Microsoft Office 2007 is easier to use, says David Pogue of the New York Times. The User Interface has been completely redesigned. Drop down menus have been replaced by a contextual Ribbon that displays all the features applicable to what you are doing at the time.

1. The tabs across the top are designed to be task oriented. Clicking on a tab the Ribbon will display all the features applicable to that task.

2. Groups within each task break a task into possible subtasks. The most often used features are displayed by group.

3. Task buttons are the same icons we have come to know in previous versions of Office. It will take a little time for experienced users to get used to the new Ribbon, but it really is much more intuitive and easy to use.

David Pogue does a great job summarizing the changes;

After a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone. (Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. "We had some options in there that literally did nothing," said Paul Coleman, a product manager.)

Instead, almost the entire world of formatting options has been dug out of Office's guts and artfully arranged on a top-mounted strip of controls called the Ribbon.

You no longer have to spend 20 minutes hunting through menus for Page Numbering or whatever. It's all right there on the Ribbon. What was once buried four layers deep is now arrayed before you in a big software smorgasbord.

You can try out the new Office 2007 via a free download at www.microsoftoffice.com