Wednesday, May 24, 2006

OT - Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 Beta available

My first observations:

  1. The UI is ultra cool. Makes me want to use word 2007 all the time
  2. The default font wasn’t Times New Roman anymore. This “calibri” font is real nice on screen!
  3. You have a “Save As” PDF option. You can publish to a PDF file straight from Word. No plugins required anymore!
  4. The default file format is .docx – the new XML based file format,
  5. You can write a post for your blog in word, and have it published at blogger. That’s what I'm doing right now!
  6. Creating tables, ‘Smart Art’ the “roll over to get a live preview“ feature, the page layout “themes”– They just rock!
  7. Lots of features that were hidden below menus are now exposed in the toolbars – and to avoid cluttering of too many tools, they have put them neatly under different tabs. Neat!
  8. Select some text, and a mini format toolbar popups up just along the text. And unless you want to use it, it stays out of your way, as a semi transparent popup.
  9. Press ‘Alt’ and every control in the UI that has a shortcut shows the shortcut key combination to be pressed in a small layer above the control itself.

And many more!

Just like IE 7 and Win Media Player 11 beta, the classic File menu( that’s what they call it ) has been hidden.1

I’ve just gone tried out MS Word 2007- am yet to check out Excel and Powerpoint. This is just too impressive.

Check it out here - <http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx>


And ya, the page has a splash animation, using Flash