How to See the About Dialog and Version Information in Office 2007

One of our favorite readers wrote in today asking how to tell if his Word 2007 installation was running Service Pack 1, since he couldn’t find the About dialog, which got me thinking… I bet most people don’t know where it is!

So Jeff, this article is for you, but hopefully it will help somebody else as well. This same method should work for all Office applications: Word, Excel, Access, and all the rest.

First click on the Office button in the upper left-hand corner.

Now click the Word Options button in the menu (or Excel options for Excel, etc)

 

Select the Resources tab on the left-hand pane, and then you’ll see “about Microsoft Office Word 2007″ in the list.

You can click on the About button to bring up About dialog… and look, I’m running SP1 and didn’t even realize it.

 

You can do the same thing for any Office application.

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. This article was written on 02/25/08 and tagged with: Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word

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Comments (7)

1. February 25, 2008 6:03 pm
   j0e

   Works except for MS Outlook as the About dialog box is located in the old location.

2. February 25, 2008 9:41 pm
   GMTurner

   And for those that really want easy access to this in the future, you can always customize the “Quick Access Tab” by adding a button for the “About” page. Not sure why you would want to do this, but it’s something you could do. A previous post covered how-to Save Time by Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar. The “About” option is available in the list of commands for “Commands Not in the Ribbon”.

3. February 25, 2009 9:40 pm
   Mike

   This article was VERY helpful. I was going out of mind trying to find the About dialog until I found this article. Thanks for this useful tip.

   You know something is askew when it is necessary to search to internet to find a “how-to” article just to learn out how to display the About dialog!!!!

4. April 18, 2009 9:03 pm
   JCarlos

   Thank you. Very helpful!

5. May 2, 2009 6:18 am
   john k

   thanks!

6. May 30, 2009 4:37 pm
   Jonathan D

   Just as I suspected-

   1. The About dialog was moved to a totally nondiscoverable place in Word 2007… I guessed my way to Word Options, but didn’t guess “Resources”. I never thought of the About box as an option or a resource.

   2. The most reliable way to find where it moved to was to Google “Word 2007 about dialog” which took me to this page. The built-in “Help” feature of Word (which I rarely use, but found with the blue ‘?’ icon) was totally useless. I could not find a set of search terms that would even include the right answer among the top 25 potential answers. I’m not sure how the relevancy ranking is supposed to work but it is totally broken.

   It was actually faster to switch over to the Mac, boot up Firefox, and Google for the answer than it was to even launch the built-in Help dialog and perform the search there from within Word. And the former has the distinct advantage of producing a useful answer.

7. June 10, 2009 8:50 am
   Ken T.

   Thanks for posting this info. This was pretty much impossible to find otherwise. Something so simple, made so inobvious. I hate the ribbon bar– it is not more intuitive. It is more cumbersome. Clearly 1 step forward, 2 or more steps back.