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Office 2007


Gerard

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Well I got my hands on beta 2 of Microsoft Office 2007, and I absolutely love it.

I'm still writing the full review, but in the meantime have a sneaky look at my screenshots in the meantime.

spellcheck.gifdrawing_styles.gifthemes.gif

The new ribbon interface replaces menus and icons. It's a straightforward set of ideas really: put different icons on different tabs for when you're doing different things. The thing is, unlike many recent innovations, it actually works. When you're writing, you go to the "Home" tab, and everything you need will be there. When you want to add something, you go to the "Insert" tab, and everything you need will be there. When you want to edit a picture, simply select the picture and the "Format" tab pops up, which has absolutely everything you need in it, including shapes, styles, shadows, 3D effects and arranging tools.

The second great change of Office 2007 is the expansion of styles. Now you can set predefined styles to pretty much anything (images, pages, text) , and these work in conjunction with the improved theme system.

The third great change is Live Previews. When selecting a theme or style to anything, you no longer have to think, guess, undo and repeat. Now all you have to do is hover over the thumnail and your document is instantly updated to reflect what would happen if you chose that. This works for text styles, fonts, font sizes, themes, colours, drawings, positioning, shadows, 3D effects.. everything.

I'll leave you to drool over the rest, and you should be able to view the finished review in under 24 hours. Enjoy.

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I was reading about Office 2007 recently. I guess the magazine was right when they said that it had a completely different interface. I also heard that it saves in some sort of generic kinda .xml format so it can be read with other versions of Office - legaxy versions. A good question is, what are the open source office suites going to do now?

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Yeah Word 2007 documents are saved as .docx instead of .doc, but the old compatibilities are still there (One option is "Save As Word 97-2003 Document")

This is because faster and more versatile XML is used for storing the information and formatting instead of the older unique methods. In fact, most recent Microsoft programs themselves are written partially in XML. I was digging around inside Windows Live Messenger (MSN8) a couple of weeks ago and found the entire XML source code for one page or another, CSS and all. Pretty funky really.

And this is better than any apple product. I dare say that Microsoft have actually got it right this time, something they haven't achieved since Word 2.0 for Windows 3.11

It's a billion times better than Vista too :P

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Anyway, now you can download Office 2007 for yourself here:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/be...en/default.mspx

Be warned, it's a hefty download. Also it is only a beta, so wont work 100% yet. Also its Office 2007, not 2003, so it saves documents as .docx etc rather than .doc, which makes it somewhat incompatible with older versions unless you saveas them, which wont be 100% to Office 2007's potential.

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I can't download anything over 20mb when I'm at school. Account daily limits.

But it does look awesome, I'll give it a try on my laptop. I already use Office 2003, so I hope this lives up to the hype.

I meant I was going to leave the home computer on. If I were to touch a school computer ... I wouldn't graduate.

As far as installing it, it was almost done installing and had an error.

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Well, big download and the mail just came (had to use another account), I am getting it right now, a couple of hours to go, nothing big as 3 days ago I was downloading at 5kbs, now I am getting 55+kbs, this 500 mb and 2 hours of waiting are just nothing for me.

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