Life’s good: living with Vista RC1 and Office 2007 every day

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 09 October 2006

Page 4 of 5 As for Office 2007, this is a joy to use compared with Office 2003. I’ve really taken to the new ‘ribbon toolbar’, and while it took a few moments to find features at times, the new toolbar layout makes it very easy to find those features again in their new places. About the only issue I’ve had with Office 2007 is with Outlook, and it isn’t with sending and receiving emails which works just as expected. It’s to do with Outlook’s inbuilt email search. It’s nowhere near as fast as Vista’s built-in desktop search which ironically searches all your email at light speed. Quite why this is the case, as they’re supposed to be using the same search technology, is unclear at this stage. Let’s just say for now that it’s a beta thing, and hope Microsoft fixes this for the final release. Word, Outlook and Powerpoint are the programs I use the most, and the new versions have all worked well. Indeed, everything dramatically improved with Office 2007 when the Beta 2 Technical Refresh (or B2TR) update was released a few weeks ago. If you don’t have it, and are still running Office 2007 Beta 2, you must get it! The new OneNote 2007 software, which now comes as part of the Office Suite, is also quite amazing. It’s a cross between Word and a desktop publishing program, and when used with a Tablet PC, or with a graphics tablet from Wacom plugged into an existing desktop or laptop computer, it’s a very cool notetaking system. You really do have to try it to appreciate it, but it does let you store, retrieve and search for your data – even if it has been handwritten – very quickly indeed. It’s like having a real notebook, but one that has endless paper, can be easily sorted and searched and can be written on just like paper, or typed into with the keyboard. If this paragraph doesn’t convince you, and I don’t really expect that it will, you will simply have to try it out. When, and indeed if, you get Office 2007, you’ll be able to. Perhaps Microsoft will also have download trial versions available – Microsoft made OneNote 2003 available for a six month trial, but we don’t know if they’ll do that again. << First page <   1 2 3 4 5 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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