Office has evolved from the days when linking data in one Office application to another was considered revolutionary. Cross-application interaction is stronger in this release.

In Outlook 2007, for example, you can automatically import meeting details from a calendar item into OneNote. OneNote also indexes text within image files by using a optical character recognition engine, so its Instant Search can find words within images, scanned documents or handwritten notes. As in Outlook, search results begin to appear as soon as you type the first few letters that match an item in the index.

There are some surprises, such as how Office simplifies or automates what you could do in previous versions (but only manually). Word's "Insert Excel Chart" option opens an Excel spreadsheet, creates a chart, embeds the chart into the Word document, and links the data to the Excel document. Change a value in Excel and the Word chart is automatically updated.

Office InfoPath forms can be sent in an e-mail message; recipients using Outlook can complete the form and e-mail it back to the sender without having OneNote installed on their systems. Assignments from Microsoft Project 2007 can be viewed within Outlook, and status and time spent can be reported and returned to Project for automatic updating.

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