Important Microsoft Office 2007 Information for Faculty

The NCSU Bookstore is selling MS Office 2007 at their deeply discounted rate for students, faculty and staff. To align with the bookstore, the College is recommending that all incoming undergraduate students purchase MS Office 2007 for their Windows laptop PCs.

Office 2007 does not require Windows Vista and may be installed on computers running Windows XP with SP2.

What does this mean for faculty?

The MS Office 2007 file formats (and filename extensions) have changed. What were previously .doc, .xls and .ppt for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, respectively, are now .docx, .xlsx and .pptx with the 2007 version. According to the Microsoft website, these new XML-based file formats are compressed to offer a dramatic reduction in file size.

If you are using MS Office 2000, Office XP or Office 2003 and you receive an Office 2007 file from a student, for example, you will need to download the Compatibility Pack from the Microsoft website. By installing the Compatibility Pack, you will be able to open, edit and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007. Please contact your department's system administrator if you have specific questions about your machine.

How do I receive MS Office 2007 for my office computer?

College of Engineering faculty and staff are advised to contact their departmental system administrator for information about MS Office 2007 for their office computer.

MS Office 2007 training and help

OIT Education is holding training sessions on Office 2007. You may visit the OIT training website for the schedule and register to attend an OIT session. Click on Productivity Tools on the Workshop Schedule page.

Microsoft provides online self-paced training, demonstrations, and interactive command reference guides at their Office 2007 training home page. Links from that page provide interactive command reference guides for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For example, the Word guide displays a Word 2003 interface. Point or mouse over the menu command or button to learn its comparable Word 2007 command.

Microsoft also provides interactive reference guides that show the comparable Office 2007 commands for the Office 2003 commands for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Point to an Office 2003 menu item or button and the comparable Office 2007 command will display.

You may also download an Excel template that alphabetically lists locations of Word 2003 commands in Word 2007.

 

revised 2/15/2008 rsl