About About

It was asked last week: "With the Help menu not present in Office 2007, where do I get to the version information from the About box?"

Good question. In thinking through the design, we decided that it made sense for the version information to be integrated into the Options dialog box, since that's kind of a hub for application-level and system-level configuration and information. The Options window itself is launched from the bottom of the Office menu.

The "Resources" page within Options contains all of the information about updating and getting support for Office, so this seemed like the most natural place for the version information to live.


(Click to view full picture)

Outside of the beta program, the two top reasons people need version information are 1) when calling product support and 2) when verifying the service pack level installed. For #1, we just need to have a predictable location that product support can use to lead people towards the version information. #2 was what motivated us to move the version information to the same page as where one checks for product updates.