Microsoft Office 2007

This post, for example, was written and published to my blog entirely from inside Microsoft Word 2007 (Beta 2). The setup is pretty straightforward, blogger and a couple of other blogging platforms are supported , and publishing a post is pretty seamless. Matter of seconds, really!

But that’s not the only reason I’m upbeat about Office 2007. The Beta 2 version that I’ve been checking out for the last week or so has provided me enough reasons to upgrade to the new version the moment it is released sometime late this year or early next year. Top of that list is the new ‘ribbon bar’. As you may have already heard, Office 2007 gets rid of the drop-down menu system in favor of a more visual ribbon bar for anything and everything you would want to do in all the three major applications – Word, PowerPoint & Excel (I haven’t tried the other apps yet, so just these three on my list). The new interface takes some getting used to and I did find myself searching for basic options for the first few days, but the productivity gain once you have understood the logic behind the placement of options is so high, the initial learning curve hardly matters.

Apart from the interface overhaul, lots of new features have been added too. I haven’t checked out everything yet, the few things that really caught my fancy include SmartArt (a way to transform simple mundane lists into flowcharts and diagrams) and conditional formatting enhancements in Excel (adding bar graphs or icons straight into cells depending upon values in those cells, etc.).

The Beta 2 is a public release and you can download and give it a test ride yourself. While you do that, I’m going to go back and play some more with SmartArt.