Get Ready for Vista

et ready, accountants! Like it or not, your basic Microsoft computer tools—from the operating system to all the workaday applications—will soon be history. Replacing them will be the recently introduced Vista operating system and Office 2007, which includes, among other things, Word, Excel, Access, Outlook and PowerPoint.

The upgrade is not just cosmetic. Vista’s look and feel is much different from the Windows version it’s replacing, and its underlying structure has been completely redesigned, making it more powerful, faster, safer and unfortunately—at least until users get used to it—more difficult to use.

Microsoft has extended support for the XP version through 2014—but it will charge users for that support after April 2009. This means some 845 million users worldwide will either have to upgrade to Vista or eventually work with an unsupported application.

In many ways Vista and the Office 2007 tools resemble the Microsoft products you’re currently using, but in many other ways they’re significantly different—both visually and functionally. Visually they are quite beautiful, even resembling the appearance of Apple’s OS X operating system. But the beauty is not just skin deep: Behind it are brains that can significantly support accountants in more and better ways than Windows XP and Office 2003.

I wrote this article on a computer loaded with Vista and Office 2007, and to my delight—and relief—once I got familiar with some of the new processes I found they worked much better than the former versions on the same machine. This article describes many, but not all, of the new features and focuses on those that clearly benefit CPAs.

VISTA’S POWER
One major productivity gain you’ll spot almost instantly is Vista’s desktop search capability. With just a few typed-in clues, it locates every matching file, folder, program or e-mail in your computer. The feature is accessible from anywhere on the computer—even when you’re in Internet Explorer. Its speed and agility exceed the current leading third-party desktop search tools, Google Desktop and Copernic.

For example, I wanted to locate any mention of my JofA editor, Stanley Zarowin. As I was typing the first letters of his name, zar , Vista snapped into action, and even before I finished typing, every mention of his name in my computer was displayed for instant access (see screenshot below).

If you seek a software application on your computer, it will not only locate it instantly, it will even launch it when found.

Quick Switches. Although Vista continues to use the Alt+Tab command to switch between applications, tapping those keys now also produces a thumbnail view of each application with a glimpse of the open file.

Additionally, if you hover the cursor over an icon in the taskbar, you can get a larger view of the underlying file, making it easier to work with multiple files in the same application.

Alternatively, pressing the Windows Key+Tab produces an array of all the thumbnails of open applications, which is the most obvious example of Vista’s new Aero interface features (see screenshot).

Improved Security. After years of embarrassment over its leaky security, Microsoft focused on building better protection into Vista. For example, if you try to install a program or adjust a PC-wide setting, the User Account Control pops up and demands your password. While the pop-up may annoy you, it’s an effective security tool.

Microsoft also added Windows Defender , which includes malware and spyware protection. In addition, it included System Service Hardening , a feature designed to protect system files and provide new barriers to viruses. However, as good as these protections are, you still need antivirus software.

Another key security feature accountants will appreciate is BitLocker , an encryption tool that encodes either selected files or your whole drive. This will prevent anyone from reading your data if your computer is stolen or lost.

BitLocker is available only in the two high-end versions of Vista—Ultimate and Enterprise—and your computer must contain a special microchip, called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which is built into many new computers; it can be added later as a thumb drive plugged into a USB port. (For more on the several versions of Vista, see the sidebar “Choosing a Vista Version.”)

Quicker loads. Most impressive is Vista’s speed—both boot-up and application loading. On my Vista computer (a Hewlett-Packard nc6230 laptop with 2 gigabytes of RAM), Excel loads the first time in less than a second; successive launches are slightly faster. That’s compared with Windows XP, which took up to six seconds for its initial Excel load and two seconds thereafter.

Vista is a miser when it comes to using battery power. My laptop ran almost a full hour longer on the same batteries than it did under Windows XP.

Improved backup. With XP I felt a need to use third-party backup software, but Vista’s system is so effective I may rely fully on it. Not only can you schedule it to back up the entire computer, it also can handle customized backups. In addition it can perform backups to a network or a remote disk. And, of course, like XP, it can take “snapshots” of the entire system so, in the event of problems, you can revert the computer to an earlier date when the computer ran properly (see screenshot).

Gadgets Galore. In addition to the basic applications, Vista has the Sidebar , adjustable layers of single-purpose gadgets, including a foreign-currency calculator, a timer, a stock ticker, a headline feed, lists of contacts, a calendar and a notebook (see screenshot). In addition, other gadgets—for business and for fun—can be retrieved online.

Virtual folders. One of Vista’s most innovative features, which accountants may find particularly useful, is tagging . Consider this: Have you ever wanted to file a document in more than one place? To do that with paper requires multiple copies. But with tagging, all you need to do is label the document in several ways while storing just a single copy. The tags allow that single document to appear in multiple folder views, called virtual folders, and to be located using any of the different labels you gave it.

POWER OF OFFICE 2007
Although Office 2007 applications are more powerful than any of the earlier Office tools, they will present the same adjustment pains you’ll face with Vista. The main problem is the new ribbon menus (see screenshot below).

