We have had almost a whole year to experience the productivity gains from Vista and Office 2007. If your organization has provided you these technology tools, now is a good time to assess your use of the new technology. Are you using the new technology in the best way possible? Vista, when combined with Office, can leverage these old favorite technologies to give you more horsepower to get those day to day tasks completed more easily and quickly.
Now that we have a year's worth of experience with the new Microsoft technologies, a few conclusions that probably should have been obvious earlier are now crystal clear:
1) The days of 32 bit computing are drawing to a close, and your organization should strongly consider running a 64 bit version of Vista (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate) to maximize your personal productivity while utilizing your hardware resources fully.
2) To maintain compatibility with older applications, it is clear that virtualization is a great choice with Vista. Our prior article on virtualization is clearly more important than ever.
3) To gain the most with Microsoft Office 2007 on a 64 bit implementation of Vista, we strongly suggest implementing Office 2007 as a 64 bit application as well. This version of the product seems to run faster on Vista 64 bit operating systems.
4) To support the hardware, virtualization and other applications properly, 4 GB of RAM seems to be a reasonable amount of memory.
Once the building blocks are in place, it is clear that you will benefit by having extra education on how to use applications like Excel, Word or Outlook even if you have used them for some time. Admittedly, you can use the new generation of product the same way you used it before, but the designers have made a concerted effort to make your day to day tasks easier to complete with less effort and keystrokes. Key features that I am using daily include:
1) Windows search. Built into Vista, this capability allows you to find documents, email and other items quickly and accurately.
2) Preview. This feature in Word, Excel and PowerPoint allows you to see the formatting that will be applied to your document, spreadsheet or presentation before it is applied. This can save 3-7 keystrokes or more if you are trying to get something to look "just right".
3) Table handling. This feature in Excel allows much more efficient handling of tabular data whether it is a large or small data set. The table tools allow you to insert, delete, format and annotate tables faster than ever before. However, there are new tricks that are not so obvious without training in this portion of the product.
4) Charting. There is psychological research that shows that graphical images are handled in a separate part of the brain at roughly 994 times the speed of non-graphical data. Perhaps the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is true. The charting engines have been completely re-written throughout the Microsoft Office 2007 product. Charts are more flexible, capable and easier to generate. Again, education can help you use this tool better, although Office 2007 charting is easy enough to use, you will think that no training is necessary.
5) Managing your world. Outlook 2007 has improved the calendar handling, task management and email management functionality. When combined with Exchange 2007, new features abound in this module. The ability to send a calendar or drop a task onto the calendar so time is allocated to complete critical tasks makes managing yourself and others for success much easier.
6) Differentiation. You can get your message across to others much more effectively in PowerPoint 2007. New graphics support allows you to illustrate relationships more easily, communicate organizational relationships, or illustrate financial data more clearly. You can help your listeners understand your position much more clearly.
7) File and retrieve. The Access database has been simplified, yet made more powerful in Office 2007. This can allow you to keep large amounts of data. However, retrieving and reporting this data is much easier than with prior versions.
8) Stable and reliable. Depending on how you would like to count it, this is the twelfth version of Office, and the seventh version of Windows. Microsoft has continued to invest year after year in making their products more capable while making them easier to use.
Although the current versions of Vista and Office may seem foreign at first, and it is likely that you will experience a productivity loss in the short term, in the long term, the changes in both the operating system and the Office productivity suite will make your day to day use of computers easier. Invest now in some training to help you use the tool better in the coming year.
Randy Johnston
Executive Vice President, K2 Enterprises
