Wow … Flowcharting in Office 2007 is slick!

The first time you play around with the flowchart tools in Excel 2007 (aka Excel 12) you can’t but wonder about the whole “Substance over Style” maxim. Sometimes Style is pretty cool, too.

I used the on-line demo to take these screenshots, so there are some visual artifacts. Also, I didn’t line up one of the flowchart symbols in the second screenshot, so it bugs me (I’m really picky about these things.). But other than that, I was really impressed with what they added to the styling for the Excel flowchart symbols. It makes me really excited to work on a Excel 2007 compatible version of FlowBreeze.

Other than the styling, the biggest benefit you’ll see with Flowcharting in Excel 2007 is the ribbon style toolbar. A lot has been written about the ribbon toolbar - good and bad. In the case of flowchart options, it really opens up the features and makes them more obvious for the average user. Doing gradient fills in Excel 2003 and previous versions was almost a hidden feature. Now the flowchart autoshape formatting options are easily accessible.

The downside to the Office 2007 flowcharting is the mismatch between Excel 2007 and Word 2007 (I haven’t played with PowerPoint yet). In previous versions of Office the flowchart capabilities of the applications were pretty much on par with each other. Not so this time. The Excel 2007 flowcharting tools offer a lot more symbol formatting options than flowcharting in Word 2007.