Office 2007, my first impressions.

Posted on April 26, 2006
Tags: Techie |

I’ve installed the Office 2007 Enterprise pre-release (beta, previously code named Office 12) and gave it a short test drive. It looks really neat but the new menus and tool bars are quite different from Office 97-XP-2003. Some of it is really wierd like the dynamic changing of the tool bar.. I do like the right click action which brings up more options though. Another thing about the toolbars is also that they are quite screen real-estate hungry. It looks like M$ is counting on most people to move higher up than 1024*768. I do like the bigger tooltips since the old ones were barely adequate unless you already knew what the function was supposed to do.

Anyways, I’ve not played enough with it yet to see how fast, or how slow, I can get used to it (I’m an old dog when it comes to UI designs) but I reckon if 80% of people didn’t use 80% of the functionality in the previous versions of Office then this is probably going to go even further up to maybe 90% unless you’re in a very advanced corporate environment where collaboration is a big thing.
I also noticed that charts render kind of differently, and very very slowly, I guess they’ve changed the graph engines. Also need to keep in mind that this is beta so things are expected to be (even clunkier and) buggier than normal.

Comments

2 Responses to “Office 2007, my first impressions.”

  1. richard on April 26th, 2006 7:16 am

    Cool. I’d like to hear more once you’ve used it a bit. It’s normal for parts of MS products to be twice or three times as slow in pre-release, because they typically have a lot of extra test code running to try to find bugs. In the past, things like pre-release spreadsheet recalculation were actually done twice with two different algorithms so that they could be checked against each other!

    The current mac version of office is very toolbar centric, and they go transparent when you aren’t using them. I guess that’s to try to make up for all the real estate they use up, but it’s still a pain because even though you can see over there, you can’t click on that area because it will activate the toolbar and make it opaque. So on my 23″ desktop display it’s no problem, but on my 12″ laptop I try to do without the toolbars as much as I can.

  2. eyal on April 26th, 2006 3:29 pm

    Yes, that extra code makes sense.

    I still keep OpenOffice installed just in case something quirky happens or updates break it.

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