2007 Microsoft Office Beta FREE!

Say what you will about the folks from Red­mond, WA, but most of us still use their soft­ware to get things accom­plished. So like it or not, when Microsoft updates its pro­grams it is big news, and so I pass this along to you today. Microsoft has made a free beta ver­sion of Office 2007 avail­able for down­load from the web. I down­loaded it today, and I am impressed with it so far. I have spent most of my time in Word and Out­look, which have both gone through sig­nif­i­cant revi­sions, and I will out­line some of the inter­est­ing things I found.

Word
Though the func­tion­al­ity is not rad­i­cally revamped, Word has a nice new look and feel to it. Gone are the drop down menus, replaced by tool­bars and icons that change based on your selec­tion. One nice enhance­ment is the abil­ity to add equa­tions into a doc­u­ment with a one click – a great note tak­ing tool for the col­lege class­room. There are also improved chart­ing and for­mat­ting func­tions. A func­tion called Smar­tArt, allows you to eas­ily import some won­der­ful graphic ele­ments to illus­trate con­cepts or processes. It is easy to e-mail from the appli­ca­tion, print to the web, and the edit­ing options are greatly improved. Over­all I was very impressed.

Out­look
Let me pref­ace this by say­ing I am a gmail guy. Still, work is not onboard with “The G.” If your com­pany is like mine, you are forced to use out­look to man­age your e-mail. Although I am not a huge fan of out­look, I must say this prod­uct has been improved quite a bit. Some of the key enhance­ments include a desk­top search appli­ca­tion and an improved task and to-do man­age­ment tool. The biggest enhance­ment is the inte­gra­tion of RSS directly into Out­look. It is this fea­ture that will make Out­look rel­e­vant again and will finally lead to the mass adop­tion of RSS. Once given the Microsoft seal of approval, RSS will be deliv­ered to the masses. If you don’t under­stand RSS or have it incor­po­rated into your web-site, you had bet­ter get on board. The RSS inter­face is very nice. It orga­nizes feeds into the famil­iar Microsoft fold­ers, and then sep­a­rates by read / unread, date sent and sub­ject. It is very user friendly, and deliv­ers RSS in a for­mat that is very sim­i­lar to e-mail. This will serve to bridge the gap of under­stand­ing how RSS works for many. Of every­thing I have seen, I believe this will have the biggest impact on the way in which peo­ple use computers.

As a test, I com­posed this post com­pletely in Word, and pub­lished it directly to the site to test it. I am inter­ested to see the results. One def­i­nite draw­back is that I am not able to put cat­e­gories on my post from Word, but that is noth­ing too terrible.

As I dig deeper into the trial offer, I will dis­cuss other new enhance­ments I dis­cover. If you are inter­ested in find­ing out about MS Office 2007 for your­self, down­load the beta and let me know what you think.