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A few thoughts on Office 2007 Beta 1

Today marks the fourth week I've had the opportunity to play with the Office 2007 Beta 1. My trial by fire for Office 2007 was a little bit of an accident -- I had run into some corruption problems with my Outlook 2003 inbox and decided as long as I was going to format anyway, I might as well give the new Office a shot first.  Office 2007 unexpectedly *fixed* all of my corruption problems (no more, "would you like to replace the default dot configuration?") and after a few days I thought I'd give it a week or four before formatting.  I was quite surprised with some of the additions, particularly with Outlook, and before long I found going back to Office 2003 something I was dreading.

Outlook 2007 was the first application I had high expectations for -- and the mail client gave me a mixed bag of disappointments and pleasantries alike.  The first on my list of disappointments was the fact that Outlook now has a lot more emphasis on Tasks, popping up separate reminders and taking up the whole right side of the main window pane to show me my tasks.  Marking the red flag on an email automatically adds a task, but typically I used to just use this red flag as a marker to determine important emails.  Some of this integration can be turned off, but most cannot.  

One feature I found fairly exciting was the addition of a semi-journalistic email/contact/calendar index.  Searching for emails is considerably faster in comparison to Outlook 2003, but still no where near the speed of Copernic of GDS.  Granted, Outlook 2003's integration is much better than any other desktop app, but Copernic-caliber performance would have been very welcomed.  Unfortunately, to make matters worse, my Copernic and GDS stopped indexing correctly as soon as I upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007, but I suspect this will be fixed in the near future.

Speed in Office 2007, particularly Outlook 2007 Beta 1, is not quite there yet.  The application is considerably slower than Office 2003, but this is to be expected from Beta software.  Compared to the pre-Beta, speed has improved dramatically -- so I would expect things to speed up as code reaches final revisions.

Perhaps the largest annoyance of mine with Outlook 2007 is the new anti-phishing countermeasures.  Replying/Forwarding emails marked as "possible phishing" is blocked, even if you add the sender to a safe sender list.  I can understand the need for this occasionally, but from the Beta I could not figure out any method to over ride this.  Clicking possibly phished links is also blocked, but it is still possible to copy the URL from Outlook (Right Click, Add to Clipboard), and then paste it into the browser. Personally, however, I do not want Outlook to manage this for me and wish there was some way to disable it.

The new interface is certainly something that takes getting used to.  I also suspect that in Beta 1, not all of the interface navigation is in place -- applications like Excel 2007 were painfully difficult to get around due to my reliance on Excel 2003's shortcut menus.  Table formatting, for example, has a lot more templates than it does in Excel 2003, but tweaking and drawing individual borders is a much more convoluted task.  On the other hand, Word 2007 seems to have a cleaner approach -- the commands I do use (Grammar Check, Tracking Changes, etc) are much better integrated with clearer menu shortcuts.

On the topic of Word 2007, I found the experience generally much better than Excel 2007 and the transition from Word 2003 to Word 2007 was quite pleasant.  Word 2007 has a much cleaner spelling and grammar check, with more definitions and slightly better logic.  Word won't get on your case too much about passive tense though it will point out if you switch too often.  The dictionary has been much improved, so no more "pier-to-pier" typos (at least for the next few years) and a personal interesting observation of mine was "AnandTech.com" was added to the default dictionary.  Word has a lot more emphasis on formatting this time around, which doesn't affect my usage that much, but for people who are constantly fiddling with titles and spacing, Word 2007 will probably save you some time.

The new file extensions, "docx, xlsx, pptx," take some getting used to.  Obviously, older versions of Office cannot read these formats, and since the "x" formats are the default formats you have to constantly be mindful of whom you are sending your documents to.  Excel also had some terrible format quirks.  When saving spreadsheets with any sort of color formatting in ordinary Excel 2003 xls format, something, somewhere, got lost-in-translation; almost all of my formatting came out in the wrong color or wrong size in Excel 2003. The transition between cross-version Word formatting seems fine, and I did not have much opportunity to try cross-version saves between Outlook or PowerPoint.

I will be posting more experiences of mine with the new Outlook, but overall for a first look I am fairly interested to see where the next Beta revisions take the suite.