After a decade or so of minor tweaks and paint jobs, Microsoft has finally decided to seriously overhaul its Office software suite, which contains programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, used by millions every day. But will the makeover, due for release early next year, improve our working lives? I’ve been testing the latest trial version of Office 2007, which you can download free at tinyurl.com/9wn46 — though you must be careful not to overwrite your existing Office suite if you do install it.

Why such a drastic redesign now? Several competitors have begun to offer similar packages free online. OpenOffice 2 (www.openoffice.org) apes the Microsoft suite so successfully that millions of people have downloaded it (see the Doors review at tinyurl.com/k687q). With Google launching free web-based software for word-processing, calendar, spreadsheet and e-mail, Microsoft must do something special to convince us to keep paying.

And it has gone for the jugular, by completely reshaping the software. Gone are the familiar toolbars at the top of the screen, with dozens of buttons confusingly screaming for attention; gone, too, are the drop-down menus that contained all those features people never used.

They have been replaced by an ingeniously designed menu system — the ribbon — that runs across the top of the screen, revealing only features and options that are relevant to what you’re doing at the time. So, for example, if I insert a photo into a Word document, a picture-tools menu appears, which I can use to alter the photo’s brightness. If I’m creating a graph in Excel, options for changing colours are there without me having to find them in complicated sub-menus.

At first, the ribbon is hideously confusing: like walking into your office on Monday morning to find the photocopier’s been moved. It took a good five minutes simply to work out how to open a Word document and track down the thesaurus. After a couple of days’ practice, however, you become used to it, and even find yourself playing with features you hadn’t discovered on previous software versions, though they were there — such as swish graphical effects for PowerPoint presentations. Likewise, inserting headers and footers into Word documents is far less painful and the new zoom bar makes it simple to quickly scan long reports.

New features help make documents look more professional, too: when you select a font from the menu, “active preview” shows exactly how it will look. And an improved range of graph styles in Excel transforms dull data into slicker-looking charts.

The e-mail and calendar software, Outlook, however, has been largely neglected, though there are a few nice touches. The option to colour-code your e-mail messages (red for ones that need urgent attention, say) is handy; and the search tool, which was ponderously slow at finding a contact or e-mail, has been improved slightly.

Do any of these largely impressive features justify paying several hundred pounds? Afraid not. Yes, this is the best, most powerful office suite I’ve ever tested, and yes, it’s a damn sight easier to use than Office 2003 or any of the freebie clones — but it’s not that much better. It might save me a little time by making some advanced features easier to find, but how often do you need these when you’re typing a document or plugging numbers into a spreadsheet? Best to wait for Office 2007 to be bundled when you next buy a computer, or hope for cut-price editions.

In the meantime, your existing version of Office, or the increasingly impressive freebies, are good enough. And if you really want to try the new Office, take it for a test run yourself. Do note, however, that the suite’s new file formats won’t work with previous versions of Word or Excel, so you may create files you can’t open — like buying the wrong-sized staples.

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