Microsoft Office Suite Office 2007 (12.0)

2007, January 30

Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12), sometimes called the "2007 Microsoft Office system", is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007. The Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, was released on January 15, 2008.

Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars. Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. 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.

Office 2007 is compatible with Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 through Windows 10 v1607 and Windows Server 2016. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Vista RTM.

Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. 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.

With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.

Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite. Users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.

According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed (its sample comprising 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers).

Support for Office 2007 ended on October 10, 2017. On August 27, 2021, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 would be cut off from connecting to Microsoft 365 Exchange servers on November 1, 2021.

Development

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

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. However, because of an unprecedented number of downloads, a fee of $1.50 was introduced for each product downloaded after August 2, 2006, The beta was updated on September 14, 2006, in Beta 2 Technical Refresh (Beta2TR). It included an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality.

Office 2007 was released to volume licensing customers on November 30, 2006, and to the general public on January 30, 2007. The last security updates were released on April 10, 2018.

Service packs

Since the initial release of Microsoft Office 2007, three service packs containing updates as well as additional features have been released. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Packs are cumulative, so previous Service Packs are not a prerequisite for installation.

Service Pack 1 was released on December 11, 2007. 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. Service Pack 2 was released on April 28, 2009. It added improved support for ODF, XPS and PDF standards, and included several bug fixes. Service Pack 3 was released on October 25, 2011.