Office 12 applications do their best to help you use more colorful layouts. For example, insert a cover page in Word and you're presented with a variety of richly formated layouts to choose from.

SmartArt is another welcome addition for improving your documents' visual appeal. In PowerPoint, for example, you can insert a Venn diagram or a step-by-step process chart, or select a bulleted list and apply the same graphic layout to your existing text (see Figure 4). You can directly edit a SmartArt object -- when you add a step to a diagram, the Office application will redraw the image with all components properly resized and rearranged.

SmartArt also lets you add some professional touches to the images, such as shading and glow, and you can control transparency or add reflections.

Excel Excels

There aren't a significant number of new features in Excel. Microsoft focused on refining some current behavior and making it easier to use. And then there's the matter of size: Excel 2007 now supports over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet.