About Office 2007 Galleries
June H writes:
” I clicked on an Office 2007 banner ad that talked about a feature called ‘Margin Galleries’ but I could not find anything about it on the site I was taken to. Can you explain? “
We’ve had a few messages like this, the online advertising for Office 2007 entices with mentions of interesting features. You’re taken to the main Office 2007 promo site and not a page specific to the feature you were interested in. This might be a tactic to increase the number of overall page hits but I wonder how many people get frustrated by the lack of relevant info and lose interest?
‘Margin Galleries’ is just one incarnation of the new ‘ribbon’ interface in Office 2007 and the related Galleries feature.
An Office 2007 Gallery is a pull-down list of defined settings, usually with some visual prompts and more text than in a standard Windows menu plus an option to go to more detailed settings.
In Word 2007 the Margin pull-down has a gallery of commonly used margin combinations including a wide margin and mirrored margins (for facing pages).
In earlier versions of Word you had to change each of the four margin settings manually (top/ bottom, left/right or inside/outside). You can still do that in Word 2007 from the Custom Margins option which takes you to the Page Layout dialog box familiar to users of earlier versions of Word.
Excel 2007 also has a margin gallery under the Page Layout tab.
Margins aren’t the best example of Galleries in Office 2007. They are better in situations where a visual prompt plus the expanded text explanation are helpful. On the Page Layout tab of Word 2007 is a better example – the Breaks Gallery.
Page and Section breaks in Word have always been a source of confusion (even for experts) but the gallery in Word 2007 shows the major options clearly in both a large icon and some text.
With the Breaks gallery you can get a better idea of what each break option can do than in earlier versions of Word.
Not everything has a gallery, just below Breaks on the ribbon is Line Numbers which, perhaps, could have benefited from a gallery.
