In light of the mini-review that Bunk.nu has given, I thought I’d give my own mini-review on it too.

I’ve been using Office 2007 at work for… about 3 weeks now.

There are some really great things – particularly with Outlook and MS Desktop Search.

Outlook 2007

This is the application I use the most out of any of the Office applications – it’s open on my desktop all the time.  It’s got all my contacts in it (sync’ed with my PDA) and I have all my meetings and major time allocations managed through the Outlook Calendar.

This is the default view in Outlook. On the left, we’ve got the typical folder view for Outlook Mail, followed by the current folder view, the selected email, and then the “To-Do Bar”.

This To-Do bar is, from what I can tell, a new feature in Outlook – it combines a mini calendar view where bold indicates meetings and things like that – followed by your upcoming meetings, and then any tasks you have allocated.   For me, this was the best single feature.   All that information, in one spot, is very very useful.

There’s a myriad of other little features – like in each email, there’s “Previous/Next” buttons that appear when you mouse over the headers on the forwarded/replied portions – this lets you scroll down faster.  Not a killer feature, kinda handy – but I haven’t had a chance to use it much yet.    It also formats (for display only, it doesn’t alter the content) the headers for the forwarded/replied emails – so you can easily distinguish each reply.

We also have Microsoft Office Communicator as one of the internal IM applications – under Outlook 2003, you got some status information, which was useful – but you had to hover over each person’s name to get it, AND they had to be on your contact list.  Under 2007, it automatically shows the Communicator status for people in the To/From/CC lines, even if they’re not on your contact list. 
You can then chat to them via Communicator, or call them (if you have a PBX Gateway enabled Office Communicator server) with 2 mouse clicks.

Word 2007

I don’t get much of a chance to use Word to create documents at the moment – I usually just read them. However, the new Ribbon interface is quite handy for most things.

If you need to use custom templates, which have unsigned code in them (as our corporate templates do – to automate initial document setup and use of the template) – then you might run into some difficulties.

Trying to find the “Tools” menu was a pain in the ass – So, where do they hide the Options button? In plain sight, actually – right next to “Exit Word”. That’s the first of 6 clicks you need to go through, to change the security setting from “Paranoid Mode”  err… “Disable all macros with notification” to “Enable all macros”. There’s no option to Prompt To Run Macros like previous versions of Office.

Unfortunately, hiding the Word Options button off to the side like that has  broken the other visual rules they have there – Close is a menu item, why isn’t Options? .

Excel 2007

 I use Excel a bit less at the moment – so I haven’t really had a chance to do much with it.  However the revamped charting controls, and much cleaner/fresher default colours are great. 

Apart from that, I don’t have much to say about excel.

Well, I think that’s it for me – I haven’t used any of the other Office applications yet. All in all though – the new Office is nice, although I’m glad I’m not paying for it.