Office 2007 has been right alongside Vista in receiving all manner of poor reviews and complaints, primarily revolving around the new file formats (such as .docx) and the replacement of the old toolbars with the ribbon. After spending a fair amount of time working on a huge engineering paper the past few days, I feel I can safely say that Office 2007 is the best thing to happen to writing as an engineer.
As someone who has muddled with the old "Microsoft Equation Editor" that has remained almost completely unchanged for years, Office 2007's equation editor is one of those "Why didn't they do this years ago???" sort of things. Press the arrow under equations and get instant access to a list of built-in equations.
If you click on the equations button, an entire chunk of ribbon opens up with every amount of functionality from the old equation editor had, and then some, all instantly accessable directly from within Word without having to deal with another window to insert the equation components.
All of this is perfect for writing entire equations out with great ease. However in engineering writing I frequently need to put in a single greek letter to reference a value. In older versions of word that meant either using a character map, the symbols font, or inserting a single letter through the equation editor. Now, just to the right of the equations button is the Symbol button. Initially it contains a few basic symbols, but as you choose from the attached character map, Office will automatically save the symbols you use. When you need the symbol again, you just click the symbol button on the ribbon, and select the symbol from the nice drop down list.
Just these two tiny additions to Office have made a big difference to how I use it on a regular basis, and I couldn't be happier.
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