Office 2007 is less bloated than before

Office 2007 will arrive together with Windows Vista on January 30 next week. The new release of Office will be simpler and less bloated, it's even one of the sales points.

The new office suit from Microsoft promises to be simpler, more streamlined and that its documents take up far less space on your hard drive. CNET takes a look at what Microsoft did to achieve this:

So what did Microsoft do then? It began shrinking Microsoft Office. In fact, the chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which arrives on Jan. 30, is that it's simpler, it's more streamlined and its documents take up far less disk space.

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..