Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12), sometimes called the "2007 Microsoft Office system", is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007. The Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, was released on January 15, 2008.

Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars. Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. The new formats are intended to facilitate the sharing of information between programs, improve security, reduce the size of documents, and enable new recovery scenarios.

Office 2007 is compatible with Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 through Windows 10 v1607 and Windows Server 2016. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Vista RTM.

Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports Excel Services, a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.

With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.

Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite. Users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.

According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed (its sample comprising 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers).

Support for Office 2007 ended on October 10, 2017. On August 27, 2021, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 would be cut off from connecting to Microsoft 365 Exchange servers on November 1, 2021.

Development Microsoft announced Beta 1 of Office 2007 with the reveal of the ribbon user interface on March 9, 2006, at CeBIT in Germany.

Beta 2 was announced by Bill Gates at WinHEC 2006, and was initially released to the public at no cost from Microsoft's web site. However, because of an unprecedented number of downloads, a fee of $1.50 was introduced for each product downloaded after August 2, 2006, The beta was updated on September 14, 2006, in Beta 2 Technical Refresh (Beta2TR). It included an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality.

Office 2007 was released to volume licensing customers on November 30, 2006, and to the general public on January 30, 2007. The last security updates were released on April 10, 2018.

Service packs Since the initial release of Microsoft Office 2007, three service packs containing updates as well as additional features have been released. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Packs are cumulative, so previous Service Packs are not a prerequisite for installation.

Service Pack 1 was released on December 11, 2007. Official documentation claims that SP1 is not simply a rollup of publicly released patches, but that it also contains fixes for a total of 481 issues throughout the entire Office suite. Service Pack 2 was released on April 28, 2009. It added improved support for ODF, XPS and PDF standards, and included several bug fixes. Service Pack 3 was released on October 25, 2011.

Editions

+Comparison of Microsoft Office 2007 editions Programs and Features Basic Home and Student Standard Small Business Professional Professional Plus Enterprise Ultimate Licensing scheme OEM Retail and OEM Retail and volume Retail, OEM and volume Retail and OEM VolumeVolume Retail Word Excel PowerPoint Outlook OneNote Picture Manager Publisher Access InfoPath Communicator Groove Project SharePoint Designer Visio Office Customization Tool (OCT) Upgrade MSRP $239.95 $279.95 $329.95 $539.95 Full MSRP $149.95 $399.95 $449.95 $499.95 $679.95 1 Office Customization Tool is used to customize the installation of Office 2007 by creating a Windows Installer patch file (.MSP) and replacing the Custom Installation Wizard and Custom Deployment Wizard included in earlier versions of the Office Resource Kit that created a Windows Installer Transform (.MST).

Volume licensing Eligible employees of companies with volume license agreements for Microsoft Office receive additional tools, including enterprise content management, electronic forms, Information Rights Management capabilities and copies for use on a home computer. Office 2007 was the last to implement offline VLKs. Future versions would need to connect to the internet to activate.

New features

User interface The new user interface (UI), officially known as Fluent User Interface,See has been implemented in the core Microsoft Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and in the item inspector used to create or edit individual items in Outlook. These applications have been selected for the UI overhaul because they center around document authoring. The rest of the applications in the suite changed to the new UI in subsequent versions. Original prototypes of the new user interface were revealed at MIX 2008 in Las Vegas.

In Office 2007, Calibri () replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. It is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002 and released to the general public in 2004.

Office button The Office 2007 button, located on the top-left of the window, replaces the File menu and provides access to functionality common across all Office applications, including opening, saving, printing, and sharing a file. It can also close the application. Users can also choose color schemes for the interface. A notable accessibility improvement is that the Office button follows Fitts's law.

Ribbon

The ribbon, a panel that houses a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organizes commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The ribbon is present in Microsoft Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Access 2007 and some Outlook 2007 windows. The ribbon is not user customizable in Office 2007. Each application has a different set of tabs that exposes functions that the application offers. For example, while Excel has a tab for the graphing capabilities, Word does not; instead it has tabs to control the formatting of a text document. Within each tab, various related options may be grouped together. The ribbon is designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible with fewer mouse clicks as compared to the menu-based UI used prior to Office 2007. Moving the mouse scroll wheel while on any of the tabs on the ribbon cycles through the tabs. The ribbon can be minimized by double clicking the active section's title, such as the Home text in the picture below. Office 2007 does not natively support removing, modifying or replacing ribbon. Third party add-ins, however, can bring menus and toolbars back to Office 2007 or customize the ribbon commands. Add-ins that restore menus and toolbars include Classic Menu for Office,http://www.addintools.com Classic Menu for Office ToolbarToggle, and Ubitmenu. Others like RibbonCustomizer enable the customization of ribbons. Office 2010 does allow user customization of the ribbon out of the box.

Contextual Tabs Some tabs, called Contextual Tabs, appear only when certain objects are selected. Contextual Tabs expose functionality specific only to the object with focus. For example, selecting a picture brings up a new tab showing toolbar actions specific to the selected photo.

Live Preview Microsoft Office 2007 also introduces a feature called Live Preview, which temporarily applies formatting on the focused text or object when any formatting button is moused-over. The temporary formatting is removed when the mouse pointer is moved from the button. This allows users to have a preview of how the option would affect the appearance of the object, without actually applying it.

Mini Toolbar The new Mini Toolbar is a small toolbar with basic formatting commands that appears within the document editing area, much like a context menu. When the mouse selects part of the text, Mini Toolbar appears close to selected text. It remains semi-transparent until the mouse pointer is hovered on it, to avoid obstructing what is underneath. Mini Toolbar can also be made to appear by right-clicking in the editing area or via key on keyboard, in which case it appears near the cursor, above or below the traditional context menu. Mini Toolbar is not customizable in Office 2007, but can be turned off.

Quick Access Toolbar The Quick Access toolbar (by default) sits in the title bar and serves as a repository of most used functions, such as save, undo/redo and print. It is customizable, although this feature is limited, compared to toolbars in previous Office versions. Any command available in the entire Office application can be added to the Quick Access toolbar, including commands not available on the ribbon as well as macros. Keyboard shortcuts for any of the commands on the toolbar are also fully customizable, similar to previous Office versions.

Other UI features Super-tooltips, or screentips, that can house formatted text and even images, are used to provide detailed descriptions of what most buttons do. A zoom slider present in the bottom-right corner, allowing for dynamic and rapid magnification of documents. The status bar is fully customizable. Users can right click the status bar and add or remove what they want the status bar to display.

SmartArt

SmartArt, found under the Insert tab in the ribbon in PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook, is a new group of editable and formatted diagrams. There are 115 preset SmartArt graphics layout templates in categories such as list, process, cycle, and hierarchy. When an instance of a SmartArt is inserted, a Text Pane appears next to it to guide the user through entering text in the hierarchical levels. Each SmartArt graphic, based on its design, maps the text outline, automatically resized for best fit, onto the graphic. There are a number of "quick styles" for each graphic that apply largely different 3D effects to the graphic, and the graphic's shapes and text can be formatted through shape styles and WordArt styles. In addition, SmartArt graphics change their colors, fonts, and effects to match the document's theme.

File formats

Office Open XML

Microsoft Office 2007 introduced a new file format, called Office Open XML, as the default file format. Such files are saved using an extra X letter in their extension (.docx/xlsx/pptx/etc.). However, it can still save documents in the old format, which is compatible with previous versions. Alternatively, Microsoft has made available a free add-on known as the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack that lets Office open, edit, and save documents created under the newer 2007 format.