Office 2007 BETA 2 : Initial View

Got my hands on a copy of the latest Office 2007 BETA 2 today. So far I’ve only installed the end user apps, and none of the server stuff.

Initial impression is that there may be something worth buying here. With the BETA you do get everything in all versions, so the cost of all this BETA stuff when it’s in production would be in the thousands rather than the hundreds (and that’s not including the server apps) I suspect, but still, it looks good.

The user interface is completely new in the basic office apps (Word, Excel etc) although Outlook is pretty similar. I’d guess that when its finalised everything will have the new GUI.

Unfortunately the VISIO BETA 2 just crashes each time I try and load it, and since it’s all running on a clean install of XP SP2 then I presume it’s just broken. If it isn’t going to work on that then where is it? Hope it will be fixed soon.

The other (very) annoying feature, which I presume will be fixed in the final release is that when you open Outlook it spurns multiple Word windows (when you create and email, add a contact etc). There just blank and you can’t close or minimise them. I think this problem goes back to Office 2003 as it happened on there too, but you could turn off ‘Use Word to edit messages’ which fixed it. That options not available here, and I suspect using Word is pretty integrated to save creating two spell checkers, two grammar checkers etc.

That problem only seems to appear on multiple monitor setups, so if you’re on a single screen then all should be well. At least, that’s what I found in Office 2003. Primarily I’ve noticed this with Matrox cards, probably something to do with the way they manage the desktop (far superior to other ‘gamer’ cards trying to power two screens from one chip).

Still trying to see what InfoPath and Groove do for me that you couldn’t do with a well tuned SharePoint setup, but we’ll see.

One final point of note so far with Outlook 2007. With an IMAP connection it seems to want to do a lot more to keep the folders synchronised than the 2003 variant did. I’ve not had it installed enough to see what it’s doing, but it’s certainly a lot slower than 2003. Whether this is due to BETA or a new way of looking after IMAP folders we’ll have to wait and see. A bit more digging required there!

Still, a promising start for a BETA application and I’ll wait and see how I get on with it over the coming days and weeks.