Hibri Marzook Musings on technology and systems thinking

A first look at Office 2007.

The installation was quite faster than previous Office installs. No glitches,

I’ve installed Beta 2 on both my home and work computers. Now, after installing

i fired up Word 2007, and then I was lost. “How do I open a file ?”.

The main menu bar (File, Edit etc.. ) was missing. I had to fiddle around a

bit to find that the big round button with the Office logo on the top left

corner IS the file menu. As usual Office has its own look and feel apart from

the OS, but this time MS has taken it even further. Office has its own Themes.

Yes, Beta 2 comes with a light blue XP theme, and the black/grey Vista theme.

Both themes have the Vista look and feel.

Other than the big UI changes, Word has support for blogging, Beta 2 supports

Wordpress, Livejournal, Typepad blogs. dasBlog and .Text blog support will be

added in a future version. I cant add new blog entries, but I can modify

existing posts. This in my opinion is a major feature, because the blog editors

out there do not have the spell checking features of Word.

There are no major UI changes in Outlook, as in Word, everything looks mostly

the same. There is the To-Do bar on the side, and support for RSS feeds. Task

management is much more nicer and I can organize them by tasks due next week,

this week, no due date etc.. with just a right click. Outlook now has inline

spell checking, no need to hit F7. Everything went well on my office computer,

but Outlook 2007 does not read any of my e-mails on my laptop. The message body

is blank. Hope it didn’t bork my emails !!. Another cool feature in Outlook is

the message attachment preview. Word, Excel and images can be previewed in the

message preview pane itself.

By Hibri Marzook

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