Living with Office 2007 Beta 2
Recently, Microsoft has released both Windows Vista Beta 2 and Microsoft Office Beta 2. Both are public, although Vista will not be made available until a few weeks from now but you can download the free Office 2007 Beta 2 now from Microsoft's web site.
I, being the nerd that I am (and proud of it!), downloaded both and I'm running them on my laptop as my only Operating System and Office Suite. The usability of Vista has certainly improved, but what I really want to point out is the new Office. If you haven't seen it yet, check out some of the screenshots that people are posting on the web!
My impression? I love the new Office! The interface is much more user friendly and Microsoft has made it much easier to find all the cool features available in the different programs like Word and Excel. I have been finishing up a research project this year at school and had to create a slide show presentation as well as write a thesis paper. I used PowerPoint 2007 and Word 2007 to accomplish the respective tasks and I was quite amazed at how many cool features I was able to figure out how to use. As a result, I made some pretty awesome stuff. I've been using the new Outlook as well, and my favorite feature of that is the integrated RSS feed reader.
On the negative end, I'd say stability is the biggest problem with this beta. I've had the programs crash on me quite frequently (especially Outlook and Word). Luckily, this is only a temporary problem as the quality will be much better once Microsoft is close to releasing the final product.
And if you're interested, there's quite a storm brewing about a feature that lets you save documents as PDF files. Basically, it is being rumored that Adobe wants to file suit against Microsoft for adding the free feature, even though many other applications support exporting to PDF. Some are upset that adobe is doing this, but then there is also the conspiracy theorists that claim Microsoft is misleading the public in an attempt to harm Adobe and further promote their own PDF rival, XPS (XML Paper Specification).
I, being the nerd that I am (and proud of it!), downloaded both and I'm running them on my laptop as my only Operating System and Office Suite. The usability of Vista has certainly improved, but what I really want to point out is the new Office. If you haven't seen it yet, check out some of the screenshots that people are posting on the web!
My impression? I love the new Office! The interface is much more user friendly and Microsoft has made it much easier to find all the cool features available in the different programs like Word and Excel. I have been finishing up a research project this year at school and had to create a slide show presentation as well as write a thesis paper. I used PowerPoint 2007 and Word 2007 to accomplish the respective tasks and I was quite amazed at how many cool features I was able to figure out how to use. As a result, I made some pretty awesome stuff. I've been using the new Outlook as well, and my favorite feature of that is the integrated RSS feed reader.
On the negative end, I'd say stability is the biggest problem with this beta. I've had the programs crash on me quite frequently (especially Outlook and Word). Luckily, this is only a temporary problem as the quality will be much better once Microsoft is close to releasing the final product.
And if you're interested, there's quite a storm brewing about a feature that lets you save documents as PDF files. Basically, it is being rumored that Adobe wants to file suit against Microsoft for adding the free feature, even though many other applications support exporting to PDF. Some are upset that adobe is doing this, but then there is also the conspiracy theorists that claim Microsoft is misleading the public in an attempt to harm Adobe and further promote their own PDF rival, XPS (XML Paper Specification).
posted by Chris at
10:22 AM
1 Comments:
Chris Gillum. Long time no talk! Just thought I'd say hi, I remembered you had a blog so I looked it up. Congrats on graduating!! I did, too, in May...my sister's about to move back to WA, she's transferring to Northwest U., and I might be moving back soon thereafter as well. Hope you're doing well, shoot me an email sometime or something! Ciao. ~Angi~
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