Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Office 2007 Beta - Initial Impressions

First off I've gotta say I don't really get "hot n bothered" over an Office release. I like and use Word,Excel and Infopath and use Access a bit, but they don't really light my fire so to speak.

However, I am mighty impressed with my first play with 2007. Office apps have been resetting the benchmark as far as GUI goes for years, but they really have raised the bar with 2007. I really like the RibbonBar menu system and have been waiting for years for someone to come up with a better system than the traditional fixed menu. It groups actions in a logical manner and I found it made finding things really easy. I can see how it is going to confuse and annoy heavy Office users (that's people who use Office a lot - not people who eat a lot), but once they get over the shock and get into the new system they should start to like it.

The eye candy is nice too I guess, but wearing my IT Manager's hat (it's the dusty one in the corner I don't like wearing), I hope it doesn't add to the overhead when using via a Terminal Server session. I haven't looked into this so hopefully it doesn't.

Outlook was a little sluggish, but hey it's a beta. It doesn't appear to be too much different at intial view from the previous version. I tried to use the built in RSS reader feature, but it was slow and buggy so will wait until the next release before I comment further on that, but suffice to say it has some work still to be done IMHO.

Overall, judging by the Beta I think the next version of Office is going to be a good one.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like it! Good job. Go on.
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