Styles are predefined formats for font, line spacing, paragraphs, indents, alignments, borders and shading. Themes on the other hand control the overall look and feel of the document such as colors, fonts and effects.
Still confused?
Themes give you the fonts and the colors to start with while Styles determine exactly how the colors and the fonts will be used in your entire document.
In analogy, we can say, the sum of all its parts is the Style and the parts are the Themes. In cooking, the Style is the recipe and the Themes are the ingredients.
Just like me, most of you may be wondering what’s with the other software in the Microsoft Office suites. We see in the list the Office Groove, OneNote, InfoPath and others. Microsoft Office 2007 has different editions. Whichever edition you have, at the end of the day most of the abovementioned sounds a bit Latin to all of us. This is what this blog is all about, to enlighten us again what these software are for.
Of course, the usual ones we know in the likes of Word, Excel, PowerPoint are definitely serving the same purpose and just been improved to address further the needs of the industry and for collaboration with SharePoint.
Now, moving on to the not so familiar products in the suite, these are:
1.OneNote, it is like the old timer Filopax, a company that produces well known personal organizers normally made of leather with 6-ring loose binder and with lots of pockets in it in different sizes. Today, we have OneNote , it is a digital notebook which allows you to better sort your stuff and quickly find what you have written and stored in it. In my opinion, it looks very similar with the Filopax organizer which I also have back then, a very trendy stuff back at the time. In a gist, OneNote is definitely a lot better than a regular notebook.
2.Groove, it is a mini-SharePoint, that’s how I call it since Microsoft says it’s a collaboration software program. It may be a bit limited but it can do simple sharing of information, discussion, meetings to name a few. This should be enough to get you started with the idea of collaboration. I also think this could be Microsoft’s way of getting you to move to the bigger version of it, SharePoint.
3.InfoPath, it is for creating forms. It also can be published to SharePoint. With knowledge of .NET programming, it can be extended to do more.
4.Communicator, it is use for communicating with people in different time zones thru instant messaging, voice, desktop sharing and video.
5.SharePoint Designer, this is the new FrontPage. If you want to design web pages to build a website, this one is free. It can also be extended thru .NET programming for use in a SharePoint portal.
Deciding which one best suited you, check out the matrix Microsoft has that compares side by side what’s in each edition. To sum it up, majority of corporations, go for the Ultimate Edition.