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.