You may be a user whose needs extend beyond letter writing and number crunching. If you routinely take on special tasks such as creating printed publications or tracking extensive customer data, you may find yourself working with some of the other applications that are part of some editions of Microsoft Office 2007. This section gives you a snapshot of those other applications; later chapters of the book revisit these topics.

Publisher
Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 enables you to create publications, which have a greater emphasis on design than do word processing documents. To dummy-proof the creative process, Publisher includes attractive publication designs with placeholders for text and images and other features such as decorative rules and backgrounds already in place, as shown in Figure 1-8.

The distinction between documents and publications may seem fuzzy, but you can roughly think of a document as anything you’d print from an office printer—such as a report or proposal— compared to something you might have professionally printed, such as a business card or brochure.

A later chapter shows you how to handle the Publisher basics of choosing a publication design and adding text and graphics. Then you’ll learn to throw in snazzier effects such as drop caps and Design Gallery objects, and even how to prep a publication for professional printing.

Access
The Microsoft Office Access 2007 database program can certainly do the heavy lifting when it comes to managing detailed mountains of data such as customer, inventory, and order lists that may have hundreds or thousands of entries. The file that holds such lists is called a database.

Each Access database file actually can hold multiple lists of data, each stored in a separate table, such as the Current Foster Animals table shown in Figure 1-9.

Access enables you to enter and view data using a simple form. You also can set up queries to pull sets of matching data out of the database and generate reports that consolidate and analyze data. Later chapters introduce you to these Access skills.

OneNote
It’s a risky proposition to track your professional or educational life via notes scribbled on various scraps of paper or notebook pages. As the notes pile up, it becomes harder and harder to find relevant information, making you look as though you can’t keep up. If you lose a scrap of paper containing a critical piece of information, you can put a project in jeopardy.

Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (Figure 1-10) serves as a type of electronic scrapbook for notes, reference materials, and files related to a particular activity or project. Then, when you need to find all the “stuff” related to a particular project, you can flip right to the applicable notebook tab. You learn to get yourself together with OneNote in a later chapter.

InfoPath
The Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 application included with the higher-end Office versions may actually move us closer to that mythical land known as the “paperless office.” InfoPath enables you to design electronic fill-in forms based on a template like the one shown in Figure 1-11. Each time a user fills in the form, the unique user data is stored in a separate location called a data source, in essence adding a new entry to that list. You’ll get started with InfoPath forms later in the book, too.

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