Microsoft Office Professional 2007 on DVD

Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12[6]) is a version of Microsoft Office, a family of office suites and productivity software for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006;[7] it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006,[8][9] and later to retail on January 30, 2007,[1] the same respective release dates of Windows Vista. It was preceded by Office 2003 and succeeded by Office 2010.

Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars.[10] Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. The new formats are intended to facilitate the sharing of information between programs, improve security, reduce the size of documents, and enable new recovery scenarios.[11]

Office 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, or a later operating system; it is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.[4]

Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is Office SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports Excel Services, a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.

With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.

Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite, as Windows Speech Recognition was integrated into Windows Vista. Windows XP users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.[12]

According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed (its sample comprising 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers).[13]