Appreciating Office 2007: Shadows

There are a lot of things that I am starting to really appreciate about Office 2007.

The first one is probably the most cosmetic, but it’s making a real difference and that’s shadows.

I have always been stunned by the lack of flexibility in shadows in earlier versions of Office. Let’s be honest, they didn’t even look like shadows. I’m not sure what they looked like, but it wasn’t a shadow.

The new shadow capabilities in Office 2007 are far batter. They now look like, and behave like shadows.

The options in 2003 were so limiting as to make them unusable:

What can I do here? I can make the shadow bigger, I can change the colour, and I can make it semi-transparent. And the result:

Even the drop shadows in Live Writer look more like a shadow than that.

In 2007 it’s all changed:

The presets in there own are enough, but I now have the ability to adjust so much more: transparency, size, blur, angle, distance.

Now that actually looks like a shadow.

I’m not sure how much fiddling I will do with these new options though, because the Quick Styles do a pretty good job on there own (another post, another time).

And that’s just shadows on objects, shadows on text has radically changed, and definitely for the better (another post another time).