Themes simplify getting the same look across a presentation without resorting to master slides, but if you do there's now hierarchy of masters with templates for picture slides, chart slides and other layouts. This is the simplest approach PowerPoint has ever tried for using and customising templates.

Excel does the obvious catching up: bigger worksheets, 64 levels of sort, 2GB of memory, unlimited cells in formulas, unlimited format types. Sorting and filtering is more powerful, checkboxes make it easy to construct a custom filter and you can sort by cell or font colour. There's an option to remove duplicate rows based on specific columns.

As you scroll through a long table you see the header rows at the top of the sheet without having to split and freeze the screen. Calculated columns are simpler than array formulas for repeating a formula in every row of your table, and a total row can now show other options like sum, average, count or your own formula.

Even PivotTables are a little easier to work with - again you use checkboxes to select fields as well as still using drag and drop.

Formatting styles

Excel finally gets styles for formatting cells so you don't have to re-apply font, colour, alignment and the rest one by one. The new visual annotations are a standout feature that make conditional formatting easy and effective; you can use colour or icons to highlight high and low values in a large set of numbers without needing a separate chart.

You can still record macros, though the option is a little buried on the View tab and the full macro options are on the Developer tab which you have to choose to turn on.

Putting a new interface on Access doesn't make it any easier to understand the complexities of relational databases and it's still a tool that shines for developers rather than casual users, but it doesn't mean that Access makes it harder either and novices have a chance to succeed.

Instead of starting with a blank screen there's a useful set of templates - from project tracking to technical support tickets - and you get the option to link a database to a SharePoint site straight away, which is still the only real way to publish an interactive database from Access.

The ribbon emphasises the natural workflow in designing a database, from creating forms and reports, to linking external data and analysing and extending your database.

The visual report designer is far easier to use, and you can build your tables the way you normally would in Excel spreadsheets by adding columns and new list values as you think of them. Access can also work with Outlook 2007 to send out emails, to collect data and populate the database with the answers automatically, saving you a lot of typing and hassle.

Putting OneNote into Office Home and Student 2007 runs the risk it will be seen as an app purely for education, but it's a powerful way for anyone to store and organise notes: typed, handwritten, copied from documents or 'printed' into the notebook from any application at all.

This is a major upgrade for OneNote as well; the concept of multiple notebooks means you can split personal and business information or organise any other way that suits you, because you have a hierarchy rather than a flat list that rapidly grew out of control in OneNote 2003.

Audio recording is still extremely useful, because it time syncs with written notes, although for the audio search to deliver good results means recording at higher quality.

It's much easier to manage the flags you can apply to notes to indicate a question you want to ask, a quote you want to remember or anything else you want to highlight - think of the asterisks and symbols you would draw in notes on paper.