Office 2007 represents some very significant changes for Office users.

Most notably is the ribbon menu presentation. Using this new feature is pretty frustrating at first, not because it’s not better, because you have to unlearn the programs a bit. In the end, I like the changes, they put more power at your fingertips and offer a lot of new tools.

One of my favorite finds is in PowerPoint. PowerPoint has a new tool called SmartArt. SmartArt gives you the ability to create eye-catching graphics that present relationships, matrixs, cycles, pyramids, hierarchy and processes by simply typing your core words and selecting some simple formatting. The end product makes for some very nice graphics that aid in the telling of your story (The image above is the Duct Tape Marketing Customer Life-Cycle brought to life. – click the image to get the full impact). What I like about it most though is that you can take the created graphic and save it as one of a number of very web friendly formats. This feature allows you to very easily create smart images for web pages.

There are lots of ways to create graphics like these, but I like easy!

Care to share some of your marketing and productivity related finds in this massive upgrade?