Ed Bott's Microsoft Report blogs about What do you think of Office 2007 so far?
I've been using it, mostly OneNote, Outlook and Word, since the release of the latest beta, and I like the most of it.
The Ribbon bar and the User Interface
The most significant change is the user interface and I like what I see. I took a while for me to be aquainted with the new shortcuts and the Ribbon bar, I am a keyboard user. But I think it's working fine. I only wish OneNote 2007 had the Ribbon bar, as I wrote before. Outlook does not have it either, but Jensen Harris explains why.
Previewing works really fine and is great.
New document formats
It works fine using the new document formats (.docx etc) and it also works fine using the old ones (.doc etc). Publishing as PDF is also great, a feature I lacked before. But now Microsoft has decided to withdraw that function from the final release, after being haunted by Adobe. Wasn't PDF supposed to be an "open format"?
Performance
It's a beta, so what can you expect. It's not that fast as I hoped and it consumes a lot of memory. Outlook should be really fast, and I hope they optimize it before the final release. Outlook 2003 was fast enough, and one of the first applications from Microsoft that was faster than it's predecessors.
Head over to Ed Bott's site and tell him what you think?
