Office 2007 - Act 2 - Excel

I just received a corporate deployment of Office 2007 (see my comments in an earlier post). Email is working just fine. But now I need to make some extensive changes to an Excel spreadsheet.

I double-click on the file, and it opens up just fine. But - my first thought is: Where are the menu items? My second thought is: Why are they eating up all of my screen real estate?

I managed to get through the necessary updates I needed to make to a document by pretending that the tabs on the ribbon bar were actually menu items. The first real problem occurred when I wanted to do a "Save As". I couldn't find it anywhere! I finally customized the Quick Access Toolbar and added "Save As" to it so that I could use it.

I later discovered that the "button" in the upper left concealed all (and more) of the actions that used to be found in the "File" menu, and also hides access to "Excel Options" - and I thought it was just an oversized move/close button like most other windows. I also discovered that by double-clicking on the ribbon bar tab, I can hide the contents of the ribbon itself until I click on the top tab. With those two discoveries, my major problems so far have been solved (or at least worked around).

I managed to find what will probably be a very important setting for the near future. In the Excel Options, under the Save entry, I can specify that I want to "Save files in this format" and am able to choose "Excel 97-2003 Workbook". That's definitely going to be useful since I'm one of the early corporate deployments - a corporate beta tester, if you want - and will need to ensure compatibility with the rest of my deparment.

Now I'm curious though. Outlook's main window, while it had a little different shading and color in portions of the window which had none before, didn't seem to be overly changed - no ribbon bar at least. But the designers of Excel jumped in feet-first to the new paradigm. Once again Microsoft is consistent in its inconsistencies.