Every major Office application (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook and PowerPoint) uses ribbon menus. Although I’ve been using the ribbons for more than a year (I started with the beta version), I still routinely have trouble finding some functions. The old XP/2003 menus are gone, so you can’t fall back on them when a tool or function eludes you.

It was no small challenge for Microsoft to design a user-friendly system for the upgrade when you consider that originally Word alone had only about 150 features; it now has more than 1,500. What exacerbates the user-friendly problem is that many functions have been regrouped into different menus. A saving grace is that the shortcut keys for most functions haven’t changed.

Once you start sorting through the many functions, you’ll discover the Quick Access Toolbar (see screenshot). If you press an Alt key, each of the ribbon bar elements reveals the shortcut keys to access the menu or function you want.

However, many critical functions, including menu items related to PivotTables , aren’t included in the ribbon menu; they’re only accessible from the small Quick Access Bar . At the time of this writing, I counted more than 600 functions that were missing from the ribbon menus.

File format. Office 2007 expands the use of XML for sharing data across different information systems; to make fuller use of XML, Microsoft had to redesign the coding for all Office 2007 files. In addition to wider applications of XML, the new design allows easy application of styles and formatting and it’s able to pack more data into a smaller space, reducing the load on data-storage facilities.

The traditional formats—Word’s doc , Excel’s xls , PowerPoint’s ppt and Access’s mdb —are replaced with docx , xlsx , pptx and accdb . Although the new Office recognizes the old formats, when an old file is saved in Office 2007, it’s automatically upgraded. For the moment, at least, that should not be a problem. But eventually files created in newer versions of Office may not be accessible with older Microsoft versions or will be prone to errors. Be advised that, if you work on files in the old format and choose not to convert them, you won’t be able to take advantage of many new Office features.

Warning. I have had some difficulty with both backward and forward compatibility—opening files that moved to and from Office 2003 and 2007. For more on compatibility problems and what you can do about them, see the sidebar “Dealing With Office 2007 Incompatibilities.”

EXCEL’S NEW MUSCLES
Excel 2007’s table capabilities have been beefed up considerably. For example, with two keystrokes this table…

…can be changed with the help of this design menu…

…into this:

But more importantly, notice how Excel uses the titles of the table to replace the A, B and C columns.

Excel charting. Special attention is given to charts, making them more useful and easier to customize. Consider this stacked cylinder chart, which was produced from the above data with one additional keystroke:

Just one more keystroke added Conditional Formatting and produced this chart:

And with another Conditional Formatting choice the chart morphs to this:

PivotTables . One of Excel’s powerful but difficult to understand—and use—power tools, PivotTables , is turned into a friendly function that can be created and customized with a few keystrokes.

A WISER WORD
Word also is more powerful than its predecessors. For example, formatting a document is a snap. Just hover over a format button to produce a menu of 11 document styles (see screenshot).

Users of earlier versions of Word usually either avoided the cumbersome Mail Merge feature or turned it over to the clerical staff. The new Word simplifies the functions, and a merge can be completed in about a minute.

OUTLOOK
An accountant’s professional life is guided by e-mail and calendars, and for many, Microsoft Outlook is an essential tool. The 2007 version has been beefed up and fine-tuned to make it more effective and easier to use. As you can see from the screenshot below, Outlook now includes the daily task list as well as all the future tasks at the bottom of its display. In addition, tasks can be dropped directly onto the calendar.

Search capabilities. The Vista search function, which was described earlier, extends to Outlook and all e-mails sent and received. In the past we advised our clients to ignore the Outlook search function because it was slow and inaccurate, but Outlook 2007’s search resolves this issue.

POWER FOR POWER POINT
Say goodbye to those moments when, during a PowerPoint presentation, as you pause to elaborate on a slide, your computer single-mindedly calculates it’s been idle long enough and nods off to sleep. The new Presentation Mode not only keeps your computer (and your audience) awake, it blocks uninvited dialogue boxes and screensavers.

In addition to new fonts, clipart, animations and graphics, the PowerPoint designers added the business graphics support contained in Excel.

Organizational charting also has been made easier to create and customize.

A BETTER ACCESS
For many accountants, Access, the Office database, is one of the most esoteric applications. While it still presents a challenge to the novice and experienced alike, Microsoft has attempted to make it more approachable. It has added and improved wizards to guide users through setup processes, and it has included more templates as a learning aid.

Clearly, Vista and Office 2007 are not just minor system upgrades. While there’s room for refinement—which surely will come—they represent a computer sea change. To be sure, Microsoft faces some threatening competition, not only from Linux or Macintosh, but from users sticking with prior versions of Windows—even without support. Likewise, as broadband speeds accelerate and the Web becomes more reliable, users may opt not to load tons of application software on their computers, but instead to access their word processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentation tools via the Internet. In the meantime, Vista and Office 2007 are the most viable alternatives for accountants.

Randolph P. Johnston , executive vice president of K2 Enterprises ( www.k2e.com ), Hutchinson, Kan., is a technology consultant. His e-mail address is randy@k2e.com .