Office 2007 accompanied Windows Vista to the market, and hit the shelves at the end of January 2007, designed as the successor of Office 2003. Microsoft has yet to release specific numbers related to the sales performances of the Office 2007 System, having revealed only that it shipped over 70 million licenses of Office between July 1 2006, and June 30 2007, namely the company past Fiscal Year. But according to statistics from the NPD Group made available via a report at the beginning of September, boxed copies of Office 2007 are outselling Office 2003 by two to one, which makes the latest suite of Office programs a hit with consumers.

In the same manner as Windows Vista is an evolution over Windows XP, Office 2007 grows the already luxuriant collection of features and capabilities delivered by Office 2003, packaging it under an overhauled visual style, via the Fluent, formerly Ribbon, graphical user interface. In this context, Microsoft has started offering some 10 months ago a collection of resources designed to enable users to familiarize themselves with the programs, servers, services, tools and technologies that make up the Office 2007 System.

The Office Developer How-to Center on MSDN has grown over time and is now offering in excess of 100 task-based samples, each a walkthrough focused on a certain aspect of Office 2007. The resources cover Office Fluent Ribbon, XML in the 2007 Office System, SharePoint Server 2007, Access 2007, Visio, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition, Excel 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, InfoPath 2007, Outlook 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007, Project 2007 and SharePoint Designer 2007.

"It's been about 10 months since we started publishing Office Visual How-tos (VHTs), which is a compound content type, mixing a short how-to article, code samples, and a video of that code sample in action. The wealth of this content type is that you can watch a quick video to visualize how a feature works and then you can read conceptual information and grab a code sample. We also provide a list of related resources for further reading and learning. Another interesting fact is that the VHT content plan attempted to cover most relevant developer features of the different 2007 Microsoft Office system products, servers, services, tools, and technologies. We worked very hard to cover as many MOSS, WSS, Office Core, Office Client, and VSTO code samples," explained Erika Ehrli, Microsoft Site Manager - ODC.