On the face of it, there are good reasons for this, though mostly if the majority of emails are sent between people using Office2007 (a fair assumption in an office). You can include SmartArt, charts and formatting is easier with the Mini Toolbar.

The problems start when emails start to come from people who don’t use Outlook 2007, myself included thinking of our weekly newsletter. In fact I’d been doing some unrelated research work and the feature comparison between Outlook 2003 and 2007 doesn’t look kindly on the new version.

With Office 2010 on the way, Microsoft confirmed that Word 2010 would be used for emails, prompting an online campaign at fixoutlook.org, complete with a Twitter feed.

Microsoft responded, claiming that Word is “the best e-mail authoring experience around” and linking to a white paper explaining the benefits.

What caught my eye in the paper were the features that won’t be available if Word 2007 is not installed on the computer: auto-formatting, native table functionality, background spell checking, thesaurus, grammar checking, autotext.

Personally, it’s the results that count, and I’m not happy that quite a few CSS standard formatting marks aren’t supported such as background-image. Perhaps the answer is to improve Word.

Knowing what looks good where and when is a valuable skill, and if you've never done anything like this before, you should read this book. In fact if you have been doing design without any advice (that’s me), you should read this book too.

The layout of the book is as good as my introduction would suggest, giving examples of all the principles that are explained. A particularly helpful touch is that all the fonts used in the book are named in a special index at the back. There are few things worse than finding a font and then not knowing what it’s called.

The basic message of the book boils down into four key principles:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

The acronym may be unfortunate but it is memorable! Each is explained in some detail and there are exercises to follow at the end of chapters.

At nearly £25, The Non-Designer’s Design Book might seem expensive, especially given it’s slim stature. But this is money very well spent if you are planning any kind of design work. It radically improved the design work I’ve been doing both at work and at home.

5/5 Buy it! 

The Non-Designer's Design Book
Robin Williams
PeachPit Press
£23.99
ISBN: 978-0321534040

Well worth a look if you have any design projects planned.

“I love the ribbon. I'm a pretty hardcore office user: word, excel, and
powerpoint are essential components of my daily life.

1) When the mouse cursor is in the ribbon region, you can flip through
all of the ribbon categories with the mouse wheel. This essentially
makes every ribbon menu option a 1-click option. The classic menu
sometimes requires up to three clicks (unless you're willing to wait
for sub-menus to pop up on their own). 1-click is better than 3-clicks;
therefore, the ribbon is an improvement on the interface.

2) I hate clicking through menus! If you're using the mouse at
an angle then it's way too easy to "slide off" the menu option you're
trying to select. The assortment of differently sized buttons on the
ribbon solve that problem perfectly. This is another improvement.

3) The largest complaint I've heard here is that its not intuitive and
you have trouble finding things. Well, if you have trouble finding
things, then spend the 20 minutes and learn the interface first. It's a
different interface; it's something that you have to learn. The fact
that it's so easy to learn (it's very visually oriented) is what makes
it "intuitive". “

I’ll just add on Dave’s last point a link to the Interactive Guide: Word 2003 to Word 2007. It’s a clever little Flash app. Find the option you want in the Office 2003 menu system and it will show you where to find it in Office 2007.

One way to avoid expensive confusions is to look for images that have a Creative Commons license. You can search several sites via the Creative Commons website, including Flickr, and this has been helpful several times in the past when I’ve been putting posters together.

Yahoo has made life easier when it comes to finding images for projects by adding some Creative Commons options to their image search page. The changes are made to the search immediately so you don’t have to repeat it to change the options.

It can be a pain when the perfect image isn’t available, but you owe it to the artist to abide by the licenses.

I am webmaster for a small amateur theatre company and recently used a picture from Google Images on the website to promote an in-house Family Fun Day.  A few weeks later at the end of August, I received a demand for the sum of £964 for use of the image without payment. I had never heard of the company but it said it owns the copyrights to the photograph. The paperwork states there is no negotiation possible re-their payment demand. It also said it was not acceptable to say it was not known that the image was copyrighted, or that it was downloaded from another web-site, which indeed it had been. There was no intention to defraud anybody but the photo had no rights warning and so I assumed it would be in order to use it. I would willingly pay a few hundred to clear this up, but £900 plus? I am frantic.
Terry Swoffer

Case solved

The image Mr Swoffer used was from Getty Images. The amount demanded by Getty seems to be a standard fee for cases of copyright infringement. Although Mr Swoffer stated that the demand he received said no negotiation was possible, you usually can thrash out an agreement acceptable to both parties. We contacted Getty and the representative told us that it would always try to reach a compromise. It said it realised people inadvertently use its images and in Mr Swoffer’s case there was no malicious intent to defraud the photographer or itself. However it pointed out that if someone uses a photo without permission, the photographer doesn’t get paid his or her royalties so it is very hot on copyright infringement.  We explained he had tried repeatedly to reach the company to no avail. We are happy to report that Getty contacted Mr Swoffer, who incidentally had immediately removed the image from the website, and withdrew its demand for payment.

Although Mr Swoffer said there was no reference anywhere to state that the image had copyright restrictions, it is always best to assume this is the case when using material that is not your own. We should also point out that on Google images it does clearly state those photos are subject to copyright. If you are not sure don’t use the image. The same rule of thumb applies to music, videos, works of art, published text etc.

The 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
UK copyright law gives the creators of literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, sound recordings, broadcasts, films and typographical arrangement of published editions, rights to control the ways in which their material may be used. The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has more information www.ipo.gov.uk/copy.htm