You have seen the new Ribbon UI and I have already talked about OneNote 2007. So what else is new?

Across Office:

• A completely new drawing and graphics engine internally called “Escher 2.0″. Excel and PowerPoint implement it fully, Word only implements some of it. See some of the things you can do now.
• A completely new charting engine.
• SmartArt. A new way of doing organization, process and other kinds of diagrams.
• A new set of fonts. If you are tired of Times New Roman, Tahoma and the other fonts we are all using daily, Office 2007 comes with a new (and in my opinion) much better set of fonts.
• Office Themes. Probably one of the most impressive innovations in 2007. Office Themes enable you to have your documents, spreadsheets and presentations look the same, and most importantly fit well visually together in the same document. My favorite example is copying a chart from Excel 2003 into PowerPoint or Word 2003. The chart will use the default Excel color scheme that guaranteed doesn’t match the color scheme of your presentation or document. What you basically get is a nice looking document or presentation with an ugly chart in it. If you do the same thing with 2007, the chart will take on the color scheme of the document or presentation and blend very well in. Combined with the other new things already listed, Office 2007 documents simply look more professional.
• PDF & XPS writing support. Although not in Office 2007 out of the box due to legal issues with Adobe, you can download a free add-in to add it. It is not available in Outlook though.
• New file formats. Yes, Microsoft did it again. Office gets new file formats. In contrast to the previous switch though, users actually benefit from the new file formats directly. The new ones are XML-based, appropriately called OpenXML therefore. They are also standardized, open and fully documented (a first for Office file formats). All the XML and other contents of a file (e.g. images) are stored in a ZIP-container. So files created in the new file formats are already zipped and will use a lot less space than 97-2003 format files.
• SharePoint. There is better SharePoint support (and also a new version of the SharePoint server). As I basically don’t use SharePoint, I really don’t know what to say about it.

Outlook:

• Much improved IMAP support. More on that in a later post that I am still working on.
• To-Do Bar. A bar that allows you to see a snippet of your calendar and tasks in the main Outlook window no matter what folder is selected.
• Time zone support for appointments. You can now specify a time zone for appointments directly. A small, but very needed new feature!
• Instant search via the Windows Desktop Search 3 Engine.
• RSS support. All the blogs I subscribe to, I read in Outlook.
• Internet Calendar Subscription support. You can add any Internet calendar subscription (.ics file) to your calendar. Any changes to the calendar are automatically downloaded and reflected in Outlook. You can also publish a calendar as Internet calendar to Office Online or any server with WebDAV support.
• A special slimmed-down and packaged into a DLL version of Word is now the built-in editor for Outlook. This means a much better editor is now the native editor of Outlook. Outlook also uses this editor to display HTML content. Read more what this means for HTML emails in an earlier post.
• There are a lot more new things with Outlook 2007 especially in regards to Outlook 2007. If anyone out there has a comprehensive list, let me know and I’ll link to it.

PowerPoint

• A fellow MVP, Echo Swinford, has a great list on her website of all the new and changed things in PowerPoint 2007.

Word

• There is now a built-in bibliography manager. It’s not powerful enough to matched dedicated bibliography tools such as EndNote, but it should be pretty helpful for high school and undergraduate students. Everyone else though is going to be better off with a real bibliography manager.
• A new equation editor. The new built-in equation editor of Word is just fantastic. Unfortunately, Word is the only Office product that ships with it. The others still use the same old one.
• Contextual spell checking. Hard to explain, so just read about it yourself.
• There are lots of small to big improvements in Word that make it easier to use and easier to produce professional looking documents. The Word Team Blog is a great place to discover those.

Excel

• Much is new in Excel and instead of me getting half of it wrong, I’ll defer for it to the Excel Blog.

Access

• I’ll do the same thing for Access, as the likelihood for me getting is wrong is quite high. Read the Access Blog instead.

Did I forget to highlight a cool new feature? What is your favorite new feature? Post a comment and share it with everyone else! (note that all comments are currently moderated, as my blog is suffering from heavy comment spam right now)