Getting to Know Office 2007

Every Office 2007 document has a theme associated with it. Themes are available across Excel 2007, Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Outlook 2007. Therefore, your communications or design personnel should spend some time, right away, creating themes that reflect your corporate identity.

In Office 2007, a template is truly a starter document. For example, PowerPoint 2007 design templates have been replaced by themes, and each theme defines slide layout, colors, and other slide-design features. PowerPoint 2007, on the other hand, now contains only starter slides and boilerplate content.

PowerPoint 2007 shape styles, Excel 2007 cell styles, Word 2007 styles, and Quick Styles are affected by the colors, fonts, and effects of the theme that's in use. For example, in Word 2007 a template's Quick Style might define the Heading 1 style as a certain size and with a particular indentation. However, the theme would determine the actual font. A theme might be one of the built-in themes or one created with your corporate fonts and colors. The theme defines, among other things, the font used for headings and that used for body text. The heading font defined in the theme would be sized and indented based on the Heading 1 style definition. What's great is that you could switch between a casual Quick Style and a more formal Quick Style, which would alter font sizes, indentation, and other aspects of text styles, but the colors and fonts would still comply with your corporate standards. Additionally, you could create Excel 2007 worksheets, PowerPoint 2007 presentations, and even email messages all using the same theme! Note, however, that one caveat of the theme function is that Microsoft Office 2003 documents and documents saved in Office 2003 formats will continue to behave as they always have. If, for example, you save a 2007 document as a 2003 document, any custom theme information defined in that file will be lost.

I read about, but can't find, the Document Inspector on any of the Ribbon commands. What does the Document Inspector do, and how can I use it?
The Document Inspector is a prepublishing feature and doesn't live on the Ribbon (so to speak). Document inspection is available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007. To find the Document Inspector, follow these steps:

1. Click the Office button.
2. Choose Prepare.
3. Click Inspect Document.

The inspection process removes categorical personal data and any tracked-changes identification. The list in Figure 2 shows the Document Inspector features you can enable.