the screen organized by function. Each tab is divided into groups of related task-oriented commands.

Key features are now at your fingertips. In other words, features that were previously very difficult to locate in older versions of Office applications, are now very easy to find or "discover" within the new Ribbon. For example; symbols, line numbering and paragraph spacing in Word (once buried deep in menus and dialog boxes) are now clearly displayed at the top of your screen on the Ribbon.

Contextual tabs are another ingenious feature in Office 2007. The tabs only appear in the Ribbon when needed. For example, when you click in a Table, the Table Tools tab appears; click outside of the table and the contextual tabs disappear.

Documents can now be created and edited with a more professional look, faster and easier than ever before. Through the use of new Office 2007 templates, Quick Parts and other Building Blocks, elegant documents can be created in as little as three clicks. Live Preview, Galleries, Themes and Quick Styles make it possible to format and edit a document in a matter of mere seconds.

Some of the features of the new file format include the ability to:

• Create documents that are less prone to file corruption.
• Reduce file size significantly.
• Recover content from corrupt documents (not available in previous versions of Office).
• Content Management - The capability to update and replace content in all Office 2007 documents in a repository. For example, the same logo may be used in thousands of documents and can quickly be replaced in all XML documents.

While SmartArt is one of the most obvious and outstanding new additions to Microsoft's graphics capabilities, there are other great tools that may be of more interest to you. In PowerPoint, the ability to insert multiple photos at one time, using the Photo Album tool, is one those great features. The Photo Album tool; capable of formatting, assigning placement (i.e., fit one photo per slide or select up to four photos per slide), and applying captions to multiple photos all at once, can save hours of work.

Another efficiency tool found throughout Office 2007 is the Compress Pictures feature. The ability to compress all pictures in a document with only a few clicks results in smaller file sizes, which is especially useful for files and presentations that are graphics-heavy.

The Selection and Visibility pane is another great new graphics feature that presents the user with a list of all the objects in a document. The task pane allows the user to quickly select and group multiple graphics; as well as show, hide and arrange objects -- making it much easier to work with layered objects.

It is all the little things that add up to huge improvements in efficiency and ease-of-use for Office 2007. Through the use of the new templates, Quick Parts and other Building Blocks, elegant documents can be created in as little as three clicks. Live Preview, Galleries, Themes and Quick Styles make it possible to format and edit a document in a matter of mere seconds.

Some of our favorite new features such as the PDF converter, Global Spelling Options, Contextual Spelling, Mini Toolbar, customizable Status Bar and Zoom slider can be found throughout Office 2007.

In Word, the Document Comparison features, new Table Styles, and improved Track Changes make a big impact on usability; while the new Presenter View, Custom Layouts and slide Reset button are a sigh of relief and a helping hand in PowerPoint.

Excel's new features such as the Page Layout view, new Conditional Formatting options and additional Formulas allow for data to be manipulated and understood within a single click or two.

And last but not least the Calendar Overlay feature, new To-Do Bar and color category options make managing your schedule so much faster and easier in Outlook. These features may not sound like much written here on this page, however once you begin to use Office 2007 it will not take long before you begin to see the benefits.

Is it worth the upgrade? We say yes.

The Office 2007 improvements boil down to a few simple factors:

• An overall improvement to the interface and some great new tools result in greater efficiencies and a higher quality of work product.
• Processes that often took hours to accomplish in previous versions of Office and resulted in only mediocre documents, now only take a few mouse clicks and result in professional, eye-catching documents.
• And while it’s true that change is often difficult, and users may experience somewhat of a learning curve, we at Rafte believe the short investment of time is well worth the effort.

To learn more about Office 2007, Office 2007 Training, and other great technology advances that can help your firm or legal department become more efficient - call Rafte & Company at (713) 993-9637.