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.

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.

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

[16] 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.

It included an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality.

[20] 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.

[22] It added improved support for ODF, XPS and PDF standards, and included several bug fixes.

The ribbon is designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible with fewer mouse clicks[37] as compared to the menu-based UI used prior to Office 2007.

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.

Keyboard shortcuts for any of the commands on the toolbar are also fully customizable, similar to previous Office versions.

SmartArt, found under the Insert tab in the ribbon in PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook, is a new group of editable and formatted diagrams.

Initially, Microsoft promised to support exporting to Portable Document Format (PDF) in Office 2007.

However, due to legal objections from Adobe Systems, Office 2007 originally did not offer PDF support out of the box, but rather as a separate free download.

[52] According to ODF Alliance this support falls short and substantial improvements are still needed for interoperability in real-world situations.

[53][54] Third-party plugins able to read from and write to the ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF) are available as a separate download.

Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 does not support reading and writing encrypted (password protected) ODF files.

[61] Microsoft stated that they consider adding support for an official ODF formula language (OpenFormula), once a future version of the ISO/IEC 26300 standard specification includes one.

[62] Microsoft's ODF spreadsheet support in SP2 is not fully inter-operable with other implementations of OpenDocument, such as the IBM Symphony, which use the non-standardized OpenOffice.org 2.x formula language, and OpenOffice.org 3.x, which uses a draft of OpenFormula.

Peter Amstein and the Microsoft Office team are reluctant to make liberal use of extension mechanisms, even though provided in ODF 1.1.

"[64] The EU investigated Microsoft Office OpenDocument Format support to see if it provided consumers greater choice.

As such, Microsoft Office 2007 features server components for applications such as Excel, which work in conjunction with SharePoint Services, to provide a collaboration platform.

The new Office Theme file format (.THMX) is shared between Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook email messages.

Based on these data, a consolidated report view can be generated by Microsoft Office Outlook with Business Contact Manager.

Documents can also be managed through pre-defined policies that let users create and publish shared content, through a SharePoint site.

Microsoft PerformancePoint Server allows users to monitor, analyze, and plan their business as well as drive alignment, accountability, and actionable insight across the entire organization.

Some users with experience using previous versions of Microsoft Office have complained about having to find features in the ribbon.

[104] Microsoft has released a series of small programs,[105] help sheets,[106] videos[107] and add-ins[108] to help users learn the new interface more quickly.

He says "Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans.

[111] PC World has stated that upgrading to Office 2007 presents dangers to certain data, such as templates, macros, and mail messages.

Some extra styles, such as the standard Association for Computing Machinery publication format, are made freely available by third parties.