Microsoft Office commands: Then and Now

Microsoft's ambitious update to its Office suite has done away with the familiar, gray menu of features and pull-down menus shown here in Word 2003. Some of the most commonly used commands have moved to unexpected places. Here's a sample of what's moved and what's new in Office 2007.

The new Ribbon toolbar in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, as well as the message composition window of Outlook arranges major functions within a graphical, tabbed interface atop the screen. Some tabs remain hidden until the software senses that you may need them. For instance, a Picture Tools Format tab appears when you click on a picture.

Office 2007 eliminates the File menu, and places many of the former File commands underneath the Microsoft Office logo button in the upper-left corner of the screen.

Perhaps the best-loved command, Undo was located under the Edit menu of the Office 2003 applications.

An arrow icon within Office 2007 software represents the Undo feature, now perched in the upper-left corner of the interface. You also can press CTRL+Z instead of clicking on the arrow icon with a mouse.

In Office 2003, you had to open the Font dialog box from the Format menu to change the appearance of text on the page. To sample new fonts, you might have even made changes to the document, then selected Undo to reverse unwanted changes, and repeated those steps until the style fit your tastes.

In Office 2007, a drop-down list of fonts displays their appearance, and you can preview styles on the page without changing the document. These formatting options are located on the Home tab of the Ribbon toolbar. Similarly, you can preview changes to images and charts by hovering over styles in Office 2007's new, graphical galleries.

Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2003 would let you attach a file to an Outlook e-mail message and send it without leaving the page.

When you choose Send from Word, PowerPoint, or Excel 2007, an Outlook window pops up that allows you to compose, edit, and send an e-mail with the file already attached.

To add rows to a spreadsheet in Excel 2003, you would select Rows from the Insert pull-down menu.

In Excel 2007, don't hunt beneath the Insert tab if you need to insert a row. Instead, click on the Home tab and look to the right. There, you'll find the Insert menu with the Insert Sheet Rows option.

The data-sorting options in Excel 2003 allowed you to sort by three criteria at once.

The new Sort dialog box in Excel 2007 provides more options for complicated sorts, and it even lets you arrange data by the color of a font or cell.

Previously located within the Edit pull-down menu, the Fill Down command allows you to copy a series of values into the selected rows.

Fill Down is now located within a small pull-down menu near the right edge of the interface of Excel 2007, underneath the Home tab.

When you wanted to add a new slide within PowerPoint 2003, you can select New Slide from the Insert menu or type CTRL+M on the keyboard.

In PowerPoint 2007, the Insert Slide function is located underneath the Home tab, not the Insert tab as you might assume. Just as with PowerPoint 2003, pressing CTRL+M also does the trick.

Inserting a chart within a PowerPoint 2003 slide show would open a generic chart and a Datasheet grid, without running the Excel spreadsheet software.

Inserting a chart in PowerPoint 2007 triggers Excel 2007 to open. With this split-screen view, you can manage a chart's appearance within PowerPoint, while handling the source data in Excel.

Would you rather press CTRL+S instead of selecting File and then Save in Office 2003? If you forgot a keyboard shortcut, then you would have had to open a pull-down menu to see it spelled out next to its corresponding function.

In Office 2007 applications, press the ALT key at any time to display the quick keys next to their corresponding functions. For example, the H badge shows that you can press ALT+H to move to the Home tab. Some shortcuts require the CTRL key. CTRL+F, for instance, will press the Office logo button in the upper-left corner.