The second major test version of Office 2007 is now available to all.
The second major test version of Office 2007 is now available to all, not just MSDN customers and approved beta testers.
As usual these later test versions are feature locked. Don’t expect any feedback to result in changes the interface or features of Office. From now on the focus is on bug fixing and optimization.
It is more of a ‘marketing beta’ than what traditionalists might think of as a true software test. Some people feel special because they have the beta version.
A major reason for the wide beta is what Microsoft calls ‘evangelizing’ – getting people talking about the next version of Office long before it’s available. In the case of Office 2007 much of that evangelizing will be about the new interface in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
While it’s tempting, don’t commit yourself to using Office 2007 Beta 2 with no way to fall back on a stable version of Office. Beta 2 is fairly stable but, like all beta releases, it’s slower than a final release and prone to errors. The latter will, naturally, occur at the moment of maximum inconvenience. Remember that the default documents in Office 2007 can’t yet be read by users of older versions of Office so sharing your work needs a little care.
One example of a Beta 2 error had us laughing only minutes after installation. Outlook 2007 popped up a two word message ‘Unknown Error’ with the sub-heading ‘Was this message helpful?’ – errr no, not really.
BETA 2 EARLY NOTES
Some random notes on Beta 2 after a short time:
– The installation on Windows XP and Vista is smooth and didn’t require a re-boot.
– The Visio viewer is included by default in Office 2007.
– The new Office document formats (.docx etc) are used by default. You may want to change that to ‘Word 97-2003’ format (Office icon in top left | Word options | Save) so that people you work with can use your documents.
– A beta release of the ‘Compatibility Pack’ to let Office 2003 and XP use the new document formats is available however the installation isn’t simple and the document formats may not be compatible with the final versions.
– Word now has a ‘blog’ feature that’s linked to Microsoft approved blog hosters. It will be interesting to see how useful this really is or if it’s just a way to add a headline feature into Word 2007.
– Outlook has a mobile messaging option but there’s no US mobile / wireless phone carriers yet signed up to work with this service.
– Outlook 2007 has a faster search system than in the past (and about time) however it now requires Windows Desktop Search to be installed separately (previous beta versions did not). This will give the Microsoft desktop search offering an advantage over rivals from Google, Yahoo etc. Hopefully the companies will work to make their competing products operate together on the one computer.
– The addition of themes into Word means we have some new font options like +Body and +Heading which are linked to the theme instead of a particular font.
– A sad loss seems to be the Outlook Calendar view which shows all the appointments for a week on a single screen regardless of the time (ie a 9am event and an 8pm event show next to each other if there’s nothing scheduled in between).
The new interface has been changed a bit for this beta with the most obvious change being a large round Office logo button in the top left. As expected there is no ‘classic interface’ option to use the more familiar Office 2003 menus and toolbars.
We like the new interface with reservations. It will be a big step for many people who get freaked by even small changes to the look of a program. If you give it a chance I think you’ll get a lot out of the new way of doing things.
Sadly there’s no immediate way to re-order the ‘chunks’ on each ribbon which means you’re stuck with the order of tools that suits Microsoft not you. We’re not the only people to be struck by the prominent placement of ‘Shapes’ on the prime left position of the Insert ribbon in Word 2007. Perhaps this placement has more to do with looking cool in product demos rather than truly making the most commonly used features readily available?
