by Daniel Grotta
Rating 84
The new professional edition of Canon’s OfficeReady plug-in software for Microsoft Office provides templates for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. More than 1,000 new bundled templates extend the power of Office to handle repetitive business tasks and projects more efficiently.
The Excel templates, which provide formulas and automatically perform calculations, are invaluable. They include a wide range of business projects, such as calculating job estimates, financial statement analysis, and making investment or inventory decisions.
The 150 new photo templates for Word provide placeholders for photos within the layout of a document. Photo editing tools in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint allow for basic adjustments to color, brightness, contrast, and sharpness.
OfficeReady’s Master Slide Wizard walks users through the process of creating a master slide, which permanently lays out logos, photos, and graphics placements that can be used for corporate presentations. Unfortunately the tool offers no image previews.
The new, very intuitive Template Browser can be accessed from within Office applications or as an independent program to locate and preview all the templates you create according to category and application.
The program does have some quirks. For example, installation places an OfficeReady button in the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint toolbars. To open up the OfficeReady toolbar, users must click on this button every time to launch the application.
OfficeReady Professional fits neatly into the normal workflow process by adding more efficiency to common Office applications. The large assortment of functional templates will help employees get work done quicker, and with greater ease.