Office 2007 Beta 2

May 23rd, 2006

Office 2007 Beta 2 was released today. I’ve seen all the screenshots and read the posts on Jensen Harris’ blog on how great Office 12 was and it’s great to be able to try it out. It’s a pretty small download - 450MB gives you Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, Outlook, etc.

When you install Office, you’ll be given the option to Upgrade or to leave old versions. I still use Office 2000 and I didn’t want to be left without an office suite when Office 2007 expires in January so I chose to leave Office 2000 there. I also didn’t bother installing Outlook, etc. The install was quite quick - it took about 20 minutes, no reboot. The first time it started it required activation - this simply involved typing in the license key which was also entered at installation.

My initial thoughts were that Office 2007 was slow and indeed it feels quite a bit slower than Office 2000. The new interface is also very confusing at a first glance and it can take a while to get used to. I’m still not totally used to it.

I’m not going to give a few review or provide tons of screenshots as billions of sites already have; I’m just going to give my first impressions. 

I really love some of the UI improvements. The quick previews when you put your mouse over items is nice but I’ve found it sometimes takes a second or two to show on my system (3 GHz Pentium 4) which ruins the experience a bit.

Microsoft Word 

I love the blogging. You can set up Word with your MSN Space, Blogger account or any blogs which support the MetaWeblog API or the Atom API. It worked first time though I couldn’t work out how to make it upload pictures.

Another thing which I loved was the ease of creating SmartArt. It’s really easy to create some unique diagrams which look fantastic. I don’t know how long SmartArt will stay cool; Frontpage templates were quite cool until every single site started using them.

Blog Post

My god, it even has reflections! 

SmartArt

It is outrageously simple to do some things which are a real pain in the kidneys to do in earlier versions. 

The Beta does have a few bugs and issues - for example I found a dialog with the title &Password but this Beta is very usable.

Word 2007 knocks the socks off OpenOffice, previous versions of Word and all the web based word processors (if they ever were a contender). I have the feeling that I’ll be upgrading to this version when it comes out.

Reflections (Added 21:01)

If you hate reflections, you’re not going to be a fan of Office 2007. It’s unbelievably easy to add a reflection - you can add it to text, images, etc. You can do perspective on images really easily too.

Reflections

  1. Windows Vista and Office 2007 Screencasts
  2. Create Adobe Acrobat PDFs and XPS files from Microsoft Office
  3. Office 2007 Contextual Spelling Checker
  4. Thinkfree Web Office
  5. Online Office Suites

3 Responses to “Office 2007 Beta 2”

  1. # Opheron 24 May 2006 at 2:32 pm

    I remember the times of Office 2000, it was quite a nifty package, fast and efficient. When I upgraded to 2003 I certainly noticed a difference in loading time, but the extra features are worth it.

    Apparently 2007 has slower loading times than 2003, so its not that bad.

  2. # Khloon 24 May 2006 at 4:11 pm

    Unscientific benchmark but I opened up Word 2000 - it took approx 4 seconds. Word 2007 took around 12 seconds.

  3. # Opheron 24 May 2006 at 4:34 pm

    Just finished installing. I was made to reboot PC, but it is definately alot faster than 2003.

    And the new UI is imho far more better and asthetically pleasing.

    However when I firsted opened the program I though I was on a Mac due to the curvy corners. :( 

    Overall - I LOVE IT! 

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