Today, I’ll try to address some of the technical questions about Office 07 regarding matters such as, system requirements, ease of installation and noticeable features relating to the post-release of this software.

System Requirements

Prior to installing anything new on your computers, it is critical to assess whether or not your current system has the necessary capabilities to handle the new addition.  Definitely do not upgrade if your system can’t handle it.  Here are some system recommendations for Microsoft Office 2007.

1. I would make sure that I had at least a Pentium 4 CPU 2.93Mhz processor.  If you like speed, this will be necessary.
2. 512MB of memory, minimum!  If I were you though, I’d probably make sure I had 1GB of memory.  Why?  Why have a new system that you can’t get the maximum performance from.
3. Microsoft recommends that you have 2GB of disk space before doing an install.  Wow, that’s a lot of disk space.
4. And of course, you’ll need at least Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003 SP1.

The full list of requirements can be viewed on the Microsoft Office Website.
Installation
I really have to commend Microsoft for the ease of this installation.  I only had to click three buttons during the install.  (That is, if you clicked on the install button instead of the customize button option.)   Just to let you know though, there was a previous Office Professional 2003 install that I uninstalled before beginning the installation.
Side note:  I didn’t lose any of my Outlook exchange settings.

The screen shots below are what you’ll see during a normal install.  A piece of cake, eh?

Features

There are several noticeable features on Microsoft Office 2007 that I really appreciate.

• The Ribbon 

• The Microsoft Office Button

Key Features: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx

Compatibility

Just one issue that I’ve recognized thus far.  If you have friends that are still using Office 2003 or earlier, you’ll need to save your work in the .doc format, specifically for users of Office 97 – 03.  Now, Microsoft has released an Office Compatibility Pack, but as of this date, I haven’t tried it out.  You can check it out for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en.

Recommended

For many office users this new release of Office is a big plus, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t require a small learning curve.  Some of the new features help to make work easier (and if I dare say, a little bit of fun).  As for the system requirements, I think most users won’t have a problem with them (I hope most of you already have at least a P4).  You won’t be running XP with less than 256MB of memory, so you shouldn’t have any issues with the memory or OS requirement.  For the compatibility issue that I brought up, it’s really just a small thing anyways, so why not just do the upgrade.�
Have a great week!

Resources

It’s a new day.  It’s a new office
 http://www.microsoft.com/office/newday/default.mspx
Microsoft System Requirements
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ha101668651033.aspx#8
Key Featureshttp://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

Filed under: Technical Articles on May 18th, 2007 |