Outlook cuts ribbon while power points

HAVING HAD A WORD on Excel and after whipping through Word, we're wrapping up our look at upcoming Office 2007 today, with a look at the new versions of Outlook and PowerPoint - the least re-worked applications in the new Office offering from Microsoft.

Outlook 2007
Outlook underwent significant change in the 2003 version and it seems Microsoft's Outlook team has decided not to rock the boat with further large-scale changes in 2007. In fact, on first execution of Outlook 2007 the only alterations that are immediately obvious include the new default font in your non-formatted emails and the new 'To-do' bar that appears to the right of the Outlook window.

Surprisingly considering the rest of the suites reliance on the ribbon, Outlook 2007 relies on the establish file/edit/view drop-down menu of old - until you open up an email into full-read mode where upon a selection of ribbon headings similar to the standard Word offering will appear. Outlook's word processing engine relies on Word, so it's no shock to see an almost identical view when opening an email.

Unfortunately this feels like a split-personality and it won't be surprising if this lead to confusion for end-users. Switching the whole suite to an effectively implemented intuitive ribbon interface has been largely successful but to ship an integral product which combines the old and the new, compromises the suite's consistency and usability.

There are a few other tweaks in Outlook 2007 including the addition of a Business Card View, substantial improvements to the look of the Calendar view and coloured 'category' flagging for your email. The indexed search built on Windows Desktop Search 3, is a much faster improved searching tool - at this late stage of the beta you have to download separately on opening Outlook for the first time, we hope that isn't the case on release. Apart from these fairly trivial changes, Outlook is much the same as before.

PowerPoint 2007
PowerPoint is fully ribbon-based, similar to the interfaces of the new Word and Excel as opposed to that of the half-breed Outlook and it certainly benefits. The application's interface is now much less cluttered and far easier to use - a simple presentation with effective graphics created via the suites 'SmartArt' technology, can be had in minutes. Various other enhancements centre round the presentation and editing of graphics (mainly via the standard OfficeArt and SmartArt embedded objects) and also included are much more intuitive animation tools.

The addition of the now familiar 'Theming' tool is as effective within PowerPoint as it is in Word and Excel. Via a simple mouse-over, pre-defined themes allow an instant preview of how your slides can be completely and effectively redesigned by the simple selection of an accompanying theme.

This also allows, for example, a consistent corporate design to easily be introduced across the suite's portfolio of applications.

The integration of Excel within PowerPoint is a major plus, especially for business users. Charts and diagrams can all be imported from Excel or even created directly by PowerPoint via data from your Excel spreadsheet, with a click of a button.

PowerPoint's main areas of change seem to involve the new ribbon-based GUI and the basic underlying design tools which can be utilised throughout the suite. Small changes, but they're effective, useful upgrades that should be welcomed with open-arms. There is simply no reason to have a mundane yawn-inducing PowerPoint slide-show again. But don't put money on it. ?