Live every ex-Microsoft, I became a huge critic of the company's product, business strategy and attitude in general. But I have to agree that Office 2007 is out of this world.
I haven't played with Vista yet, and have no plans on doing so on the next year. But Office is a productivity suit, and if it could make me more efficient and faster at doing simple tasks it deserves my attention.
Last week I installed Office 2007 and... wow! This is the real 'wow' campaign that Microsoft should be doing. Office 2007 gave me the same feeling when I ran Windows XP the first time. XP was a huge leap from Windows 98. Not only in reliability, but the whole user experience. Office 2007 gives the same impression from previous versions of Office (2003, XP, 2000, etc.).
I don't think Microsoft innovated so much on the Office UI ever.
Enough with the abstract, here is the concrete:
The Ribbon is great. I'm still struggling to find where things are, but that is just a matter of getting used to it. The first thing that I noticed is that I get things done with less clicks.
The entire experience is consistent.
The UI look great. Just something about the soft-blue gradient colors and the orange highlights that work well togheter.
I haven't tried the new PowerPoint yet, but heard nice things about the new presentations.
Outlook works like before. That is pretty much my bar to install it. I like the ClearType. Like the "To-Do Bar".
My only complaint so far is about Outlook. There are two features that I'm desperate to have:
Ability to have two Exchange Mailboxes on the same profile. Ok, that is a very rare user scenario, but I have my professional and my personal Exchange servers. Now I have to keep closing Outlook and opening on a different profile all day long. Very annoying.
Ability to configure the Reminder box "Snooze" options. It has too many options right now and I always need to scroll the listbox. First, the list box should be 10 items high, and have my own timespan. And just in case you are curious, this is what I want: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hour, 18 hour, 1 day, 4 days, 1 week, 2 weeks.
On the neutral side, but it could be better:
Outlook continues to hang and be slow from time to time. Some emails take a minute to appear (usually if they link to external images)
HTML rendering of Outlook has changed. Some of Sampa's emails look like crap. I'll need to fix that.
Nobody has Office 2007 yet. I just had to re-send a Word document because I mistakenly saved in 2007 format.
I continue to believe that improvements to Outlook is the number one reason Microsoft can maintain its leadership in the office-productivity suit for a long time.
Taking one minute to render an email? That gets Outlook 2007 an instant "F - this software isn't close to production quality." No excuses - having a slow remote site for things like images is meaningless.
Five seconds, and I'm very annoyed. One minute is long past absurd. Outlook is a mail client; displaying mail slowly isn't ever an option, period, full stop. If they can't get that right, it's game over.
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Comments (1) for "Office 2007 rocks!"
December, 2007
