Office 2007 Public Beta Released Tuesday 9:00 PST
or, "Everything you know about Word is wrong."
With all the talk about the SharePoint 2007 beta, it would be easy to miss the fact that SharePoint and Office are now really two sides of the same product. Both were released for public trial yesterday with Beta 2. So what's different?
Everything! All the Office apps got a facelift in the form of a new navigation system called the Ribbon. See Jensen's post to see what Willis is talkin' 'bout. Well, except for Outlook, which evolved in its own way with the To-Do Bar (as described by Melissa Macbeth).
I've been using O12 for a few months now and here's the scoop: if you've used Office for years, you have a bit of unlearning to do, but it only takes a few hours to fly, and you'll feel even more strange and awkward going back to the old.
If you're ten years old and using Office for the first time, you'll catch on right away.
If you use Outlook, you don't need to change at all. But if you take advantage of things like Right-Click, "Follow-up. . . Next Week" and "Categorize. . . [your folder list here]" you'll find it pretty fresh.
Don't feel comfortable installing beta software? You don't have to uninstall your old versions, um, except for Outlook, darn. But yes, you can happily have Word and Excel and Access and all the other apps sitting side-by-side with the 2007 betas and use either at will.
Worried about generating a whole bunch of documents in the new format and being stuck when the beta expires? No worries, there will be a free download from Office 2000 forward that will allow old versions to read/write in the new Office format. This was announced last week at the SharePoint conference, and it's great news for planning a migration.