Office 2007 can be a great tool to enhance your personal productivity.  We’re a big fan of the Office 2007 program.  It can take a little getting used to, because it does organize things differently than the previous versions.  However, I think in a short period of time you’ll generally find yourself getting used to the new layout and becoming more productive with the new structure.

That in of itself would be plenty of good reason to go for Office 2007, but there’s a big additional improvement that can step up the productivity quite a bit more.  Take advantage of this and you’ll capture even more richness from the new program.

Look at it this way – we all have things we most often do repetitively.  We all have certain ways that we really like to operate.  Therefore, Office 2007 comes in with the quick access toolbar.

With the quick access tool bar, you get to put up over 50 tasks that you commonly do and have them available right at the top of the screen, no matter which part of the Office program you are in.  For example, do you have certain things you like to do in formatting?  You might, for example, like to put things often in bold or, perhaps, center or use a style, such as the comma format.  You may like to indent or, perhaps, increase or decrease the number of decimals.

You can use the quick access toolbar to put those features right at your fingertips, no matter where you are in the application.  Those things are always just one click away.  I cover a variety of things in my quick access toolbar how I like to format, things for printing, things for calculations and other features rather than having to move around what they know call ribbons (instead of the old menus), which might take you two or three steps, you can reduce it to one step.

There’s another plus to it too.  In the older versions of Excel, it was a little more complicated to add things to menus for favorite things you liked to do.  You had to right click on a toolbar and then go through a special wizard to add things to the particular toolbar.  It would take several steps and might not necessarily be intuitive.

That changes with Office 2007.  It’s very simple.  Have a task that you like such as, for example, being able to have a quick icon available for always seeing a print preview.  All you need to do is just right click on that icon for that particular task and you’ll see a choice come up to add this to the quick access tool bar, just click on that and you’re set.  You’ve already added it.  That’s all it takes.

So, if you have Office 2007 and haven’t taken advantage of the quick access toolbar, we strongly encourage you to do so.  If you haven’t made the leap yet to Office 2007, this could be one more good reason to go ahead and take the plunge.