The Office 2007 suite has a completely redesigned interface for its applications. The Office 2007 suite, by default, saves documents in a new file format. Office 2007 documents saved in this new format cannot be opened by earlier versions of Office unless a compatibility pack has been installed in the older version of Office. TR recommends you save documents in the older Office format if you will be sharing your documents with users who have not upgraded to Office 2007.

Training

You can learn more about the new features of Office 2007 and how to use them most efficiently by accessing the online resources at the following Microsoft web pages using Internet Explorer 6 or higher:

• Technology Resources provides additional access to online e-learning courses and quick references and courseware for many Microsoft applications.
• See the Getting Started with the 2007 Microsoft Office System.
• Watch an  online Office 2007 demo  to review many of the new features of the components of Office 2007.
• Check out the  online reference guides for Office 2007 to learn where your favorite Office 2003 commands are located in the new 2007 Office system interface.
• Take a  Microsoft online self paced training course.

Before Upgrading

Because of the many new features of Office 2007, it is important for Office users to realize the following:

• Office 2007 saves documents in a new format and older versions of Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) will not be able to open Office 2007 documents without  a compatibility pack or format converter utility.  Office 2007 documents have different file extensions.  For example, Word 2007 documents will have a ".docx" extension as opposed to the ".doc" extension used by earlier versions of Office.
• Office 2007 applications do give you the capability to save a document in the older format.  However, if you use a  feature that is only in Office 2007 than you will lose that info when the document is saved in the older format.
• Macintosh Office users must run a separate converter utility before they can open Office 2007 documents.  This converter program is not able to convert Excel 2007 documents.  If you share Excel documents with Mac users, you must save them in the older format for a Mac Office user.
• Because Excel 2007 has more columns than previous versions of Excel, if you select an entire row and perform an action on it, that change will be lost when you save your document in the older Excel format.
• In Access 2007, you can open and work with the records in the old Microsoft Access format.  However, you cannot make structural changes such as when you create new fields, create tables, save queries, etc. that will require you to re-save the database.

Opening an Office 2007 document in an older version of Microsoft Office

Office 2003 users can learn how to open a Word 2007 document in an earlier version of Word and learn how to open any Office 2007 document from this Microsoft Support web page.

Macintosh Office 2004 users will need to download and run a converter program to open Office 2007 documents or upgrade to Office 2008.  This converter program is not able to convert Excel 2007 documents.

Network Installation of Office 2007

Technology Resources is pleased to provide Texas State faculty/staff users the ability to remotely install Microsoft Office 2007 to their workstations across the Texas State Network.

• Continue to the Office 2007 Network Installation Site.